How to Read a Research Study, Part 7 of 7
Recommended reading
The primary sources this guide is built on, with one line each on why each earns its place. Free where free, accessible where accessible.
Ask Grace
Want to ask Grace to summarise any of these sources for you? Ask Grace.
Primary methodology canon
The ten sources that underpin the critical-appraisal scaffolding across Parts 2 to 6. Tap a citation to read the line on why it earns its place and the full bibliographic entry. If a source you expected to see is missing, email john@theglucoseneverlies.com.
Greenhalgh T, Dijkstra P (2025). How to Read a Paper, 7th edition.
The canonical UK clinician-facing critical-appraisal text. The preface to the first edition (1996) is the EBM-applied-in-vacuum quote in Part 4; Chapter 16 is the very-few-of-us-behave-like-the-mean quote in Part 5. Grade A.
Greenhalgh T, Dijkstra P. How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine and Healthcare, 7th edition. Wiley-Blackwell, 2025.
Goldacre B (2012). Bad Pharma.
The Reboxetine paragraph in Part 3 comes from Chapter 1. The single best teaching anchor for selection-not-fabrication publication bias. Grade C as cited evidence, Grade A as teaching scaffold.
Goldacre B. Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients. Fourth Estate, 2012.
Goldacre B (2008). Bad Science.
The back-pain regression-to-the-mean paragraph in Part 6 comes from Chapter 4. The accessible companion to Bad Pharma. Grade C as cited evidence, Grade A as teaching scaffold.
Goldacre B. Bad Science. Fourth Estate, 2008.
Goldacre B (2014). I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That.
Column-by-column tour of media reporting of medicine. The cover-the-options test in Part 3 is the operational lesson. Grade C as cited evidence, Grade A as worked-example bank.
Goldacre B. I Think You’ll Find It’s a Bit More Complicated Than That. Fourth Estate, 2014.
Sackett DL et al (1996). Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t.
The EBM founding editorial. Names the discipline, names the limits, still the single clearest statement of what EBM is and what it is not. Grade A.
Sackett DL, Rosenberg WMC, Gray JAM, Haynes RB, Richardson WS. Evidence based medicine: what it is and what it isn’t. BMJ 1996; 312:71-72.
Sterne JAC et al (2019). RoB 2: a revised tool for assessing risk of bias in randomised trials.
The current methodological standard for assessing risk of bias in RCTs. The tool any auditor reaches for when reading a single trial. Grade A.
Sterne JAC, Savovic J, Page MJ, et al. RoB 2: a revised tool for assessing risk of bias in randomised trials. BMJ 2019; 366:l4898.
CASP UK (2024). Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklist set.
Eleven study-design-specific checklists, freely available. The cover-the-options test, the comparator-equivalence test, the outcome-definition test all live here. Grade A.
CASP UK. Critical Appraisal Skills Programme checklist set. 2024. casp-uk.net.
Higgins JPT et al, eds (2024). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions, v6.5.
The Grade A definition in Part 2 and the diamond-meta-analysis quote in Part 5 come from this. The reference text for what a systematic review is, and is not. Freely available. Grade A.
Higgins JPT, Thomas J, Chandler J, Cumpston M, Li T, Page MJ, Welch VA (editors). Cochrane Handbook for Systematic Reviews of Interventions, version 6.5. Cochrane, 2024. training.cochrane.org/handbook/current.
GRADE Working Group. Handbook for grading quality of evidence and strength of recommendations.
The methodology behind the A-to-D evidence taxonomy on this site. Freely available. Grade A.
GRADE Working Group. Handbook for grading quality of evidence and strength of recommendations. gdt.gradepro.org/app/handbook/handbook.html.
Wieten SE (2018). What Counts as “What Works”.
Durham University doctoral thesis. Philosophical critique of the EBM frame; the dissenting voice slot in Grace’s 5-paper synthesis. Grade C.
Wieten SE. What Counts as “What Works”: Evidence-Based Medicine and the Problem of Evidence. Doctoral thesis, Durham University, 2018.
Epistemological canon (Taleb and Peters)
The four sources behind the trade-offs lens in Part 4 and the population-vs-individual framing across the guide. The Taleb books are not clinical research; they are the thinking scaffold under which the clinical research is read.
Taleb NN (2018). Skin in the Game.
The ergodicity passage in Part 4 (Chapter 19, The Logic of Risk Taking) and the skin-in-the-game framing across the guide. The single best teaching anchor for the population-vs-individual gap in plain language.
Taleb NN. Skin in the Game: Hidden Asymmetries in Daily Life. Random House, 2018.
Taleb NN (2012). Antifragile.
The Via Negativa framing across the guide; the anti-fragility lens on carb counting in Part 5. The argument that subtraction beats addition under uncertainty.
Taleb NN. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. Random House, 2012.
Taleb NN (2007). The Black Swan.
The rare-ruinous-event lens in Part 4. The argument that the consequential outliers (severe hypo, DKA, post-bariatric severe hypoglycaemia) are precisely what population averages hide.
Taleb NN. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Random House, 2007.
Peters O (2019). The ergodicity problem in economics.
The formal-mathematics paper behind the ergodicity passage in Part 4. The clean technical statement of why a time-average for one person is not the ensemble-average across many people.
Peters O. The ergodicity problem in economics. Nature Physics 2019; 15:1216-1221.
Part 7 of 7
Recommended reading