Author Archives: Caroline Struthers

EQUATOR pre-congress workshops, Swissotel, Chicago, 9 September 2017

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GoodReports logoJoin the EQUATOR Network GoodReports campaign and the Centre for Journalology & International Society of Managing and Technical Editors (ISMTE) on Saturday 9 September

EQUATOR are delighted to invite you to register for two unique workshops. At the first, you will hear about recent innovations and experiences, and share ideas on how journals and publishers can effectively implement the use of reporting guidelines to improve the quality of their publications.  At the second, you will explore what legitimate journals can do to distinguish themselves from the growing number of predatory journals.

Doug AltmanMorning workshop: 8.00am-12.00pm

Implementing Reporting Guidelines: Time for Action

The main aim of this workshop is to use evidence and experience of both the workshop participants and speakers to develop a draft one-page EQUATOR “GoodReports” Action Plan – a practical tool for journal editors and publishers to help them integrate the use of reporting guidelines in their editorial and publishing systems.

Workshop speakers: Doug Altman (Director, UK EQUATOR Centre), Caroline Struthers (Education and  Training Manager, UK EQUATOR Centre), Jason Roberts (Executive Editor, Headache), Allan Heinemann (co-editor in chief, Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation), Sabine Alam (Editorial Director, F1000 platforms), Mario Maliki (Netherlands Research Integrity Network)

Programme outline

  • Reporting in the medical literature: issues and initiatives: Doug Altman
  • Reporting guidelines and development of new EQUATOR resources: Caroline Struthers
  • What happens at your journal?  Guided discussion: Jason Roberts
  • Implementation case studies and evaluations: Jason Roberts, Allan Heinemann, Sabina Alam, Mario Malicki
  • Participatory session: Drafting the “GoodReports” action plan

 

 

Afternoon workshop: 1.30pm-5.00pm

Predatory journals: what can legitimate journals do?

Can you trust what you read? Can you trust where you read it?  This session focuses on the phenomenon of potentially illegitimate and predatory publications. It presents evidence-based criteria for distinguishing predators and discusses journal standards, legitimacy, and transparency.

There are concerns about the validity of research published in predatory journals, but it’s also possilbe that they may contain perfectly good research.  It seems impossible to discern whether and how they apply peer review to the papers they publish.

Our session calls for universally higher journal standards and demands fully transparent implementation of such standards.

Workshop speakers: Hilda Bastian (Absolutely Maybe, PLOS Blogs, Washington DC, USA), Kelly Cobey (Centre for Journalology, Ottawa, Canada), Ana Marušic (University of Split School of Medicine, Split, Croatia), Jason Roberts (Origin Editorial, USA), Peush Sahni (The National Medical Journal of India, All India Institute of Medical Sciences, New Delhi, India), Larissa Shamseer (Centre for Journalology, Ottawa, Canada), Liz Wager (Sideview, Princes Risborough, UK)

Programme outline

  • Predatory Journals: what is the problem?: Jason Roberts
  • What does a predatory journal look like and what do they publish?: Larissa Shamseer
  • Presentation of case studies (authors and editors): Kelly Cobey
  • Stakeholders: Who should do what: Larissa Shamseer & Kelly Cobey
  • Guided Discussion. Taking action: where do we go from here?
    Panelists: Hilda Bastian, Ana Marusic, Peush Sahni, Liz Wager
    Facilitator: Jason Roberts

Target Audience: We believe both sessions will be of interest to editors and editorial office staff, publishers, funders, and, of course, researchers. The morning session will be of interest to anyone interested in taking the lead in new initiatives to develop effective policies to ensure effective and appropriate use of reporting guidelines at all stages of the editorial and publishing process, including, but not limited to, peer review. The afternoon session will be especially pertinent to editorial offices and publishers keen to distinguish themselves from predatory journals and educate their own authors and readers on predatory publications.

Registration for the morning workshop is £65 ($85). Please register here to reserve your space.

Registration for the afternoon workshop is $35. Please register here to reserve a space.

Both workshops are proudly presented in association with the International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, September 10-12, 2017, Chicago, Illinois, USA

On the evening of Monday 11 September, Patrick Bossuyt will give the 8th Annual EQUATOR Lecture

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Practising What We Preach: How we improved the publication guidelines for quality improvement research

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UK EQUATOR Centre Seminar Series flyer
UK EQUATOR Centre Seminar
Thursday 9 March, 1-2pm
Bernard Sunley Lecture Theatre, Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, Oxford University

Entry is free, but please book via Eventbrite

Speakers Louise Davies and Greg Ogrinc, from the Dartmouth Institute in New Hampshire USA and Hilary Mosher, from the University of Iowa will describe the journey of updating the SQUIRE reporting guideline and how it helps you write clearly about three key components of your research

  • the use of theory in planning, implementing, and evaluating quality improvement work
  • the description of the context of the research
  • the study of the intervention(s).

