The original Grading guidelines post is nearly a year old and things have not moved smoothly – not only did Covid happen but also there was the rewrite of the website that took most of 2020! But we’ve not abandoned our wish to ‘grade’ guidelines to help our users with an indication of how ‘evidence-based’ the guidelines are. Our system scores each guideline producer (based on the system mentioned in the earlier post), with a maximum score of 8.

We have now graded around two-thirds of the guidelines and that figure is rapidly increasing. Our hope is to introduce the guideline system early in 2021 (but after the relaunch of the newly coded site)!

For interest we share a distribution of the guideline scores below:

28% get the maximum score of 8 with score of 0 (15%) and 7 (14%) being next most ‘popular’. So, many are being serious about producing evidence-based guidelines but also many seem seriously less inclined!! One clarification point is that a number of the zero scores are based on an inability to find any detail of the methodology employed. They may be great guidelines; they’re just not making is easy for us (or others) to find out!