Reporting Guidelines
STREGA, STROBE, STARD, SQUIRE, MOOSE, PRISMA, GNOSIS, TREND, ORION, COREQ, QUOROM, REMARK… and CONSORT: for whom does the guideline toll?

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Aims of publication guidelines: diverse views

What exactly should this universal upholding of guidelines aim at? There are starkly divergent views about the role of publication guidelines and who needs them. One view is that the guidelines are mainly intended to help authors, and in particular, the less experienced younger authors to avoid major trouble by commission or omission, and to write clearer papers. Indeed, the strongest praise that I have received about the STROBE (Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in

Different journal policies

If one subscribes to the maximalist view, the next question is who should guard adherence to the guidelines. Journal editors seem to agree that it is undoable for them to check all guidelines. First, because of the practical burden; and second, because checking demands rather profound statistical and methodologic knowledge. Editors of medical journals often have other strengths (such as a degree in biochemistry or a background in clinical oncology) and other duties (steering the peer-review

How to proceed

The demand for checked guidelines for manuscripts on submission has led to fears of “stifling of creativity” in the epidemiologic community. These concerns should not be dismissed too easily. For example, the case-specular control group was invented for studies of power wires and electromagnetic fields, as the distance from the power line of the house where the case lived would be switched across the center of the street [13]. Authors of a study with an imaginative control group might find

Acknowledgment

I want to acknowledge the critical remarks made by Dr. Erik von Elm on a previous draft of the manuscript.

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