Successful publishing: The use of reporting guidelines

Last year, Physiotherapy Research International (PRI) published an editorial on the importance of the peer-review process for academic journals and the opportunities that quality, timely reviews produce for publishers and reviewers (Louw & Grimmer, 2016). This article highlighted the common difficulties reported by editors in recruiting willing reviewers who can deliver quality, timely reviews, and outlined many reasons why potential reviewers decline to undertake a peer-review invitation. One common constraint is reviewers' lack of time to undertake the review within the (often) short turnaround timeframes.

This editorial proposes that if authors of scientific papers made use of reporting guidelines and/ or protocol registries when conceiving their research and writing their research reports, this would ensure that, whatever the research design, the reported methods and results sections would be standarized, comprehensive, and well structured...