News

The EQUATOR Network is very pleased by journals interest in our initiative.

Some of the leading examples are highlighted below.
 
Dr Chris Morris reports from the Editorial Board meeting of the Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology journal:
‘The Editorial Board of Mac Keith Press, publishers of the journal Developmental Medicine and Child Neurology, recently endorsed the principles advocated by the EQUATOR Network. The following actions were agreed by the Editorial Board: first, the instructions to authors will be amended to include link to the EQUATOR website and authors will be strongly advised to use appropriate reporting guidelines when preparing their manuscripts. Second, peer reviewers will be made aware of the guidelines when being invited to review for the journal, and asked to use an appropriate checklist when making their quality assessment. An editorial by Dr Chris Morris, from the Department of Public Health at the University of Oxford, due to be published in the autumn, suggests that a major incentive for authors to report their research in a complete, transparent, and accurate manner will be to make the peer reviewers work easier, which may in turn make publication more likely and, perhaps, hasten the process. ‘

Another great initiative comes from PLoS Medicine. The journal launched a new section entitled ‘Guidelines and Guidance’ that will provide platform for publishing novel methodological aaproaches; consensus standards for conducting and / or reporting particular types of research; guides to commonly encountered statistical and methodological isssues and similar articles promoting highest possible standards in medical research. More details can be found in recent PLoS editorial (1).

The EQUATOR team have been monitoring incoming traffic on our website and the following journals should be very pleased that authors are reading their instructions and (at least) exploring recommended sources.
In the last 3 months, most traffic from Instructions to Authors came from:
BMJ, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, WHO Bulletin and some of the Blackwell Publishing journals (BJOG; Community dentistry and oral epidemiology).


Please let us know what is your journal doing to ensure accurate, transparent and complete reporting of health research. Your approach can provide a very practical example for colleagues in other journals.


Posted by Iveta Simera
iveta.simera@csm.ox.ac.uk



1. PLoS Med 5(4): e99 doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0050099