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
STROBE
Provided for
Observational studies in epidemiology (cohort, case-control studies, cross-sectional studies)
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 |
von Elm E, Altman DG, Egger M, Pocock SJ, Gotzsche PC, Vandenbroucke JP. The Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemiology (STROBE) Statement: guidelines for reporting observational studies.
This guideline was published simultaneously in 8 journals. You can read the guideline in any of these journals using the links below.
Ann Intern Med. 2007; 147(8):573-577. PMID: 17938396
PLoS Med. 2007;4(10):e296. PMID: 17941714
BMJ. 2007;335(7624):806-808. PMID: 17947786
Prev Med. 2007;45(4):247-251. PMID: 17950122
Epidemiology. 2007;18(6):800-804. PMID: 18049194
Lancet. 2007;370(9596):1453-1457. PMID: 18064739
J Clin Epidemiol. 2008;61(4):344-349. PMID: 18313558
Bull World Health Organ. 2007;85(11):867-872. PMID: 18038077
Additional information
Language
English
Availability in additional languages
The STROBE Statement has been translated into the following languages: Chinese (PDF); German (PDF); Greek (PDF); Japanese (PDF); Portuguese (PDF) (unofficial translation); Spanish (PDF); Italian (PDF).
The STROBE explanation and elaboration paper has been translated into the following languages: Japanese (PDF); Spanish (PDF).
The STROBE checklist has been translated into the following languages: Persian (PDF); Turkish (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
STROBE 2004/2005
Other
Additional Information
What is STROBE?
STROBE stands for an international, collaborative initiative of epidemiologists, methodologists, statisticians, researchers and journal editors involved in the conduct and dissemination of observational studies, with the common aim of STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology.
The STROBE Statement is being endorsed by a growing number of biomedical journals.
Aims and use of STROBE
Incomplete and inadequate reporting of research hampers the assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the studies reported in the medical literature. Readers need to know what was planned (and what was not), what was done, what was found, and what the results mean. Recommendations on the reporting of studies that are endorsed by leading medical journals can improve the quality of reporting.
Observational research comprises several study designs and many topic areas. We aimed to establish a checklist of items that should be included in articles reporting such research - the STROBE Statement. We considered it reasonable to initially restrict the recommendations to the three main analytical designs that are used in observational research: cohort, case-control, and cross-sectional studies. We want to provide guidance on how to report observational research well. Our recommendations are not prescriptions for designing or conducting studies. Also, the checklist is not an instrument to evaluate the quality of observational research.
Further use:
The STROBE initiative should be seen as an ongoing process, with future revisions of the recommendations based on comments, critique and new evidence. We welcome translations into other languages and extensions to other observational study designs, for example nested case-control studies, and specific topic areas, for example, genetic and molecular epidemiology.
Note: We ask anyone intending to use the STROBE Statement for further extensions, translations or other STROBE-related work to contact the coordinating group through this website first. This will allow to coordinate efforts and to avoid duplication. The authors of the original STROBE articles hold the copyright. Please, contact us if you wish to re-publish STROBE material in additional journals, books or other media.
Contact the STROBE Initiative