GoodReports: An online tool helping authors find and use reporting checklists to improve completeness of reporting

Researchers communicate about their work and findings by writing and publishing reports in journals. However, it has been suggested that around 80% of all medical research doesn't actually contribute to our knowledge, so can't be used to improve healthcare. Inappropriate study design, delays in publishing, non-publishing, not giving enough detail in a publication, and only publishing some results are some reasons for this waste.

People interested in solving this waste problem have been investigating causes and possible solutions for many years. Funders, journals, researchers, and others have supported initiatives and developed tools to help researchers design, run, and write up their research. Reporting guidelines are one such tool. A reporting guideline is like a shopping list to remind people writing articles of the key information that readers need to repeat the research or judge if the methods were good enough to make the results reliable. The best reporting guidelines are developed by expert groups following a rigorous procedure and written up and published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Reporting guidelines are published and updated at different times in different journals, making it difficult for researchers to keep up to date with what's available. Awareness of these tools, particularly among early-career researchers, is low as researchers are not routinely taught about them during training. Good journals recommend reporting guidelines, and some make it compulsory for authors to submit a filled-in checklist with their manuscript. However, often neither the journal editors dealing with incoming manuscripts nor the authors know which reporting guideline is most appropriate. And often authors need more than one guideline.

The EQUATOR Network works to promote well-written, complete health research articles, for example through our freely available, comprehensive searchable database of reporting guidelines. We developed a prototype online tool called GoodReports to help researchers find and use reporting guidelines more easily (www.goodreports.org). In recognition of the tool's promise in preliminary studies, it won the Cochrane-REWARD prize for reducing research waste in September 2018.

The GoodReports online tool asks researchers a set of simple questions about their research to "diagnose" which reporting guideline they need. The tool offers an online version of the recommended checklist, with pop-up explanations for each item and examples of good reporting where available. The checklist can also be downloaded to use offline. GoodReports asks authors to go through the checklist, clarify or add more information to their manuscript if required, mark where in the manuscript they have reported the information, and submit the filled checklist with their manuscript. The GoodReports prototype contains 16 reporting guidelines. A pilot in four BMC journals found authors using GoodReports were more likely to use the right reporting guideline. Preliminary data from a study of BMJ Open authors suggested authors using the tool were more likely to submit a reporting checklist with their manuscript than those that don't.

We propose to improve GoodReports from prototype to sharable tool. We will add more checklists, make it possible for users to combine elements from more than one reporting guideline, and add at least one example of good reporting for every checklist item. Development will be based on data from our two preliminary studies and user feedback. We will continue to collect GoodReports user feedback online throughout the project to iteratively direct how the tool develops. We will also ask the opinions of early-career researchers in local focus groups and of authors and other potential users (e.g., journal editors and medical writers) in wider online surveys. We will then test whether the GoodReports tool increases the completeness of manuscripts submitted to a medical journal in a randomised trial.

Many initiatives have been developed to prevent waste in biomedical research caused by poor methods and publishing practices. One such initiative led by the EQUATOR Network is promoting the use of reporting guidelines. Reporting guidelines exist for all main study designs, and there are hundreds more add-ons and extensions for different clinical specialities and report types. Reporting guidelines help researchers include all of the important information needed in an article to allow readers to judge the work's quality.

There are two main barriers preventing authors from using reporting guidelines effectively: how to identify and access the most appropriate guidelines, and how to use them. Over the past two years the UK EQUATOR Centre has developed a prototype online tool called GoodReports to help researchers find and apply the appropriate reporting guidance to their work. Preliminary studies of its potential to improve reporting have been encouraging and led to it winning the Cochrane-REWARD prize for reducing waste in research in September 2018.

We plan to use data from a pilot study of GoodReports with BMJ Open and website user surveys to inform enhancements and improvements to the tool's content and functionality. This will include adding more guidelines and facilitating the combination of items from more than one reporting guideline in a single checklist. After initial development, we will hold focus groups with local early-career researchers and online surveys of wider stakeholder groups to qualitatively assess the tool. These assessments and feedback from website users will be used to further refine and improve the tool, in an iterative cycle of feedback and development. Once finalised, we will test the tool in a randomised trial to test whether GoodReports (1) helps authors correctly identify the appropriate reporting guideline or combination of guidelines and (2) improves the completeness of reporting in health research articles.

Who will benefit from the research?
The proposed programme of research will benefit patients, the public, funders, journals, public and private research organisations, policy-makers, and the researchers of tomorrow.

How might they benefit from this research?
We aim to improve patient health and well-being through well-designed research based on a sound literature base that can deliver meaningful results.

The purpose of medical research is to improve the health of the population. The design, conduct, analysis, and reporting of medical research is at the heart of this. How medical research is reported in journal articles has been shown to suffer many avoidable flaws. Reporting guidelines are one of the key interventions being implemented today to improve the writing and publication process. By offering a tool to help authors find and use the correct reporting guidelines, the proposed research programme will enhance the biomedical research literature of today, and thus enhance the quality of the biomedical research of tomorrow and increase its impact on patient health and well-being.

This research will support funders, journals, and academic institutions to promote good research publication practices. Our GoodReports tool will be made freely available, allowing these organisations to share it with relevant stakeholders. The GoodReports tool will remove known barriers to using reporting guidelines: the number of reporting guidelines can be intimidating, and choosing the correct reporting guidelines and combining them to use when writing and editing articles can be challenging. The tool will not only help select the correct combination of reporting guidelines, but will also offer examples of good reporting of every item in every included checklist. Journal editors will be empowered to use reporting guidelines more efficiently and effectively in their journals to ensure the quality of their publications. Researchers will be empowered to use reporting guidelines to guide their research articles and plan their research for optimum transparency and clarity. Funders and academic institutions will be empowered to endorse or mandate reporting guidelines, knowing that a tool is in place to help researchers use them correctly. The tool will enhance the knowledge and skills of best reporting practice within public and private organisations, to allow change in organisational culture and behaviours, fostering an atmosphere of openness and collaboration surrounding publication practices.

This research has the potential to influence public policy and contribute to evidence-based policy-making, both directly and indirectly. Healthcare policy is based on the medical literature, so can only be as good as that literature base. By helping researchers to report their studies more fully, the GoodReports tool will help improve the evidence base that policies are based on, and thus the quality of those policies. The GoodReports tool also has potential to affect policies governing research practices more directly. As mentioned in the case for support, there is a growing recognition that research integrity and reproducibility are crucial issues that require governance through policy. Some reporting guidelines have already been endorsed in policy, such as CONSORT for clinical trials. The quality of the entire biomedical research literature, not just clinical trials, can be safeguarded by the widespread endorsement of reporting guidelines more generally, and the GoodReports tool as a vehicle for delivering these guidelines to authors.

Our research team and NDORMS are committed to creating high-quality opportunities for the public and patients to engage with our research, particularly school students who are the potential researchers of tomorrow. We aim to engage the public about the problems caused by poor reporting, building on recent media coverage of reproducibility and waste in biomedical research.