Enhancing the QUAlity and Transparency Of health Research

Launch and promote your journal’s reporting guideline policy

Once you’ve designed your reporting guideline policy, you’ll need to let your readers, authors, and reviewers know about it. You could launch your policy using:

Follow up

A once-off promotion of your reporting guideline policy is unlikely to reach every author and reader of your journal. We suggest that you could keep publicising your reporting guideline policy by:

Publish an editorial

An editorial is a great opportunity to introduce your new reporting guideline policy and explain why you’ve chosen it. Publishers may find it helpful to publish the same editorial across multiple journals at once.

Here are a few examples of editorials explaining a journal’s reporting guideline policy:

Instructions for Authors

Download template paragraphs (Word) to add to your Instructions for Authors. There are paragraphs for each implementation route. Editors may like to use just the first short paragraph or two to explain their policy. Publishers may like to also use the additional explanations. If you have selected certain guidelines for your journal, there are also sentences introducing key guidelines.

Instructions for Reviewers

Regardless of which implementation route you select, we encourage you to alert your peer reviewers to reporting guidelines. They are an excellent tool for identifying whether an article includes all of the information the reviewer needs to properly judge an article.

In 2012, we found that around 35% of journals offered freely accessible online instructions about their peer review process and, of those, about half mention reporting guidelines. We’ve written a toolkit to help peer reviewers to use reporting guidelines as a first step in judging a manuscript.

Download template paragraphs (Word) to add to your Instructions for Reviewers. There are paragraphs for each implementation route. Editors may like to use just the first short paragraph or two to explain their policy. Publishers may like to also use the additional explanations. If you have selected certain guidelines for your journal, there are also sentences introducing key guidelines.

Training courses for authors

You could deliver online and in person training courses explaining your reporting guideline policy to your authors.

If you would like to share your training materials here, please get in touch at equator@csm.ox.ac.uk!