What does it mean to be critical?

A critical review does not mean ‘negative’. Disagreeing with the author’s methods, results or conclusions does not mean you have critically reviewed the article.

Instead, critical review means you have read, digested, and understood the aims and methods of the article, analyzed the results, made your own conclusions based on the provided data, and compared this with the author’s conclusions. 

Acknowledge Your Biases

We all have biases. The critical thing is to be aware and acknowledge yours so you can remove them when critically reviewing a manuscript.

Eliminating the impact of your biases involves:

• being open to conclusions that may not fit your research or view and being critical of results that support your research; but also
• being critical even though the data agrees with your own findings.

Remember:

The purpose of a critical review is not to search for holes and pitfalls in a published article but to review it in a balanced way to ensure that the results and conclusions are adequately supported.