Grant: Planning Grants

Since the early 1990s research groups have developed reporting guidelines as tools to help improve the quality of reporting of health research articles. A reporting guideline is a checklist, flow diagram, or explicit text to guide authors in reporting a specific type of research, developed using explicit methodology. A recent systematic review (funded by CIHR) identified 81 reporting guidelines for reporting various types of health research. However, the review also reported that due to poor reporting of the guideline development process, the specific methods followed and the appropriateness of those methods are unclear. These results suggest that journal editors, funders, and authors using and promoting reporting guidelines should carefully assess the process by which they are developed and be cautious in choosing which ones they endorse. The development of a knowledge exchange tool to gauge the development process of reporting guidelines will facilitate various stakeholders in assessing the robustness of reporting guidelines. The objectives of the planning meeting are: to map out a research program to develop and validate an instrument to assess the adequacy of how reporting guidelines are developed; and to develop a work plan for a comprehensive research grant application to the Canadian Institutes of Health Research to fund the instrument's development. I have invited 12 experts to participate in the planning meeting. All of them have agreed to participate. These experts constitute diverse stakeholder groups necessary to successfully plan a comprehensive research program to develop an instrument to gauge the development process of reporting guidelines. The planning meeting deliverables include: a clearly defined road map to develop a valid and reliable tool to gauge the process of how reporting guidelines were developed. The road map will also include a knowledge translation component; and a comprehensive research application to CIHR.