Endorsing Reporting Guidelines: the Journal of Infection Prevention helps show the way!

Visit the Journal’s instructions to authors page and you will find a brief and concise request to use reporting guidelines to prepare, structure and report their work, selecting as appropriate, from PRISMA (www.prisma-statement.org) for systematic reviews, CONSORT (www.consort-statement.org) for randomised controlled trials, STROBE (www.strobe-statement) for observational epidemiological studies, and ORION (www.idrn.org/orion.php) for outbreak reports or infection prevention and control (IPC) intervention studies for nosocomial infection. In addition, for work that has been undertaken to improve the quality, safety and value of healthcare and used methods to establish that observed outcomes were due to the intervention there are SQUIRE (www.squire-statement.org) guidelines for reporting quality improvement. Although these are likely to be the most relevant reporting guidelines for papers dealing with infection control the page also draws attention to the EQUATOR Network’s database of reporting guidelines and to NLM’s Research Reporting Guidelines and Initiatives for other research designs ‘in order to ensure high quality reporting of studies’. Why has the journal decided to do this now? First, there is a general concern from editors of high profile general medical journals that the quality and transparency of reporting has to improve in order to encourage better research (The PLOS Medicine Editors, 2013) and enable clinicians to replicate effective interventions (Hoffman et al., 2014). This has driven development of consensus derived reporting guidelines, usually published after consultation with specialist societies and critical academic review. The EQUATOR network (www.equator-network. org) was launched a few years ago to promote transparent and accurate reporting, and includes a comprehensive online database of such guidelines. Editors of specialist journals have joined in the call to use these. In Rehabilitation Medicine, for example, the editors of 38 journals all agreed to require adherence of submissions to guidelines relevant to their field (Chan et al., 2014). Similar statements have been made in dermatology (Anon, 2015; Anstey et al., 2015), surgical (Agha et al., 2016; Roisin, 2016), anaesthetic (Stevanovic et al., 2015) and public health journals, such as BMC Public Health (BMC Public Health, 2016). Second, there has been a general move within the IPC field to encourage use of reporting guidelines, with supportive reviews (Larson and Cortazal, 2012; Pires Maciel et al., 2014; Wolkewitz et al., 2014) and editorials (Gastmeier, 2007; McConnell and Johnson, 2007; Struelens, 2007). American and European international, and national, conferences have incorporated the CONSORT, STROBE and ORION guideline abstract tools into their abstract submission processes and hosted interactive workshops on how to use them. Authors of IPC studies have been using these guidelines with, for example, 14 studies in IPC journals in the last year using the ORION guidelines either to describe their study or carry out reviews of the IPC literature. Over the same period, the STROBE guideline, published the same year as ORION, has been used in 21 papers across fields as varied as general surgery, physiotherapy, nephrology and genetic studies. About a year ago, 18 European and American infection control specialists and academics wrote to journals with a special interest in IPC encouraging them to endorse CONSORT, PRISMA, ORION and STROBE (including its extension STROME-ID for molecular epidemiological studies). Recently added to the EQUATOR site is a welcome tool (STROBE-AMS) to inform the field of antimicrobial prescribing (Tacconnelli et al., 2016). All but three of these journals agreed to endorse these guidelines and all agreed to take part in an evaluation of the effects of endorsement on transparency and quality of reporting. Although some journals already had links to some of these guidelines Endorsing Reporting Guidelines: the Journal of Infection Prevention helps show the way!