Toward Evidence-Based Urban Planning: Integrating Quality Assessments in Literature Reviews

Abstract

Literature reviews can play a pivotal role in designing urban policies. Here we introduce two tools used by public health specialists to assess the quality of studies and quantify the evidence derived from them: the Risk of Bias Assessment (RoB) and Evaluation of Certainty of Evidence (ECE). The RoB scores articles on several domains (e.g., selection bias, study design, etc.) to provide an appraisal of how rigorous the study is, whereas the ECE tool provides a framework to clearly state how much certainty there is in the outcomes under study. Both tools can be used to enhance literature review articles in urban planning to better inform practitioners on how to best develop policies using a rigorous approach.