What are reporting guidelines?
Reporting guidelines are recommendations of information to include when writing up research. They ensure research can be understood and used by a wide audience including other researchers, editors, reviewers, clinicians, evidence synthesisers, and readers from different fields, countries, or background, even decades in the future.
Reporting guidelines help researchers write academic articles, protocols, and funding applications. They make writing less daunting by breaking the process up into bite-size chunks, without dictating the final structure. They help authors lay out the key information – the building blocks – of their work. Authors then decide how best to arrange this information to build a compelling and clear account.
However, reporting guidelines are not design standards or tools for quality appraisal. They do not dictate how research must be conducted, but they do ensure research is described clearly enough for readers to understand its strengths and limitations.
Why do we need them? Because for decades, researchers have missed out important details because of oversight, or because they have not considered their audience’s needs. These gaps make it harder for others to replicate, understand, or apply the findings — and may exclude research from reviews or clinical use. This is a massive source of waste that pervades all research areas. Well-reported research has greater impact.
Reporting guidelines are made by expert groups. Most groups follow a systematic, consensus development method to create and publish a checklist, sometimes accompanied by a longer explanation paper that provides context and examples for each checklist item.
To make these resources easier to use, we at the EQUATOR Network built this website in collaboration with authors, editors, and the developers of the most-used open access reporting guidelines. We also created writing guides to help authors apply reporting guidelines early in their writing process.
Writing guides
Writing guides help authors develop their writing practice to create articles and applications that are clear, compelling, and complete. Each reporting guideline comes with its own writing guide. They break the writing process into manageable pieces. After working through the writing guide, authors will have all of their thoughts and information in one place, ready to be rearranged into a logical narrative structure. Its up to the author to decide how best to arrange information, and whether to present it in the article body, in a figure or table, or in a supplement. This structured outline forms the skeleton for drafting.
Reporting checklists
Reporting guideline checklists allow authors to demonstrate how their work complies with a reporting guideline. By including a completed checklist as supplementary material, authors can reassure editors and peer reviewers their article is complete. Publishing checklists as supplements also helps readers and evidence synthesisers to find and extract information.
Reporting checklists are best used at the end of writing, before journal submission. Specify where readers can find each reporting item by directing them to parts of the manuscript e.g.,
- Methods, para. 2
- Table 2
- Supplement A, para. 4 and Figure S1.
If you have chosen not to report an item, explain why. Otherwise editors or peer reviewers may chase you for this information, thereby delaying publication. These explanations will also help future evidence reviewers – who commonly use reporting guidelines when assessing the the quality of reporting and risk of bias – meaning your article may be more likely to be included in their reviews.
As with writing guides, reporting guideline checklists do not dictate how research should be conducted nor how manuscripts should be structured.
Writing applications and protocols using reporting guidelines
A few reporting guidelines specifically cater to protocols, but most are for writing academic articles. Nevertheless, all reporting guidelines can be used to write protocols or grant applications – just use the methods items. Although reporting guidelines don’t dictate how research should be designed or conducted, using them to write a protocol or application helps authors consider decisions they will encounter and to document their thoughts.
