Compare methods

	ICF Core Sets	ICF Linking Rules
Field	Disability Studies	Disability Studies
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	2001	2005
Originator	World Health Organization (ICF); ICF Research Branch (core set methodology)	Alarcos Cieza and colleagues (ICF Research Branch)
Type	Consensus pipeline for selecting condition-specific ICF category shortlists	Content-analysis pipeline for mapping items to a reference classification
Seminal source	World Health Organization. (2001). International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health: ICF. Geneva: WHO. ISBN: 9789241545426	Cieza, A., Geyh, S., Chatterji, S., Kostanjsek, N., Üstün, B., & Stucki, G. (2005). ICF linking rules: an update based on lessons learned. Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine, 37(4), 212-218.
Aliases	ICF Core Set Development, Condition-Specific ICF Categories, Comprehensive and Brief ICF Core Sets, ICF Shortlists	ICF Content Comparison, Instrument-to-ICF Linking, ICF Mapping Rules
Related	3	3
Summary	ICF Core Sets are condition- or context-specific shortlists of categories drawn from the WHO International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) so that the otherwise unwieldy classification of roughly fourteen hundred categories becomes usable in routine clinical and research practice. The full ICF, published in 2001, offers an exhaustive language for describing body functions and structures, activities and participation, and environmental factors, but applying all of it to a single patient is impractical. A core set answers the question 'which ICF categories actually matter for this condition?' by selecting a manageable subset through a formal, transparent, multi-method development process. That process combines a systematic review of the literature, an international expert survey using the Delphi technique, a qualitative study capturing the patient perspective, and a clinical cross-sectional study, whose convergent results are debated and voted at a consensus conference. The output is typically a paired structure: a comprehensive core set for multidisciplinary assessment and a brief core set for everyday clinical encounters and large studies.	The ICF linking rules are a standardized procedure, introduced by Alarcos Cieza and colleagues at the ICF Research Branch and refined over subsequent years, for mapping the content of health and functioning instruments onto the categories of the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. By extracting the meaningful concepts contained in each item and assigning them to the most precise matching ICF category, the rules make it possible to compare what different questionnaires actually measure, to express scores in a common functioning language, and to detect content that the ICF does not cover, such as personal factors. They are the bridge between the world's many disability instruments and the single ICF reference framework.