Methodological Reporting Checklists to Promote Transparency and Reproducibility in Brain Studies

Описание: My Way or the Highway: Methodological Reporting Checklists to Promote Transparency and Reproducibility in Brain Studies, Do they help or add burden and suppress innovation?

There is an ongoing discussion among researchers, the open science community, funding and regulatory agencies, and journal editors on the necessity or effectiveness of reporting checklists to improve transparency, repeatability/reproducibility (repeating the same methods to test replicability of the results) and data sharing opportunities. There is a concern that endorsing methodological checklists developed by a group of researchers will push the field to one way of doing research and suppress innovation or diversity within the research methodologies. Meanwhile, lack of precise reporting of methodological details in publications is very frequent as tested in multiple studies.
In this study group, we open up an opportunity for a discussion among researchers involved in developing reporting checklists, editors of major journals in the field, and regulatory and granting agencies on the potentials and threats of developing, using, encouraging and endorsing checklists. We will also discuss the best practices to develop methodological checklists to be dynamically updated with a democratized and rigorous scientific methodology. Monitoring adherence to the checklist in upcoming publications via live systematic reviews and the pros and cons of using reporting checklists to design upcoming studies will be discussed.

Main Questions:
1. What are the differences between reporting checklists, methodological checklists, pre-registration, standard operating procedures, protocol guidelines and research standards?
2. What are the standards for developing a methodological reporting checklist to be inclusive, diverse and democratic?
3. How to measure the impact of a checklist to increase transparency, repeatability/reproducibility and data sharing opportunities over time after its publication?
4. How to avoid prescriptive, top down, rigid and non-dynamic guidelines and risks for suppression of the innovations and divergent thinking?
5. Why and how journal editors and granting agencies should encourage adherence to checklists in publications and grant submissions?

These are the 10 main items we discussed during the symposiums:
There is a need for new methodological reporting checklists in brain and mental health research to increase transparency and repeatability.
These checklists should include the minimum list of items that should be reported to make the method repeatable by others, not the maximum list. Checklists can have additional non mandatory recommendations as supplements to increase the quality of research reports.
These methodological reporting checklists should be designed in a transparent, rigorous, bottom up and inclusive process.
There should be a process to measure and monitor adherence to these checklists and keep them updated.
The list of checklists that pass these quality standards will be available in a portal (potentially EQUATOR or a new one) and journals should refer new submissions to the portal to find if there is any endorsed checklist available for their field of work.
Key stakeholders in the field should agree on the quality standards of the reporting checklists. This can be done with developing a checklist for methodological reporting checklists.
There should be educational resources available on how to develop a checklist and how to adhere to the available checklists to make sure researchers and journal editors around the world will have access to these resources to make them a global culture of research
There is a growing interest in digitization and automation in the process of checklist compliance and we need to actively explore potentials to make the process less burdensome.
The checklists can eventually be linked to data sharing portals and provide methodological data necessary for further mega analysis and synthesis
Sustainable fundings to support this initiative to promote checklist development and adherence should be pursued.