The new ACCORD reporting guideline will help the medical and scientific community to improve the completeness and transparency of research involving consensus methods. The guideline was published today in the open access journal PLOS Medicine.
In biomedical research, consensus is often sought among individuals with different views and experiences when developing clinical recommendations, setting priorities and making policy decisions. Consensus research is particularly important when evidence is newly emerging, limited, inconsistent, absent or when it changes.
ACCORD (ACcurate COnsensus Reporting Document) offers a new framework for reporting research involving consensus methods, helping to address the historical problems of poor and incomplete reporting. The ACCORD guideline will help researchers to report the key information needed to allow readers to understand the methods used, to interpret the results critically and to apply them appropriately.
The new reporting guideline was developed to be the first to be applicable across all consensus methodologies. Publication professionals were instrumental in initiating and publishing the ACCORD reporting guideline that will be used widely within biomedicine and, potentially, beyond.
“As with other reporting guidelines, such as CONSORT and PRISMA, ACCORD will help researchers to report the key information needed to allow readers to understand the methods used in a study, to interpret the results critically and to apply them appropriately. We hope to see journal editors and publishers including or signposting ACCORD in their instructions for authors, and publication professionals using it when writing up studies that use Delphi and other consensus-based approaches,” said
Niall Harrison, Senior Scientific Director at OPEN Heath, who helped to develop ACCORD.
Read more about how ACCORD aims to enhance trust in consensus-based research in our article.
Abbreviations:
ACCORD, ACcurate COnsensus Reporting Document
CONSORT, Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials
PRISMA, Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis
