News

Open access journal PLoS Medicine has published a paper written by the EQUATOR team "Guidance for developers of health research reporting guidelines" (1).

The paper draws on the extensive experience in the development of reporting guidelines and offers very practical guidance to the scientists considering the development of new needed guidelines or extending and updating existing guidance.

Recent years have seen a proliferation in the development of new reporting guidelines driven mostly by the insufficient quality of published reports. The EQUATOR ‘Library for Health Research reporting’ currently lists over 90 guidelines (2).

The criteria for including guidelines in our Library are deliberately very broad to capture all available guidance: any guidelines published since 1996 and developed with the objective of improving the reporting of research studies relating to health. We have not excluded any guidelines on the basis of the methodology used for their development although our survey of reporting guidelines authors (3) and a systematic review of reporting guidelines (4) have shown major differences in the development processes of individual guidelines.  The inclusion of a reporting guideline on the EQUATOR website is not a guarantee of the guidelines ‘robustness’.

To facilitate wider use of robust guidelines, the EQUATOR team has initiated work on a tool for the evaluation of reporting guidelines which will take into account important characteristics of guidelines and their development processes and will provide useful information for those wishing to select robust guidelines and to support their use in the editorial process.    

Most internationally recognised guidelines, such as CONSORT, STARD, PRISMA or STROBE, are the results of a systematic development process; they reflect consensus of opinion of experts in a particular field, including methodologists and journal editors, and draw on relevant empirical evidence.

We recognise that there is no single best or correct approach to the development of reporting guidelines. However, we believe that the published guidance will become a valuable resource for the developers of reporting guidelines and will contribute to the development of robust widely used guidelines.

References:

1. Moher D, Schulz KF, Simera I, Altman DG (2010) Guidance for Developers of Health Research Reporting Guidelines. PLoS Med 7(2): e1000217. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000217 (Full text)


2. Simera I, Moher D, Hoey J, Schulz KF, Altman DG. A catalogue of reporting guidelines for health research. Eur J Clin Invest 2010 Jan;40(1):35-53. PMID: 20055895. (see on EQUATOR)

3. Simera I, Altman DG, Moher D, Schulz KF, Hoey J. Guidelines for Reporting Health Research: The EQUATOR Network's Survey of Guideline Authors. Plos Medicine 2008;5:e139. (Full text)

4. Moher D, Simera I, Schulz K, Miller D, Grimshaw J, Hoey J, and Altman DG. Reporting Guidelines for Clinical Research: A Systematic Review. 6th International Congress on Peer Review and Biomedical Publication, Vancouver  (http://www.ama-assn.org/public/peer/abstracts-0912.pdf; accessed 24 Sept 2009).