Standards for Reporting Research Results

This issue of Health Education & Behavior (HE&B) includes two articles—one a Perspective and the other a full-length original report—on standards and practices for reporting research results. In the first, McLeroy, Garney, Mayo-Wilson, and Grant (2016) review the rationale underlying adoption of reporting standards for randomized controlled trials, nonrandomized designs, systematic reviews, qualitative research, and social and psychological interventions. In the second, Barry et al. (2016) examine the reporting of effect sizes in six health education and behavior journals, including HE&B, and argue for increased reporting of effect sizes to better facilitate meta-analyses and syntheses of research findings across studies. In response to a presentation and lively discussion of reporting standards at the 2014 HE&B Annual Editorial Board Meeting, HE&B (“Instructions for Authors,” 2016) announced at the outset that it had revised its author instructions and submission guidelines to include new reporting standards (Allegrante, 2016). The new instructions stated that authors should adhere to reporting standards, including those of CONSORT (Begg et al., 1996; Boutron et al., 2008; Rennie, 2001; Schulz, Altman, & Moher, 2010), TREND (Des Jarlais, Lyles, Crepaz, & the TREND Group, 2004; Vlahov, 2004), PRISMA (Moher, Liberati, Tetzlaff, Altman, & PRISMA Group, 2009; Shamseer et al., 2015), TIDierR (Hoffmann et al., 2014), and the National Institutes of Health Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research Best Practices for Mixed Research Methods (Office of Behavioral and Social Science Research, 2010). We have not yet set in place mandatory guideline adherence, and as of now, we are not strictly requiring authors to submit reporting checklists, flow diagrams, or clinical trial registration. However, the two articles in this issue have stimulated us to reflect further on the importance of reporting standards and on our next steps for improved reporting of research results in HE&B. As outlined by McLeroy et al. (2016), the arguments for transparency in reporting are compelling, particularly the need to assess comparability across studies to allow for inclusion in systematic reviews and meta-analyses that facilitate identification of evidence-based practice, interventions, and strategies (Flay et al., 2005; Gottfredson et al., 2015). Cochrane reviews (Higgins & Green, 2011), the Community Preventive Services Task Force (2016; Briss et al., 2000; Zaza et al., 2000), and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (Harris et al., 2001; U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, 2016) all encourage such transparency and detailed reporting of results to aid in the development of their respective reviews and in the formulation of task force recommendations that inform practice. Such transparency, however, requires uniform consistency in reporting details, including the documentation of effect sizes. In deciding whether HE&B should require strict adherence to these guidelines, we considered current practices in the major health education and behavior journals. In their review of articles reporting quantitative results published during a 4-year period from 2010 to 2013, Barry et al. (2016) found that fewer than half of the articles published in six major journals reported an effect size. They suggest that perhaps health education and behavior researchers are not adequately prepared to compute and report effect sizes, although they acknowledge that this problem persists across disciplines and in both highand lower-impact journals. In our own cursory review of author guidelines for the six health education and behavior journals, we found that none of them—except HE&B—mention reporting guidelines, and none require clinical trial registration or reporting of effect sizes. Why? Perhaps we are not paying enough attention to the guidelines in our training programs or maybe there is low adoption among editors, editorial board members, and researchers who received their research training prior to emergence of these guidelines. Lack of enforcement during the manuscript submission and review process likely also contributes to lower reporting quality. Just as importantly, our reporting practices may reflect the high premium we place on factors other than, or in 668519 HEBXXX10.1177/1090198116668519Health Education & BehaviorKegler and Allegrante editorial2016