CASP checklists are free critical-appraisal tools from the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme, used to judge the trustworthiness, results and relevance of published studies. If your nursing, midwifery or health dissertation is literature-based — as most now are — your department almost certainly expects you to appraise your included studies with a named tool, and CASP is the family most commonly taught in UK health courses.
That sentence contains the three things students most often have wrong: CASP is a set of design-specific checklists rather than one form; appraisal is expected, not optional, in a literature-based health dissertation; and the checklist is an instrument for structured judgement, not a scoring machine. The rest of this article unpacks each.
What exactly is CASP?
The Critical Appraisal Skills Programme is a UK organisation that publishes appraisal checklists and teaches critical appraisal as part of evidence-based practice. Each checklist is a short series of structured questions asking, in essence: are the results of this study valid, what are the results, and will they help locally? The checklists are free to download from CASP’s website, and CASP publishes referencing guidance for them — cite the specific checklist and version you used, like any other source.
Which CASP checklist matches which study?
You appraise each study with the tool built for its design. CASP currently publishes checklists for qualitative studies, randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews — including separate versions for reviews with meta-analysis of RCTs and of observational studies — cohort studies, case-control studies, cross-sectional studies, diagnostic studies, economic evaluations and clinical prediction rules.
The practical procedure: identify each included study’s actual design from its methods section, not its title or abstract, then pull the matching checklist. Misidentifying design is the first common failure — a survey analysed at one time point is cross-sectional however “cohort” sounds in the title, and appraising it with a cohort checklist produces answers to questions the study never posed. If several designs appear in your review, you will be running several checklists, and your marker expects exactly that.
Does an undergraduate dissertation really need formal appraisal?
If it is a literature-based project in a health field, effectively yes. The rise of the literature-based health dissertation is partly a consequence of ethics policy — standalone undergraduate research involving NHS patients or staff cannot take place under Health Research Authority rules, which pushes empirical designs out of reach and review designs to the centre (the full picture is in our guide to ethics approval for undergraduate dissertations). A review whose evidence is never appraised is just a summary; the appraisal is what turns description into the critical analysis the marking rubric rewards. It is also what distinguishes the structured review most departments want from the full systematic review they usually do not expect — that distinction, and what each demands, is covered in literature review vs systematic review.
How do you actually use a CASP checklist well?
Answer every question with evidence from the paper, in writing — a bare yes/no column produces nothing you can use later. The value is in the sentence you write beside the judgement: where the recruitment strategy was appropriate, what the authors failed to report about attrition, why the analysis was or was not sufficiently rigorous. Those sentences become the raw material of your findings chapter: patterns across the checklists — five studies strong on data collection but weak on reflexivity, say — are precisely the kind of synthesis that separates strong reviews from catalogues.
Apply the checklist to every included study, including the ones whose conclusions you like. Selective appraisal — scrutinising only the studies that disagree with your argument — is a bias your marker will spot in minutes, because the appraisal table makes it visible.
What does a good appraisal answer look like?
Compare two answers to the same checklist question about recruitment in a qualitative study. Weak: “Yes, the recruitment strategy was appropriate.” Strong: “Partly — purposive sampling suited the aim of capturing varied ward experiences, but all twelve participants came from one trust and the authors do not discuss how site culture may have shaped the themes.” The second answer earns marks three times over: it shows you read the methods, it records a limitation you can carry into your synthesis, and it demonstrates the calibrated judgement the rubric calls critical analysis. Aim for that register on every question that matters, and allow yourself brief answers only where the question genuinely is settled by a yes or no.
Should you turn CASP answers into scores?
No — and this is the most common misuse. CASP checklists are not designed to produce numerical quality scores, and summing “yes” answers into 8/10 treats every question as equally important, which they are not: a fatal flaw in one domain can invalidate a study that scores perfectly elsewhere. Report your appraisal as structured judgement — what each study does well, where it is weak, and how much confidence its findings deserve — rather than a league table. If your module handbook explicitly asks for a scoring approach, follow the handbook, but say in your methods that scores were used because the assessment required them.
What are the alternatives to CASP?
CASP is an appraisal family, not the only one, and two neighbouring categories matter. For appraisal, other tool families exist for specific designs and purposes — your department may teach one of them instead, and the right answer is whichever your handbook names. For reporting, the EQUATOR Network indexes guidelines that tell authors what to report: COREQ, a 32-item checklist for interview and focus-group studies, and SRQR, a 21-item standard for qualitative research generally, are the ones health students meet most. The distinction earns marks when you state it: appraisal tools judge a study’s trustworthiness; reporting guidelines judge its completeness. A study can be fully reported and still weak — and a poorly reported study is hard to appraise at all, which is itself a finding to record.
Where does the appraisal go in the dissertation?
Three places. The methods chapter states which checklists you used and why, matched to designs. The findings or results chapter carries a summary table — study, design, checklist used, key strengths, key concerns — and the synthesis that draws on it. The discussion weighs your conclusions against the quality of the evidence they rest on: a recommendation built on three weak cross-sectional studies should sound like one. Completed checklists themselves usually sit in an appendix, and your text must actually use them; an appendix of forms nobody references is effort without marks.
If assembling the reading is the current bottleneck, our method for an honest AI-assisted literature review covers search and synthesis — the appraisal judgements stay yours. And when the appraising is done and the chapters need writing, you can structure and draft your dissertation in Tesify around your own appraisal tables — 100% written by you.
Frequently asked questions
Is CASP free to use for a student dissertation?
Yes — the checklists are free to download from CASP’s site. Check CASP’s referencing and Creative Commons guidance and cite the specific checklist and version you used.
Which CASP checklist should I use for qualitative studies?
The CASP qualitative studies checklist. If the paper is specifically an interview or focus-group study and your marker asks about reporting rather than appraisal, COREQ is the relevant reporting checklist — different tool, different job.
What if a study’s design has no CASP checklist?
Use an appropriate tool from another established family and say so in your methods, rather than forcing the nearest CASP form onto the wrong design. Naming the mismatch and your solution is itself good methods writing.
How many studies do I need to appraise?
All of the ones your review includes. There is no minimum count; what matters is that inclusion was systematic and every included study passed through the same appraisal process.
Can I exclude a study because it fails the CASP appraisal?
Only if your methods said in advance that quality would be an exclusion criterion, and using what threshold. Otherwise, include it and weight it: report the weaknesses and give its findings correspondingly less influence in your synthesis.
Should the CASP tables go in the appendix or the main text?
Completed checklists go in an appendix; a summary table and the synthesis built on it belong in the main text. The marker wants to see the appraisal shaping your argument, not sitting behind it.
Is CASP only for nursing students?
No — it is used across health and social care, and in any discipline appraising health-related evidence. It is most heavily taught in nursing, midwifery and allied health because appraisal is core to evidence-based practice in those courses.
What is the difference between CASP and PRISMA?
PRISMA is a reporting guideline for systematic reviews — it tells review authors what to report. CASP checklists appraise individual studies. In a full systematic review you might use both: PRISMA to structure your reporting, CASP to appraise what you included.
Do I appraise systematic reviews I cite, too?
If a systematic review is one of your included studies, yes — CASP has a checklist for that, plus versions for reviews with meta-analysis. If you only cite a review for background context, formal appraisal is not expected.
What do markers most want to see in the appraisal?
Judgement with evidence: specific observations from each paper, consistency across studies, and a synthesis that uses the appraisal to calibrate confidence. The checklist is the scaffold; the marks are in what you build on it.