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

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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.