EQUATOR 2017 highlights

 2017 was another busy year for the UK EQUATOR Centre team! We were honoured to send Iveta Simera to the Council of Science Editors (CSE) Annual Meeting, to accept the CSE’s 2017 Award for Meritorious Achievement on behalf of the EQUATOR Network. CSE’s highest award is given to a person or institution dedicated to the improvement of scientific communication through the pursuit of high standards in all activities connected with editing.

Our reporting guidelines database now includes 396 guidelines, and our Information Specialist Shona Kirtley is always busy adding more. Remember to register your planned guidelines with us when you start putting your development plan in place.

We’ve been delighted to meet so many librarians and information specialists excited to support EQUATOR and help improve biomedical research. Our Librarian Network launched action plans to help library professionals to support their researchers in writing complete, transparent health research papers. Shona also promoted librarian involvement in biomedical research reporting and reproducibility through a keynote address at the Medical Librarian Association Research Reproducibility Symposium (PDF) and collaborating with librarians to deliver a workshop at the EAHIL conference in Ireland.

Our team has been here, there, and everywhere in 2017. You may have seen us speaking at conferences like the 4th University Internationalization Seminar in Washington DC, the World Congress in Research Integrity in the Netherlands, the Peer Review Congress in the USA, the Global Evidence Summit in South Africa, and the International Conference for EBHC Teachers and Developers in Italy, to name a few. We’ve delivered training for groups of healthcare professionals and researchers through MEDICC Review in Cuba, the Global Research Nurses Network in South Africa, and the University of Oxford’s Clinical Academic Graduate School. Journal editors and medical writers weren’t left out, as we visited the International Society for Managing and Technical Editors European meeting in London and a MedComms Networking event (YouTube) in Oxford. We also ran our flagship week-long Publication School in Oxford for the third time.

Our focused project to support cancer researchers in conducting and reporting their research well continues to grow. UK EQUATOR Fellow Angela MacCarthy has published on the state of reporting guidelines in the field and we will be launching an online toolkit of resources targeting cancer researchers early in the new year.

On a sad note, we said goodbye to the UK EQUATOR Centre’s founding Deputy Director, Iveta Simera, this year. Iveta has moved just down the street to the Global Health Network, where she is the Senior Operations and Development Manager. She continues her involvement on the EQUATOR Network Steering Group and as a UK EQUATOR Centre Fellow.

We welcomed Gary Collins, Professor in Medical Statistics at the Centre for Statistics in Medicine at the University of Oxford, as the new Deputy Director of the UK EQUATOR Centre. Gary is a prognostic modelling specialist and will be expanding the EQUATOR Network research program to focus on the quality of reporting in observational research.

The EQUATOR Network team would like to thank you all for your support for our work to improve the quality and transparency of health research, and we look forward to partnering with you in 2018!