A better way to report research

A manuscript is months into peer review when the decision letter arrives. One reviewer has a simple question: How were participants excluded from the analysis? Another wants more information about how participants were randomized, and a third asks what specific instrument was used to measure an outcome. The study may be sound, but the paper lacks information needed to evaluate it. The result: another round of revisions, delays, and frustration.

For many researchers, reporting guidelines are the difference between a smooth review process and a lengthy exchange of questions that could have been addressed from the start. These structured checklists help researchers identify the essential information to include in a paper—from how participants were recruited to how data were analyzed. By ensuring key details are not left out, these standards make research easier for reviewers to evaluate and for other scientists to replicate and build on.

Common guidelines for psychologists include the Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS)—which were developed by APA for psychological research—PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses), CONSORT (CONsolidated Standards of Reporting Trials), and TIDieRopens in new window (Template for Intervention Description and Replication). Publications that follow these recommendations also make it easier for practitioners, educators, and policymakers who are interested in applying interventions to help patients, students, and the public.

While researchers can view these frameworks as a bureaucratic exercise that threatens autonomy, psychologists who have been involved in developing reporting recommendations suggest that in the long run the checklists are beneficial. “By helping me think through the different things I will need to report, they have helped me write better papers and more effectively plan studies,” said Sean Grant, PhD, lead author of a reporting guideline for CONSORT-Social and Psychological Interventions (SPI) 2018 (Trials, Vol. 19, No. 406, 2018opens in new window). “It’s like having a checklist and user’s manual for reporting research. And over time, I have internalized the standards, so I apply them naturally when I am reporting studies.”

Reporting standards from PRISMA-Scoping Reviewsopens in new window helped Grant’s team communicate findings more clearly to the public through interactive online dashboardsopens in new window, policy briefs, and press releases. He suspects this was one reason their work on the 4-day school week was recently covered in outlets such as Education Week. “The reporting guidelines made us do a better job of providing all the information about what we did in the scoping review,” Grant said. “It gave us more confidence in making claims and disseminating this work because we knew the information was comprehensive.”

Detailed reporting about the population, context, intervention, and comparison condition allows policymakers to better discern whether findings will apply to the people they serve. “A policymaker’s real question isn’t Did this work somewhere? but will it work here?” said Grant.

Reporting standards started gaining prominence in the mid-1990s as researchers and journal editors recognized that publications often lacked information about how studies were conducted and analyzed because there were few recommendations for reporting research. CONSORT was the first widely adopted guidance for randomized controlled trials, and since then numerous reporting guidelines have been developed. While researchers are increasingly using these frameworks, evidence suggests that reporting practices are still inconsistent (Lawson, D. O., et al., Trials, Vol. 23, No. 671, 2022opens in new window; Murphy, S. L., et al., Royal Society Open Science, Vol. 12, No. 3, 2025opens in new window). “Very few research-performing organizations teach or require training on how to report research,” said David Moher, PhD, senior scientist for methodological and implementation research at the Ottawa Hospital Research Institute in Canada. “Most researchers celebrate the funding they receive rather than focusing on how the studies are reported, which influences whether it can be used by others to improve care for patients.”

Interest in using reporting guidelines is likely to increase, though, as experts develop automated tools that quickly verify adherence to standards. One such tool is Metacheckopens in new window, which scans a manuscript to check a variety of details, including whether it reports a power analysis—a statistical calculation used to determine how many participants a study needs to have a good chance of detecting an effect.

“For a long time, it has not been possible to check the implementation of reporting standards at scale,” said psychologist Katie Corker, PhD, executive director of ASAPbio (Accelerating Science and Publication in Biology), a researcher-led nonprofit organization focused on making scientific communication more open and transparent. “But AI tools will make it easier for journal editors to enforce the standards and notify researchers when they are out of compliance.”

