About Grade

The GRADE approach (Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation) is a method of grading the certainty in evidence and the strength of recommendations in guidelines. This approach is being used by many international organisations to produce rigorous and transparent clinical practice guidelines and other health care recommendations.

GRADE was developed by the GRADE Working Group which is a collaboration of methodologists, guideline developers, clinicians and other interested members with the aim of developing and implementing a common, transparent and sensible approach to grading the quality of evidence and strength of recommendations in health care (see www.gradeworkinggroup.org and a GRADE overview here).

The Cochrane Collaboration uses the GRADE approach as a system to evaluate the overall certainty in the body of evidence from a systematic review and to produce Summary of Findings Tables to present the evidence to decision makers. Systematic reviewers should use GRADE to move from the results of the systematic review to make conclusions and to present the evidence. This work is supported by the Cochrane GRADEing group (formerly known as the Applicability and Recommendations Methods Group – ARMG) see gradeing.cochrane.org for more information. Cochrane and other organizations use GRADE’s official tool GRADEpro (www.gradepro.org) for using GRADE and authoring and implementing guidelines which is integrated with RevMan, Cochrane’s review authoring tool. In addition, Cochrane has compiled a page with a complete list of resources on GRADE that can be accessed here: https://training.cochrane.org/grade-approach