Core GRADE 3: rating certainty of evidence—assessing inconsistency

This third article in a seven part series presents the Core GRADE (Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development and Evaluation) approach to deciding whether to rate down certainty of evidence due to inconsistency—that is, unexplained variability in results across studies. For binary outcomes in which relative effects are consistent across baseline risks while absolute effects are not, Core Grade users assess consistency in relative …