Reporting Guidelines Make It Easy

Getting ready to submit to a research journal? Make sure you include the right reporting guideline!

I used to process submissions for several research journals to make sure they met submission requirements—and I had to suspend almost half of the incoming submissions because they didn’t include a reporting guideline.

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends that journals ask authors to follow reporting guidelines when writing their research, and now more and more journals are updating their author guidelines to follow their example. Luckily, it’s pretty easy to find the right guideline for your type of research. I would direct authors to the EQUATOR Network site, which has a handy flowchart designed for just that.

The EQUATOR Reporting Guideline Decision Tree is freely accessible and available for download from the EQUATOR site.

Most reporting guidelines also have an accompanying checklist to make it easy for authors to verify their research fulfills best practice and transparency—so don’t forget to fill out that checklist before submitting! If the right checklist is included with a submission but not completed (typically by indicating the page or line number of the manuscript where the relevant information can be found), then it will still have to be suspended by the editorial office before it goes to the editor-in-chief or peer review. It’s frustrating to get a submission sent back, and I don’t want that to happen to you.

If you want some help making sure your submission matches journal guidelines—or if you want to increase its chances of acceptance with a solid English-language edit—visit my Services page!