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
AQUA
Provided for
Reporting original anatomical studies
Relevant URLs (full-text if available)
The AQUA checklist is freely available from: http://www.eba.cm.uj.edu.pl/about-aqua
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 |
Tomaszewski KA, Henry BM, Ramakrishnan PK, Roy J, Vikse J, Loukas M, Tubbs RS, Walocha JA. Development of the Anatomical Quality Assurance (AQUA) Checklist: guidelines for reporting original anatomical studies. Clin Anat. 2016.
Additional information
Language
English
Availability in additional languages
The AQUA checklist is also available in French (PDF), Spanish (PDF) and Polish (PDF).
Study design
- Observational studies
Clinical area
- Pathology
- Radiology
- Surgery
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 AQUA reporting guideline development team have also produced consensus guidelines specifically for reporting study ethics in anatomical research within the framework of the AQUA checklist (relating to checklist items 6, 16 and 17):
Henry BM, Vikse J, Pekala P, Loukas M, Tubbs RS, Walocha JA, Jones DG, Tomaszewski KA. Consensus guidelines for the uniform reporting of study ethics in anatomical research within the framework of the anatomical quality assurance (AQUA) checklist. Clin Anat. 2018;31(4):521-524. PMID: 29532521