While the numerous options for guidelines may seem overwhelming, experts agree that study design strongly suggests which ones to use. If the paper is a systematic review or a meta-analysis, researchers typically utilize JARS–Quant (JARS for Quantitative Research Design) or PRISMA, which were developed for reporting how studies were identified, screened, selected, and synthesized; for qualitative meta-analyses, JARS–Qual offers a parallel standard. If the paper is original research—such as an experiment, survey, observational study, qualitative study, or mixed-methods project—researchers often use one of the other JARS guidelines. Researchers often turn to CONSORT-SPI when they are reporting a randomized clinical trial of a social or psychological intervention because the guideline helps authors provide details about how participants were assigned to conditions, how the intervention was delivered, and how outcomes were measured. More broadly, JARS–Quant also includes guidance for reporting clinical trials and studies with random assignment.

The JARS–Quant guidelines, which were originally developed in 2008 and updated in 2018, were designed for psychology researchers who collect data in numerical form and report them through statistical analysis. The tool includes a decision flowchart to help investigators select which table to use based on whether the study involved experimental manipulation, whether it was conducted on a single individual (N=1), and whether the researcher used random assignment to place participants in conditions. If a study utilizes experimental manipulation, for example, JARS–Quant directs the researcher to a table listing information to include in the method, results, and discussion section. The method should provide details about comparison conditions—how and when the experimental manipulations were actually administered—including a summary of the instructions. “These checklists force good science and transparency,” said Arthur Nezu, PhD, who was a member of APA’s JARS–Quant Working Group. “You can’t duplicate Grandma’s pumpkin pie recipe if you only get half the recipe.”

In developing these guidelines, Nezu advocated to include an item guiding researchers to report all important adverse events or side effects in each experimental condition. “It is critical to provide as much information as possible because the negative outcomes may affect the likelihood that people will benefit from an intervention,” said Nezu, a distinguished professor emeritus of psychological and brain sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Adverse outcomes could include the number of people who dropped out of the study or whose symptoms worsened.

To ensure he captures adverse events, Nezu has his participants complete a program evaluation asking them to rate numerous aspects of the experience: the handouts, the cost in terms of time, the effects on other people, the building, the environment, and more. “The intervention itself may be good, but if the temperature in the room is too hot and people cannot pay attention, for example, then this can affect the impact,” he said. “We need to provide as much information as possible to practitioners or others who may want to try the intervention.”

Researchers may also use more than one guideline when the recommendations serve complementary purposes, explained Grant. For example, someone who is publishing a case study of a new intervention might refer to APA’s JARS–Quant for reporting study rationale, participant characteristics, outcome measures, and analytic approach. The researchers might also use TIDieR because it provides more detail on how to describe the intervention itself, such as what materials were used, how many sessions were provided, and how fidelity was assessed.

JARS–Qual (JARS for Qualitative Research Design) is one of the primary guidelines available to help report qualitative research findings clearly. Heidi Levitt, PhD, chair of the JARS–Qual Working Group in 2018, was eager to develop this type of standard, given the frequent problematic feedback she and her colleagues had received from journal reviewers on their qualitative studies. “They were asking for inappropriate things like hypotheses and statistics that are typical for a quantitative study,” said Levitt, a professor in the psychology department at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “Sometimes our studies would be rejected for reasons that made no sense or were not reviewed at all, and this greatly concerned me.”

She approached leaders at the Society for Qualitative Inquiry in Psychology (SQIP)—a section of Division 5 (Quantitative and Qualitative Methods)—about this dilemma, and the organization invited her to chair a task force that developed the SQIP recommendations for reviewing and designing qualitative research (Qualitative Psychology, Vol. 4, No. 1, 2017). When the group presented their recommendations to APA leadership and at APA and SQIP conferences, the response was positive.

“Initially, there was a question in the research community about whether it was feasible to develop qualitative guidelines, but the people who were skeptics became supporters after our presentations,” Levitt said. She was invited to chair the APA task force to develop JARS–Qual, and the group published these standards in the American Psychologist in 2018 (Vol. 73, No. 1). That year, the article was the most downloaded article across all 91 APA journals.

