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The Joanna Briggs Institute (JBI), a research and development centre within the Faculty of Health and Medical Sciences at the University of Adelaide, publishes one of the most widely used families of critical appraisal instruments in evidence synthesis. Unlike a single all-purpose checklist, JBI maintains 13 separate critical appraisal checklists, each built for a specific study design, because the bias questions that matter for a randomized controlled trial (was allocation concealed?) are simply not the same questions that matter for a case report (is the clinical timeline clearly reported?) or a piece of qualitative research (is there congruence between the stated philosophical perspective and the research methodology?). Picking the wrong JBI checklist — or using a single generic tool across every included study in a review — produces an appraisal that looks complete but doesn’t actually interrogate the risks specific to that design.
This guide covers what the JBI checklists are, which one applies to which study design, how JBI’s approach differs structurally from other appraisal families such as AMSTAR-2 and CASP, and how JBI critical appraisal fits into a broader systematic review or scoping review workflow.
What the JBI checklists are (and aren’t)
Each JBI checklist is a short series of appraisal questions answered Yes / No / Unclear / Not Applicable, followed by an overall include/exclude/seek-further-information judgment made by the reviewer — not a summed numeric score. That format is deliberate: JBI’s methodology treats critical appraisal as a structured judgment call informed by the checklist, rather than a pass/fail cutoff derived from counting “Yes” answers. This distinguishes it from tools built around a weighted overall confidence rating, and means two independent appraisers using the same JBI checklist on the same study are expected to discuss and resolve disagreements, not just average their scores.
The checklists are maintained by JBI’s methodology groups and published as part of the JBI Manual for Evidence Synthesis, the same reference source that underpins JBI’s approach to systematic reviews, scoping reviews, and umbrella reviews. They are free to download and use, and are commonly applied inside JBI SUMARI (the System for the Unified Management, Assessment and Review of Information), JBI’s own software for conducting and managing a review from protocol through synthesis — though the checklists themselves are also used stand-alone by reviewers working in other reference-management or data-extraction tools.
The 13 JBI checklists, by study design
| Study design | JBI checklist | What it’s built to catch |
|---|---|---|
| Randomized controlled trial | Checklist for Randomized Controlled Trials | True randomization, allocation concealment, blinding of participants/assessors, completeness of follow-up, appropriateness of the statistical analysis |
| Non-randomized intervention study | Checklist for Quasi-Experimental Studies | Clear cause-and-effect temporality, adequacy of comparison groups, completeness of follow-up in the absence of randomization |
| Cohort study | Checklist for Cohort Studies | Whether exposed and unexposed groups were drawn from the same population, valid exposure measurement, identification and handling of confounding factors, completeness of follow-up |
| Case-control study | Checklist for Case Control Studies | Comparability of case and control group criteria, matching adequacy, valid and consistent exposure measurement across both groups |
| Cross-sectional study | Checklist for Analytical Cross Sectional Studies | Clarity of inclusion criteria, valid measurement of exposure/condition and outcome, identification of confounders, appropriateness of statistical analysis |
| Case series | Checklist for Case Series | Consecutive and complete inclusion of cases, clear reporting of demographic and clinical information across all included cases |
| Single case report | Checklist for Case Reports | Complete reporting of patient demographics, history, clinical condition, diagnostic tests, intervention, post-intervention outcome, and adverse events |
| Diagnostic test accuracy study | Checklist for Diagnostic Test Accuracy Studies | Consecutive/random patient sampling, appropriate reference standard, blinding between index test and reference standard |
| Prevalence study | Checklist for Prevalence Studies | Appropriateness of the sample frame and sampling method, adequate sample size, valid condition measurement, response rate |
| Qualitative research | Checklist for Qualitative Research | Congruence between the stated philosophical perspective, research question, methodology, and interpretation of results; representation of participants’ voices; ethical approval |
| Systematic review / research synthesis | Checklist for Systematic Reviews and Research Syntheses | Clarity of the review question, adequacy of the search strategy, appropriateness of critical appraisal of the included studies, methods used to combine findings |
| Economic evaluation | Checklist for Economic Evaluations | Clear economic question and perspective, appropriate comparators, validity of cost and outcome measurement, sensitivity analysis |
| Text and opinion piece | Checklist for Text and Opinion Papers | Source and standing of the opinion, clarity of the author’s interests/motivations, logical coherence of the argument, whether the opinion is grounded in relevant literature |
How to pick the right instrument
The decision point is the design of the included study you’re appraising, not the design of your own review. A systematic review that pools RCTs, cohort studies, and qualitative studies (a mixed-methods or umbrella review) will typically apply three different JBI checklists across its included evidence base — one per study design — rather than forcing every study through a single tool. Two practical rules:
- Match on the study’s actual design, not its topic. A prevalence study about a clinical intervention still gets the prevalence checklist, not the RCT one, if it didn’t randomize anything.
