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
CoBRA
Provided for
Citation of bioresources in journal articles
Relevant URLs (full-text if available)
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 |
Bravo E, Calzolari A, De Castro P, Mabile L, Napolitani F, Rossi AM, Cambon-Thomsen A. Developing a guideline to standardize the citation of bioresources in journal articles (CoBRA). BMC Med. 2015;13:33.
Additional information
Language
English
Availability in additional languages
Study design
- Experimental studies
- Observational studies
Clinical area
- No clinical specialty specified
Applies to the whole report or to individual sections of the report?
- Biospecimen/bioresource information
Reporting guideline website URL
Previous versions of this guideline / Guideline history
Other
A guideline for reporting biospecimen information more generally is available at: BRISQ guideline
Additional Information
Read the BRIF meeting report from a workshop with journal editors held in Rome in 2013: meeting report (PDF)
The following papers have also been published by the BRIF researchers:
The BRIF initiative: Laurence Mabile, Raymond Dalgleish, Gudmundur A Thorisson, Mylène Deschênes, Robert Hewitt, Jane Carpenter, Elena Bravo, Mirella Filocamo, Pierre Antoine Gourraud, Jennifer R Harris, Paul Hofman, Francine Kauffmann, Maria Angeles Muñoz-Fernàndez, Markus Pasterk, Anne Cambon-Thomsen and BRIF working group. Quantifying the use of bioresources for promoting their sharing in scientific research. GigaScience. 2013;2:7. Link to full-text
Elena Bravo, Anne Cambon-Thomsen, Paola De Castro, Laurence Mabile, Federica Napolitani, Mariarosaria Napolitano, Anna Maria Rossi. Citation of bioresources in journal articles: moving towards standards. European Science Editing. 2013;39(2):36-38. Link to full-text (PDF)