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
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 |
Petrou S, Rivero-Arias O, Dakin H, Longworth L, Oppe M, Froud R, Gray A. Preferred reporting items for studies mapping onto preference-based outcome measures: The MAPS statement.
J Med Econ. 2015;1-7. PMID: 26295698
Int J Technol Assess Health Care. 2015;31(4):1-6. PMID: 26235547
Health Qual Life Outcomes. 2015;13(1):106. PMID: 26232268
Pharmacoeconomics. 2015. PMID: 26232201
Appl Health Econ Health Policy. 2015. PMID: 26231987
Qual Life Res. 2015. PMID: 26231589
Medical Decision Making. 2015. Full-text article
Additional information
Language
English
Availability in additional languages
Study design
- Economic evaluations
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