- When a study straddles two designs (e.g., a case series that also reports a survey-style prevalence estimate), appraise it against the checklist matching its primary methodological claim, and note the secondary design limitation narratively rather than trying to blend two checklists into one score.
For reviews that specifically pool intervention studies (RCTs and/or quasi-experimental designs) and need a more granular, domain-by-domain bias judgment than JBI’s own checklists provide, JBI’s guidance itself points reviewers toward the Cochrane RoB 2 / ROBINS-I tools as a complementary option — the two families are not mutually exclusive, and some reviews use JBI checklists for study inclusion/quality screening and RoB 2 for the formal risk-of-bias judgment feeding a meta-analysis.
How JBI checklists differ from other appraisal tools on this site
CASRAI already covers several other appraisal instruments, and the distinction matters for choosing the right one:
- AMSTAR-2 appraises a completed systematic review itself (methodological rigor of the review process), not the primary studies inside it — use it when you’re critiquing someone else’s review, not when you’re appraising the individual studies you’re including in your own.
- CASP checklists cover a similar range of study designs to JBI’s family and use a comparable narrative-judgment approach, but are maintained by a different organization (the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme, Oxford) with its own question wording; some review teams standardize on one family for consistency across a project rather than mixing CASP and JBI checklists within the same review.
- AGREE II appraises clinical practice guidelines, a document type none of the JBI study-design checklists cover.
- RoB 2 and ROBINS-I are domain-based risk-of-bias tools specific to randomized and non-randomized intervention studies respectively, producing a structured low/some-concerns/high judgment per bias domain rather than JBI’s Yes/No/Unclear item format.
For a broader view of which tool applies to which study design across all of these families at once, see CASRAI’s critical appraisal tool selection guide.
Applying a JBI checklist in practice
A typical workflow: two reviewers independently appraise each included study against the matching JBI checklist, resolve disagreements by discussion (or a third reviewer), and report the overall include/exclude/seek-further-information decision — along with enough of the underlying judgment to be transparent — in the review’s methods section. For a formal systematic review, that appraisal step and its outcome should be reported per PRISMA 2020, including how many studies were excluded at the critical appraisal stage and why; for a scoping review following PRISMA-ScR, formal critical appraisal of included sources is optional by design (scoping reviews map the evidence rather than assess its quality), so most JBI-methodology scoping reviews skip this step entirely — confirm which type of review you’re running before assuming appraisal is required.
A recent update worth knowing
JBI’s checklists are periodically revised rather than static: a revised JBI Checklist for Cohort Studies was published in JBI Evidence Synthesis in March 2025, developed by JBI’s Effectiveness Methodology Group to reflect updated methodological guidance from the GRADE Working Group and PRISMA 2020’s reporting requirements. If you’re appraising cohort studies for a review, confirm you’re using the current version of that specific checklist rather than an older PDF saved from a prior review’s toolkit — JBI does not keep every checklist on the same revision cycle, so “is this the current version” is worth checking per checklist, not assumed site-wide.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to use JBI checklists specifically, or can I substitute CASP or another tool?
Most journals and review-reporting standards don’t mandate a specific appraisal-tool family — they require that critical appraisal happened, was done by at least two independent reviewers, and is reported transparently. JBI checklists are the default within reviews following JBI’s own systematic review methodology (and are required if you’re publishing through JBI Evidence Synthesis), but a review team following Cochrane methodology, for example, would typically use RoB 2/ROBINS-I instead. Check your target journal’s or review protocol’s required methodology before assuming JBI is mandatory.
Is a JBI checklist the same as a risk-of-bias assessment?
They overlap but aren’t identical. A JBI checklist produces a structured but ultimately reviewer-judged include/exclude decision per study; a formal risk-of-bias tool like RoB 2 produces a per-domain bias judgment intended to feed directly into a meta-analysis or a GRADE certainty-of-evidence rating. Some reviews use JBI checklists for study-quality screening and a separate risk-of-bias tool for the analysis itself.
What if my included study doesn’t clearly fit one of the 13 designs?
Appraise against the checklist matching the study’s primary methodological claim (see “How to pick the right instrument” above), and document the reasoning in your review’s methods section — reviewers disagreeing on study-design classification is common enough that it’s worth resolving explicitly rather than silently picking whichever checklist is easiest.
