Reporting guidelines are recommendations to help write up research clearly.
Your research will be used by people from different disciplines and backgrounds for decades to come. Reporting guidelines are community-created recommendations for describing what you did and what you found so that everyone can understand, repeat, apply, and synthesise your work. Although they recommend information to include in your manuscript, they don’t dictate how to order that information.
Most reporting guidelines consist of the full guidance (sometimes called an Explanation and Elaboration document) and a checklist. The full guidance provides detailed explanations and examples for each item, and the checklist allows you to demonstrate adherence to editors.
You can use reporting guidelines throughout your research process. However you use reporting guidelines, please cite them.
Writing manuscripts
Write confidently using a reporting guideline to quickly turn a blank page into a thorough and impactful manuscript.
Checking
Use a reporting checklist to demonstrate to an editor or peer reviewer that you have included everything. Many journals require completed checklists at submission.
Writing applications
Reporting guidelines can help you write funding applications, ethics applications, and protocols, but they won’t make design decisions for you!
Reporting guidelines are neither design nor quality appraisal tools.
Although reporting guidelines recommend information to include when writing up research, they do not mandate how to design research. Similarly, when reviewing literature, although you can use reporting guidelines to assess whether a manuscript is well reported, you cannot use them to appraise whether that study is well designed.
Key information
Reporting guideline acronym
CARE
Provided for
For completeness, transparency and data analysis in case reports and data from the point of care.
Relevant URLs (full-text if available)
The CARE Checklist is available to download in English as a PDF file.
PubMed ID
Downloads
Bibliographic reference
Commonly used reporting guidelines
| STROBE | Observational Studies |
| PRISMA | Systematic reviews of trials |
| PRISMA-P | Systematic review protocols |
| CONSORT | Randomised trials |
| SPIRIT | Randomised trial protocols |
| SRQR | Qualitative Research |
| CARE | Case Reports |
| STARD | Diagnostic studies |
| TRIPOD+AI | Prediction Models |
| ARRIVE | Animal Research |
| SQUIRE | Quality Improvement |
| CHEERS | Economic Evaluations |
| Search all |
Gagnier JJ, Kienle G, Altman DG, Moher D, Sox H, Riley D; the CARE Group. The CARE Guidelines: Consensus-based Clinical Case Reporting Guideline Development.
This guideline was published simultaneously in 7 journals. You can read the guideline in any of these journals using the links below.
BMJ Case Rep. 2013; doi: 10.1136/bcr-2013-201554 PMID: 24155002
Global Adv Health Med. 2013;10.7453/gahmj.2013.008
Dtsch Arztebl Int. 2013;110(37):603-608. PMID: 24078847 Full-text in English / Full-text in German
J Clin Epidemiol. 2014;67(1):46-51. PMID: 24035173
J Med Case Rep. 2013;7(1):223. PMID: 24228906 Full-text.
J Diet Suppl. 2013;10(4):381-390. PMID: 24237192
Headache. 2013;53(10):1541-1547. PMID: 24266334
Additional information
Language
English
Availability in additional languages
The free-to-access CARE Checklist and Case Report Writing Outline for Authors have been translated into various languages and are available at: https://swihm.com/resources/
The CARE guideline paper has been translated into Italian: CARE Italian (PDF)
Study design
- Observational studies
Clinical area
- No clinical specialty specified
Applies to the whole report or to individual sections of the report?
- Whole report
Reporting guideline website URL
Previous versions of this guideline / Guideline history
Other
Additional Information
The CARE steering group have developed a flow diagram for how a clinician should consider approaching collecting data when seeing a patient or doing a chart review so that it can be systematically collected and written with the CARE guidelines. The flow diagram is available to download: CARE Flow Diagram (PDF)
The CARE 2013 and 2017 articles as well as other free-to-access publications are available to download at https://www.care-statement.org/publications
Additional free-to-access online information including timeline examples and instructions for creating timelines are available at https://swihm.com/resources