About GoodReports

Poor reporting is a significant cause of research waste.

Eighty percent of medical research doesn't contribute to knowledge because of inappropriate study design, delay in publication, non-publication, or poor reporting.

Reporting guidelines are tools designed to help. A reporting guideline reminds authors of the key information readers need to:

  • Understand why and how you did the research
  • Repeat the study
  • Reproduce your analysis

Awareness and use of reporting guidelines are both low, even though good journals recommend them. Some journals make it compulsory to use them. Reporting guidelines are published and updated at different times in different journals, which can also make it difficult for researchers to find and use them.

The EQUATOR Network aims to improve reporting through education and training activities. We also provide a freely available, comprehensive, searchable database of reporting guidelines.

GoodReports website

The UK EQUATOR Centre has developed this website, GoodReports. It includes a set of questions to help authors identify the appropriate reporting guideline for their study. It delivers a checklist of items from that reporting guideline, with links to explanations and examples of good reporting. Authors can use the checklist to show where in their manuscript they have reported each item. Many journals now require authors to submit a completed checklist with their manuscript.

Could GoodReports really help?

GoodReports won an international prize in 2018 for its potential to reduce waste in research.

User-testing a prototype of the GoodReports tool supported our assumption that to make a significant difference, researchers need help with reporting as early aspossible in the writing process.

Improvements to GoodReports

We are making several improvements to GoodReports based on what we learnt during user-testing. We are conducting interviews, focus group and surveys to make sure the improvements will meet the needs of researchers, particularly those at an early stage of their career.

Improvements will include:

  • Addition of more reporting guidelines, extensions, and add-ons
  • More examples of good reporting linked to each item
  • Functionality to create resources which combine guidance from more than one reporting guideline

Once improvements are completed, we will conduct a randomised trial to test the hypothesis that users of the GoodReports tool write more complete reports oftheir studies.

Get involved

We have created a mailing list for people who would like to keep up with project progress and/or help us develop the resources.

We will send regular updates and opportunities to contribute including trying out the resources, and participating in focus groups. We will also share GoodReports project updates and progress, and related news from the UK EQUATOR Centre and EQUATOR Network.

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