Reporting Checklists, and What a Journal Requires

Which checklist belongs to which study

The mapping is published rather than inferred. PLOS ONE names CONSORT for randomized controlled trials and TREND for non-randomized trials. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses take PRISMA, with the flow diagram and the checklist. Observational studies take STROBE, and Mendelian randomization studies take STROBE-MR with a completed checklist. Diagnostic accuracy studies take STARD, clinical trial protocols take SPIRIT, and animal research is encouraged to follow ARRIVE.¹

Several of those must be supplied as completed documents rather than merely followed. A clinical trial requires the protocol as approved by the ethics committee together with a completed CONSORT checklist. A systematic review requires the PRISMA checklist as supporting information. A protocol requires the SPIRIT checklist as a supporting information file.¹

The STROBE-MR requirement shows what completed means in practice. The checklist must be filled in with the page number and the relevant text.¹

What the checklists actually are

CONSORT describes itself as an evidence-based minimum set of recommendations for reporting the results of randomized trials, built around a thirty-item checklist and a flow diagram displaying the progress of all participants through the trial.²

PRISMA 2020 is a set rather than a single document. It comprises a statement paper describing how the guideline was developed, a checklist of items and sub-items, an expanded version with recommendations, a separate abstract checklist, and template flow diagrams for original and updated reviews.³

Reading those descriptions carefully changes how the requirement feels. Neither is a form, and neither was written to create work. Both are lists of things a report should contain, and the checklist is the record of where each one appears.

Why the page-number column is the real work

A checklist completed with page numbers is a cross-reference table between two documents. Every row asserts that a required element appears at a stated location in the manuscript, and every assertion can be tested.

That makes it checkable in both directions, and it is where the errors are. A row citing a page that no longer contains the item, after a late revision moved it. A row left blank because the item was going to be added. A row citing a section that describes something adjacent rather than the thing named.

Editors Canada places that work inside copy editing, which covers checking for missing information and verifying that supporting elements agree with the text.⁴ Nobody needs the field to run it, and everybody needs it run before submission rather than after.

The abstract is its own problem

PRISMA publishes a separate checklist for abstracts, which exists because the abstract is not simply a shorter version of the paper.³ The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors explains why it matters. Abstracts are the only substantive portion of the article indexed in many electronic databases, and the only portion many readers read.⁵

An abstract that satisfies the main checklist and fails the abstract checklist is a common outcome. The two are usually written at different times by different people, and nobody is asked to reconcile them.

Where an editor stops

An editor does not decide whether a study was conducted as reported, whether a required element is adequately addressed, or which guideline applies to a given design. Those are the authors' determinations, made with their methodologists and, where a guideline is ambiguous, with the journal.

What an editor supplies is the reconciliation. Every checklist row read against the page it cites, every blank flagged, and every disagreement between the manuscript and its own checklist recorded before a reviewer finds it.

Everything a client sends is treated in confidence, including protocols, unpublished data, manuscripts under review, and correspondence with a journal or an ethics committee. We work on journal articles and academic and research documents against whatever the destination publishes.

Authors who complete the checklist while writing rather than afterward generally write a better paper. The rows are a list of things a reader will look for, supplied in advance by the people who studied what readers could not find.