Reports by study design

Journal research reports need details specific to the study they describe so readers can assess their conduct, findings and limitations. The parts divide by study design or kind of investigation, covering the reporting requirements and guidelines for each. General manuscript structure, choosing and applying reporting guidelines, selecting a study design, narrative review articles and regulatory clinical study reports belong to neighbouring concerns.

• Randomized trial reports — the trial manuscript and its CONSORT reporting, including the cluster and pragmatic variants
• Nonrandomized intervention reports — reporting an intervention that was not randomly assigned, and the competing explanations that follow from that
• Observational study reports — cohort, case-control, cross-sectional, registry and routinely collected-data reports, with interpretation bounded by the design
• Systematic reviews and meta-analyses — the explicit search, selection and synthesis a reader can reproduce, and when to pool results in a meta-analysis
• Diagnostic-accuracy reports — reporting an index test against a reference standard, and the clinical role the test is meant to fill
• Prediction-model reports — reporting the development, the validation or the updating of a clinical prediction model
• Case reports — writing up a single clinical observation, including case series and the veterinary form
• Qualitative study reports — making the path from interviews or focus groups to an interpretation inspectable
• Quality-improvement reports — explaining a local care problem, the change made against it, and what another site can reuse
• Outbreak and infection-control reports — reporting an outbreak and its control measures on a timeline a reader can follow
• Genetic study reports — reporting a genetic association, immunogenomic or genetic risk-prediction study under STREGA, STREIS or GRIPS, with the nomenclature, laboratory and genotyping detail each asks for
• Molecular epidemiology reports — the specimen handling and assay detail an observational report needs once biological material is measured
• Animal-study reports — reporting a preclinical animal experiment: why it has guidelines of its own, what the report contains, and the animal, housing and test details most often left out
• Plant in vitro culture reports — reporting the production of bioactive compounds in plant cell, tissue or organ culture: the botanical name, the culture and its conditions, the bioreactor and the analysis