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
PROCESS
Provided for
Reporting surgical case series.
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 |
Mathew G, Sohrabi C, Franchi T, Nicola M, Kerwan A, Agha R; PROCESS Group. Preferred Reporting Of Case Series in Surgery (PROCESS) 2023 guidelines. Int J Surg. 2023;109(12):3760-3769.
Additional information
Language
English
Availability in additional languages
Study design
- Observational studies
Clinical area
- 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
The PROCESS reporting guideline was originally published in 2016 and updated in 2018 and 2020.
2016
Agha RA, Fowler AJ, Rajmohan S, Barai I, Orgill DP; PROCESS Group. Preferred reporting of case series in surgery; the PROCESS guidelines. Int J Surg. 2016;36 (Pt A):319-323. PMID: 27770639
2018 update
Agha RA, Borrelli MR, Farwana R, Koshy K, Fowler A, Orgill DP; SCARE Group. The PROCESS 2018 Statement: Updating Consensus Preferred Reporting Of CasE Series in Surgery (PROCESS) Guidelines. Int J Surg. 2018. PMID: 30359781
2020 update
Agha RA, Sohrabi C, Mathew G, Franchi T, Kerwan A, O’Neill N; PROCESS Group. The PROCESS 2020 Guideline: Updating Consensus Preferred Reporting Of CasE Series in Surgery (PROCESS) Guidelines. Int J Surg. 2020:S1743-9191(20)30779-2. PMID: 33189880
Other
Additional Information