They will provide examples from the literature to demonstrate how these components work together in a completed manuscript

Meeting the challenge of writing and publishing quality improvement research

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Logo for the The Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence (SQUIRE) InitiativeWriting and publishing your QI work can be challenging.  Navigating the requirements for journals as well as knowing what to include in a published peer-reviewed report of QI can make the task even more difficult.  The Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence (SQUIRE www.squire-statement.org) publication guidelines were initially published in 2008 and revised in 2015.  The guidelines focus on helping authors produce more complete and more transparent reports about original QI work.  SQUIRE helps you define the rationale and theory of the QI work, describe the context where the work occurred, and focus the study of the intervention.

Do you have a project to write?  Do you need some guidance and assistance with getting started writing your QI project?  Join SQUIRE faculty from Dartmouth and University of Iowa in Leicester 7-8 March 2017.  We’ll use highly interactive sessions for you to work on your manuscript, get expert feedback, and learn how to give feedback to others.  Additionally, we’ll have plenary presentations from Professor Mary Dixon-Woods (@MaryDixonWoods) and medical and nursing QI teachers with advice about a career in scholarly QI.

 

Greg Ogrinc, a member of the SQUIRE guideline development groupGreg Ogrinc is a general internist working at the White River Junction VA Hospital in White River Junction, VT. He is the Associate Chief of Staff for Education and has served as the Senior Scholar for the White River Junction VA Quality Scholars Program.  At the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth, he is currently the Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education.

Register free of charge for the SQUIRE European Conference on writing about healthcare improvement 7-8 March, Leicester, UK

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SQUIRE logoWe’re delighted to announce two unique opportunities in early March to hear about and participate in the work of the SQUIRE group in improving the reporting of health systems improvement research.

Join an interprofessional group of attendees from around the world at the SQUIRE European Conference on Writing about Healthcare Improvement

This will be a truly a hands-on opportunity for attendees to bring a project, learn about SQUIRE, and then use SQUIRE to write portions of a manuscript.  It will be of interest to students, clinicians, researchers and others who want to learn what’s new, and apply it to their own work. Enjoy talks, expert panel discussions, manuscript writing sessions, and networking at the University of Leicester, UK 7-8 March 2017.

The Health Foundation logoThanks to the generous sponsorship of The Health Foundation, registration to the main conference is free of charge.

  • Learn about SQUIRE 2.0… What’s new?  What’s emerging?  What’s challenging?
  • Work on developing your writing skills and develop your own manuscript
  • Learn helpful writing techniques and skills that are applicable to quality improvement research

UK EQUATOR Centre Seminar Series flyerPractising What We Preach: How we improved the publication guidelines for quality improvement research

If you can’t make it to the Leicester workshop, you will have another chance to catch the SQUIRE Group in Oxford. They will be giving a seminar at the Kennedy Institute of Rheumatology, Oxford University, 1-2pm on 9 March. Entry is free, but please book via Eventbrite

Speakers Louise Davies and Greg Ogrinc, from the Dartmouth Institute in New Hampshire USA and Hilary Mosher, from the University of Iowa will describe the journey of updating the SQUIRE reporting guideline and how it helps you write clearly about three key components of your research

  • the use of theory in planning, implementing, and evaluating quality improvement work
  • the description of the context of the research
  • the study of the intervention(s).

They will provide examples from the literature to demonstrate how these components work together in a completed manuscript.

EQUATOR workshop at the 5th World Conference on Research Integrity 2017

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Be part of the solution!

Join EQUATOR’s Doug Altman and Jen de Beyer at a workshop exploring practical ways you can use reporting guidelines and related tools to improve the integrity, usability and impact of research

Sunday 28th May: 10am-1pm

Reporting guidelines are important tools to help researchers to report their studies fully and transparently, which is an integral part of ethical responsible research conduct. Selective and inaccurate reporting severely limits the reliability and usability of research articles.

Our workshop will summarise the latest research investigating the state of the published scientific literature on health research. We will introduce key reporting guidelines and explore how researchers and those supporting them can raise awareness and uptake of reporting guidelines and EQUATOR online resources to improve the quality and usability of the scientific literature. We invite your input into action plans for professional communities.

Led by EQUATOR’s Doug Altman and Jen de Beyer, the workshop will cover:-

  • How usable and reliable is published research?
  • What are our ethical responsibilities when reporting research?
  • Ways to support researchers: practical steps to raise awareness and use of reporting guidelines
  • Exploring established, new and proposed initiatives to combat poor reporting
  • Reporting guidelines – what they are, what they aren’t, and why they work
  • Introduction to EQUATOR, online resources, toolkits and courses
  • Practical exercises on identifying poor reporting
  • Developing action plans for professional communities concerned with improving research reporting and integrity.

