How to write a great research paper?

When published, your article will start a new independent life. It will be read and critically appraised, and it may contribute to systematic reviews, inform clinical guidelines, and influence clinical practice.

Before you submit your paper to a journal, you need to consider whether the article will achieve its purpose:

• Will a Cochrane reviewer be able to scrutinise your study’s methods to assess the risk of bias?
• Would another researcher be able to replicate your experiment?
• Can numerical results be extracted from your paper easily?
• Have you provided enough detail about your intervention to allow its use in clinical practice?

The resources in this toolkit will help you achieve a long and useful life for your article by reporting it in the best way possible.

• Find the right reporting guideline with the EQUATOR wizard
• Browse the EQUATOR library of reporting guidelines
• Read chapters from our textbook explaining why reporting guidelines are helpful
• Look at examples of good reporting
• Using COBWEB, an online tool for writing randomised controlled trial reports
• Read a “How to…” article on reporting medical research
• Use an annotated journal article from Authoraid as inspiration
• Follow the ICJME recommendations
• Professional medical writing support
• General guidance on scientific writing

One of the first hurdles to get over when writing up a research plan or reporting the results of your study is finding the appropriate reporting guideline. We have developed a prototype decision tree and the EQUATOR wizard (available at www.goodreports.org)  to help you choose the right reporting guideline for your work. This wizard only includes common reporting guidelines for generic study types and does not include most guideline extensions.

The EQUATOR wizard may not find a common reporting guideline for your study. You might also want to supplement a common reporting guideline with any specific guidance for your clinical area or study type. After using the wizard, we suggest visiting the EQUATOR Library for Reporting Guidelines.

The Library is a searchable database of all reporting guidelines. Use the drop-down menus to see all of the reporting guidelines and extensions for a study type. You can also search for guidelines written specifically for certain clinical specialties or sections of the research paper with these drop-down menus. The free-text search lets you search guidelines’ titles, associated keywords, and the bibliographic details of any related papers.

The EQUATOR team recently edited a textbook called Guidelines for Reporting Health Research: A User’s Manual. It explains why we need standardised reporting of important details in health research publications and how to use reporting guidelines. It also has chapters on the guidelines most commonly required by journals. You can read some sample chapters here:

• Chapter 1: Importance of transparent reporting of health research
• Chapter 4: Using reporting guidelines effectively to ensure good reporting of health research
• Chapter 5: Ambiguities and confusions between reporting and conduct
• Chapter 17: STROBE (STrengthening the Reporting of Observational studies in Epidemiology)

You can read more about the textbook here.

Once you have the right reporting guideline and know what items to report, it’s always a good idea to look at good examples for inspiration. Several guideline development groups have published articles with examples of good reporting for each item on their checklist.

Find examples of good reporting in:

• Randomised trials, including trials of non-pharmacological interventions
• Observational studies
• Trial abstracts (a selection of worked examples of using CONSORT for abstracts is here)
• Systematic reviews and protocols for systematic reviews
• Diagnostic accuracy studies
• Prediction modelling studies
• Quality improvement studies
• Trial protocols

COBWEB is an online writing tool for authors to use when writing up the results of a randomised controlled trial. It consists of a series of text boxes for each CONSORT item, prompting you to describe every detail of your study. Once you have filled in all of the relevant text boxes, COBWEB creates a formatted Word document for you to edit and continue working on.

COBWEB can be accessed at http://cochrane.fr/cobweb/. When the site prompts you to ‘choose an ID’, you can create any username to log in.

We interviewed Isabelle Boutron, one of the creators of COBWEB. Read her explanation of how COBWEB was developed and tested here.

An essential “How to…” article published in The International Journal of Clinical Practice by EQUATOR’s Iveta Simera and Doug Altman on scientific writing and the key principles of responsible research reporting.

This resource on the Authoraid website presents a journal article from PLoS ONE with annotated comments on aspects of the scientific writing.

Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals (ICMJE Recommendations) are produced by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. They are intended primarily for use by authors who submit their work for publication to ICMJE member journals, although many non-ICMJE journals recommend their use.

The EQUATOR Library has an additional page of useful resources for both medical writers and those seeking professional support, including the writing and publication of industry-sponsored research. The resources includes the latest Good Publication Practice for Communicating Company-Sponsored Medical Research: GPP3 Guidelines and the Joint Statement from AMWA, EMWA and ISMPP on the important role of professional medical writers.

We have compiled a collection of guides, books, courses, presentations and other resources designed to help you with the planning, style, structure and composition of your research articles.  The publisher BioMed Central has also produced a set of resources on writing and publishing a scientific article.

This article is for Author benefits

https://www.equator-network.org/toolkits/writing-research/