Toward Sound Objective Evaluation of Clinical Measures

The quality of all clinical decision-making, as well as power and precision in clinical research results, depends fundamentally on the quality of the measures used. Yet evaluations of the quality of clinical measures likely to be used either in clinic or research applications are difficult to execute or to critique because the criteria for judging such studies are so ill-defined. Here a set of guidelines is proposed, modeled on CONSORT guidelines for randomized clinical trials, first defining the terms often inconsistently used in the research literature and then identifying certain errors that seem to recur in evaluation studies.