How to evaluate study methodology in published clinical research.

When reading a clinical research article, the clinician must judge if the reported findings and conclusions are valid before applying them to patient care. This concern is legitimate given the wide range of study validity in the clinical literature. In this article, the authors present many validity markers that signify the quality of the information reported from a study, such as authorship, bias, confounding, statistics, randomization, controls, blinding, and the logical framework of scientific investigations.