The JARS–Qual checklist of items to include in a manuscript differs from quantitative checklists. For instance, researchers are expected to describe how they managed their perspectives and expectations within the research endeavor. This includes critically reflecting on how their own background, assumptions, relationships, and experiences influence the questions they asked, their decisions about data collection, and their development of findings. For example, cisgender, heterosexual researchers studying LGBTQ+ students’ experiences of higher education might not be aware of how the current political landscape is influencing learning. To address this limitation, researchers might read about this impact, talk to LGBTQ+ consultants, and seek feedback on findings to improve the questions they ask and the methodological integrity of their analysis. “If you do not deliberately consider how your perspective influences your methods, you might inadvertently limit the types of questions that you ask and miss seeing patterns in your findings,” explained Levitt.

Levitt, outgoing editor of Qualitative Psychology, believes that reporting standards are increasing the understanding and recognition of qualitative research. Last year, the journal’s 5-year impact factor, a metric rating articles published between 2019 and 2023 that were cited in 2024, was 8.9, a statistic showing that, on average, each paper in the journal was cited in other publications about 9 times in that span. This year, for content published between 2020 and 2024 that was cited in 2025, the 5-year impact factor was one of the highest among APA journals at 11.6, with articles having been cited on average even more frequently over the past 5 years.

Increased attention to racial equity prompted APA to gather a working group to develop standards for reporting race, ethnicity, and culture in journal articles, JARS–REC (JARS for Race, Ethnicity, and Culture). One purpose of these guidelines is to help researchers avoid the deficit model—focusing on “problems” when developing research questions related to people of color.

JARS–REC also provides guidelines for more equitable evaluation of study designs. Historically, reviewers often required study designs that used white Americans as a comparison group with people of color regardless of the research question. “This assumes Western culture has a more advanced functional model, but we should avoid this type of implicit or explicit bias,” said Mo Wang, PhD, associate dean for research and strategic initiatives in the Warrington College of Business at the University of Florida and cochair of the JARS–REC Working Group.

The recommendations also include a section on generalizability to help researchers identify and justify the target populations for the study’s finding. “If the study is about depression in Chinese people, in the past researchers were expected to discuss that the findings did not apply in a Western context, but this is not necessary,” Wang said. To address this issue, the JARS–REC states the following: “Recognize that generalizability is always constrained and is not the primary purpose of every study; all studies have a socio-historical-cultural context.”

Professors who teach research-related courses are also seeing dramatic benefits for students who learn to use reporting guidelines to analyze publications and design their own studies. “I’ve ruined research for my students because they start to understand that they can’t take findings at face value,” said L.A. Stretch, PhD, a professor at the University of the Cumberlands in Kentucky who teaches her students to use JARS. “They learn to become research detectives by critiquing what was done well, what was missing, and what should have been done.” By referring to the JARS checklists, students can identify when data do not support the implications or discussion, or if a portion of the participants are not reported in the results. Students in her class, for example, have read an article in which authors reported a statistically significant relationship between counseling students’ wellness scores and their self-reported counseling self-efficacy. “But the data did not show that wellness training causes higher competence or that the students’ counseling skills improved,” Stretch said.

Stretch also teaches graduate students to use JARS when they are starting their dissertation. The framework helps them think critically about their theoretical orientation, procedures, recruitment of participants, data collection, and analysis. The guidelines also help junior faculty convert dissertations into papers that can be published. “It’s hard to know how to condense dissertations that are 150 pages or longer into a 20- to 30-page article, and the guideline helps new faculty extract what they need,” she said.

Although Stretch has incorporated JARS into her curriculum since she initially heard about the guidelines in 2021, she is among a minority of professors who are teaching students about reporting guidelines. Stretch and other advocates suspect that lack of awareness about these tools is one of the hurdles preventing more widespread use. “I get excited about teaching graduate students about these guidelines,” she said. “If we can train the next generation of educators to use them, I believe we will see far-reaching changes in how research is reported and implemented to improve health.”