Value-added scores were headline news earlier this year when the Los Angeles Times published a series of articles, "Grading the Teachers," based on district data that the paper acquired through the California Public Records Act.
A data collection sheet and an adjusted version of the SIGN methodology checklist were used to assess the quality grade of each article.
Fifty-eight percent of articles were graded as low or very low quality (N = 78) and 42% of studies were graded as moderate or high quality (N = 57).
We adopted a very structured grading method for inclusion and exclusion of articles, and involved several reviewers in this process, in order to identify and select objective studies.
Furthermore, no comparison with other imaging techniques was made and numerous articles on the grading of Crohn's disease using MRI have been published since 2007.
There were a couple of articles about me in the local paper, and I got a letter from a woman who had been in my third-grade class.
This article introduces the rationale and methods for explicitly considering health equity in the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) methodology for development of clinical, public health, and health system guidelines.
Since 2006 the BMJ requested in its instruction to authors, that authors should preferably use the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) system for grading evidence when submitting a clinical guidelines article.
Two independent reviewers without financial conflicts of interest graded each article in terms of: 1) the authors' position on the association between rosiglitazone use and the risk of myocardial infarction; and 2) recommendations on the continuation or cessation of rosiglitazone.
The structure of this article borrows from a recent article we published on preparing Summary of Findings tables for systematic reviews of continuous outcomes prepared by the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) working group [ 3].
