PhD Project: Reporting guidelines in Biomedicine

In 2019 when I joined the DZHW to investigate the roles and functions of review articles in science, I quickly stumbled over the phenomenon called “reporting guidelines” that has become very prominent in the biomedical sciences. In short, reporting guidelines are standards that provide rules and checklists for writing scientific publications.

The reason for these guidelines to exist was a growing unease with how scientists report their findings since the late 1980s. Bad and unclear writing makes it hard for readers to understand the study and allows authors to obfuscate errors and sloppy practices in their research, so the argument by the guideline developers. Beyond values such as objectivity or reliability, reporting guidelines manifest transparency as a new core value in the production of knowledge. But reporting guidelines are not just some zombies from dusty handbooks about good scientific writing. Currently, there are houndreds of these guidelines and some of them have not only accumulated thousands of citations but also became necessary requirements for publishing in major medical journals.

Although modern science was always accompanied by the introduction of new standards, reporting guidelines brought this phenomenon to new heights. While standards traditionally accompany certain new methods or particular research strands, some central reporting guidelines such as PRISMA or CONSORT span almost all disciplines in medical research. This represents an unprecendented level of centralization of epistemic authority and legitimization. Understanding the spread of these standards can unveil the dynamics of how science gets reformed and changes as a whole.

The approach

By focusing on the “Preferred reportig items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses”, the PRISMA statement, I made use of quantitative and also qualitative methods to understand the spread of the guideline and also fully explore the details and nuances of the phenomenon. While qualitative interviews with guideline developers, journal editors and authors who use the guidelines highlight its effects and causes on the day-to-day practices of researchers, bibliometric analyses are used to generalize findings and also find national, disciplinary or other patterns. In order to tackle my research questions, I have used bibliometric data from Web of Science and Scopus, as well as PubMed of which I run an own relational version at home.

My PhD supervisors and promoters at CWTS Leiden are Dr. Wolfgang Kaltenbrunner Prof. Dr. Sarah de Rijcke Prof. Dr. Paul Wouters

Further reading

www.prisma-statement.org www.equator-network.org www.bibliometrie.info

• standardization
• medical research
• PhD project