4th University Internationalization Seminar Washington DC 16 March 2016

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Iveta Simera

Iveta Simera during the conference

On 15 March 2016, Dr Iveta Simera, Deputy Director of the UK EQUATOR Centre gave the presentation: Research papers that make a difference: how to increase research value, reputation, and impact (PDF) at the 4th University Internationalization Seminar held in Washington DC organised by the Department of Human Development, Education and Employment of the Organisation of American States (OAS), the Coimbra Group of Brazilian Universities (GCUP) and our valued collaborator from the PAHO/WHO, Dr Luis Gabriel Cuervo.

Since the meeting, EQUATOR and PAHO have developed a joint action plan (PDF) for universities to help fulfil their obligations to their scholars and to society, to enhance their reputation as supporters of high standards in health research reporting, and increase the impact of research carried out by their scientists.

This builds on our established close collaboration with the PAHO/WHO in providing resources in Spanish and Portuguese on the EQUATOR website to promote responsible reporting of research for health.

UK EQUATOR Centre Publication School Oxford 27 June-1 July 2016

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pubschool 2016 news articleTwenty researchers and clinicians joined us for a week-long journey to create well-reported, clear research with an impact beyond academia.

Researchers are taught to do research, not to write papers. It’s a familiar refrain, and the reason for our flagship week-long course, Publication School.

What better way for the EQUATOR Network to reach its goal of improving the global quality of health research reporting than by empowering health researchers from around the world to write excellent papers? This year’s participants learnt everything about the publication process, from picking a journal, to writing a detailed methods section, to engaging with communications officers and blogging about the final paper.

The 2016 Publication School cohort included physiotherapists, GPs, medical writers, and systematic reviewers. Some had written many papers, others were just starting on their academic journey. All had clear goals: to write better papers, get more comfortable using reporting guidelines, and go back to their home institutions with new knowledge to share.

Read about the first EQUATOR Publication School, held in 2015

As EQUATOR UK Centre Deputy Director Iveta Simera says, reporting guidelines are shopping lists for busy researchers, helping to ensure no important detail is forgotten from a research paper. Following a reporting guideline makes health research papers easy to write and easy to read.

We used CONSORT for clinical trials and STROBE for observational studies to write rough drafts of papers in just three days. Our guest editors and statisticians were also on hand to share tips and tricks for writing polished papers reviewers will love, increasing the chance of a fast and successful publication.

The modern researcher can reach a much wider audience when they think beyond the traditional research paper and explore avenues like blogging and social media. Doctors and patients need to be able to understand and implement health research, if it is to be truly useful.

Blogs are an excellent way to make research articles accessible to different audiences. Andre Tomlin of the National Elf Service led the group in a whirlwind 2 hour blogging challenge, critically appraising a piece of health research and writing it up in an accessible format. You can read the result at the Mental Elf site.

In keeping with the course emphasis on putting new knowledge into action, School participants took to social media to share their key messages from the course. “Research needs to be new, true, and important. Tell it to a 10 year old!” read one tweet.

Read more take-home messages and highlights from the course by following #EQPubSchool and @EQUATORNetwork.

Publication School is run by the EQUATOR UK Centre, which is embedded in the Centre for Statistics in Medicine at NDORMS, University of Oxford. This year’s course was run in collaboration with our colleagues from the EQUATOR Australasia Centre.

World Conference on Research Integrity Brazil 31 May-3 June 2015

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trishs photoIveta Simera and Caroline Struthers were delighted to represent EQUATOR at the 4th World Conference on Research Integrity in Rio de Janeiro from 31 May-3 June 2015.

It was a fantastic event attended by over 600 delegates from 55 countries.  The main theme for the conference was How to improve the research reward systems to promote responsible research.

Along with Biomed Central’s Daniel Shanahan (Associate Publisher) and Stephanie Harriman (Medical Editor), and Trish Groves (Head of research, BMJ/ Editor in Chief, BMJ Open), Iveta and Caroline presented a “Partner Symposium” on Monday 1 June entitled

EQUATOR Symposium: Making the research publication process more efficient and responsible: practical ways to improve the reliability and usability of published (health) research

The Symposium was well attended and was also well covered on Twitter.

