The National Institutes of Health in the United States recently issued guidance that all funded science and studies must be rigorus and reproducable. However, there is a natural tension between community-engaged work and the current way scientific standards define rigor and reproducibility. For example, repeated measures make a study more rigorous, but may increase community burden and a study done in one community will likely need to be tailored before being repeated, which may be viewed as being less reproducable.
While interest in Community-Engaged Research continues to grow those designing and publishing studies often fail to describe how partnerships were formed, how decisions were shared, or how methods were carried out. Without that information, readers and reviewers cannot judge a study’s rigor, replicate its approach, or compare findings across studies.
Purpose: RAPPORT gives authors, reviewers, and editors a common standard for reporting CEnR. Its goal is to make both the engagement process and the research methods transparent, auditable, and reproducible, while respecting community ownership and context.
The RAPPORT Domains:
Rigor: Describe the study design, the rationale for engagement methods, and the strategies used to ensure the study is credible and valid.
Accountability: Report how researchers and community partners were accountable to each other, including agreements, conflict resolution, and responsiveness to community feedback.
Partnership: Identify community partners, how they were recruited, the history of the relationship, and the resources and compensation given to them.
Participation: Specify the level and timing of community involvement at each research stage, from question development to dissemination.
Openness: Disclose governance, power sharing, data ownership, and any limits on data or material sharing agreed with communities.
- Reproducibility: Give enough detail on engagement and research procedures for others to adapt or replicate them, including protocols, tools, and analytic decisions.
Transparency: Report deviations from plans, limitations, conflicts of interest, and how results were returned to communities.
Scope: RAPPORT applies to quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods Community-Engaged Research (CEnR), including community-based participatory research (CBPR) done in collaboration with community and Community Partnered Participatory Research (CPPR). We do not believe this guideline currently exists in EQUATOR, and this is meant to complement existing EQUATOR guidelines such GRIPP2, not replace them. However, we note that GRIPP2 has related concepts, are open to considering an extension.
We note that RAPPORT is not for patients (which is a different dynamic) nor is it for “the public”, it is specific to community engaged and co-lead research techniques which may include may types of study design.
Use: Authors can use RAPPORT when planning, writing, and submitting manuscripts. Reviewers and editors can use it to appraise how completely CEnR is reported, and researchers can use it to assess rigor and reproducibility across the published CEnR literature.
Registered: 26 October 2026
Last updated:
Contact: Elizabeth Cohn Email: [email protected]