Click on the titles of the presentations to view the slides

Can we trust the medical research literature? Poor reporting and its consequences (PDF) (presenter: Iveta Simera)

Promoting good reporting practice for reliable and useable research papers: EQUATOR Network, reporting guidelines and other initiatives (PDF) (presenter: Caroline Struthers)

What can Biomed Central do to improve published research? (PDF) (Presenters Daniel Shanahan and Stephanie Harriman)

What can a “traditional” journal do to improve published research? (PDF) (Presenter: Trish Groves)

It was also the perfect session at which to offcially launch the brand new journal from BioMed Central Research Integrity and Peer Review with its Editors-in-Chief, Liz Wager, Iveta Simera, Stephanie Harriman and Maria Kowalczuk, and Publisher Daniel Shanahan all in the room!

The work of EQUATOR was mentioned in many of the conference sessions, including the first keynote presentation given by Lex Bouter from VU University Amsterdam entitled What is holding us back in the prevention of questionable research practices?

Liz Wager gave a great plenary talk on Tuesday morning about Why waste in research is an ethical issue (PDF) which also caused quite a stir on Twitter.  Ivan Oransky from Retraction Watch tweeted that the revelations about research waste in her talk were “devastating”.

A video of Liz’s talk should be available from the conference website soon.

Those interested in joining the important movement to REduce Waste And Reward Diligence (REWARD) in research are encouraged to submit an abstract and/or attend the forthcoming REWARD/EQUATOR conference in Edinburgh, UK 28-30 September.

And finally, on the last day of the conference on 3 June, Iveta, Daniel and Trish gave talks in a session on Reporting and publication bias, and how to overcome it.

Iveta introduced the work of the EQUATOR Network in promoting responsible reporting of health research studies, and paid particular attention to our fruitful collaboration with Luis Gabriel Cuervo and the Pan American Health Organisation. View the slide from her talk here (PDF).

Daniel Shanahan talked about Biomed Central initiatives to promote complete public records of research studies to overcome publication bias and selective reporting.

Trish talked about Data-sharing and the experience at two open access general medical journals

Get your research published and be praised for it! EQUATOR workshop, Oxford 21 June 2016

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Evidence Live logo
University of Oxford logo and CEBM logo

 

 

 

 

 

The EQUATOR Network is delighted to be hosting a practical workshop on 21 June 2016 in association with the Centre for Evidence-based Medicine and Evidence Live 2016.

We have a great line-up of confirmed speakers:

Doug Altman, Gary Collins, Ben Goldacre, Jo Silva, Iveta Simera, and Elizabeth (Liz) Wager

Over the past decades, rigorous methods of research synthesis and the movement to apply evidence to medical practice has shone a very bright light on the health research literature.   Researchers and methodologists have found that many primary studies are so badly reported it’s impossible to assess their methodological quality or use the findings in systematic reviews.  In short, the literature is not fit for purpose.

Public funds are wasted because of bad reporting or non-reporting of research, the goodwill of research participants is betrayed, and patients’ care is compromised.

EQUATOR Evidence Live workshop programmeThe workshop programme (PDF), aimed primarily at clinician-researchers, focuses on practical steps you can take to ensure that:-

  1. Your research is prioritized, conceived and designed efficiently
  2. All stages of your research are documented accurately, reported and shared fully, and can be placed in context of previous work.
  3. Time and resources invested in your research can be translated into improved healthcare, supported by trustworthy evidence.

There will be talks, discussion and several practical (and fun!) exercises highlighting:

  • How ambiguous and incomplete reporting misleads clinicians and harm patients
  • How good planning, design and methods help with your writing
  • How reporting guidelines and other EQUATOR resources can help researchers, editors and peer reviewers work as a team to improve the literature.
  • How to sail through methodological and statistical review unscathed
  • Learn from medical publications professionals and communications experts to make your message soar.

 

EQUATOR and PAHO develop practical action plan for universities to support their scientists in responsible reporting

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Dr Iveta Simera, Deputy Director of the UK EQUATOR Centre On 15 March 2016, Dr Iveta Simera, Deputy Director of the UK EQUATOR Centre gave the presentation: Research papers that make a difference: how to increase research value, reputation, and impact at the 4th University Internationalizaton Seminar held in Washington DC organised by the Department of Human Development, Education and Employment of the Organisation of American States (OAS), the Coimbra Group of Brazilian Universities (GCUP) and our valued collaborator from the PAHO/WHO, Dr Luis Gabriel Cuervo.

Dr Luis Gabriel Cuervo, Pan American Health Organization Since the meeting, EQUATOR and PAHO have developed a joint action plan for universities to help fulfil their obligations to their scholars and to society, to enhance their reputation as supporters of high standards in health research reporting, and increase the impact of research carried out by their scientists.

This builds on our established close collaboration with the PAHO/WHO in providing resources in Spanish and Portuguese on the EQUATOR website to promote responsible reporting of research for health.