Ask a clinician to name a reporting guideline and you will hear CONSORT or PRISMA. Both are excellent. Neither applies to the majority of what surgical and clinical journals actually publish.
CONSORT is for randomised controlled trials. PRISMA is for systematic reviews and meta-analyses. If you have written a case report, a case series, a retrospective cohort, a description of a new technique or an economic evaluation, you need a different document — and there is one for each.
Why this matters more than it sounds
A reporting guideline is a checklist of the things a reader needs in order to evaluate your work. It does not tell you how to run a study; it tells you what must be visible in the write-up.
Two practical consequences. First, most journals now require the relevant checklist, and submitting without one invites a request that delays your paper by weeks. Second — the more useful reason — working through the checklist before submission reliably surfaces omissions. The item you cannot point to in your manuscript is almost always something you meant to include and did not.
Find yours
| What you did | Guideline |
|---|---|
| Single patient case report | CARE |
| Surgical case report | SCARE |
| Surgical case series | PROCESS |
| Surgical cohort, cross-sectional or case-control study | STROCSS |
| Observational study (cohort, case-control, cross-sectional) | STROBE |
| Study using routinely collected health data | RECORD (a STROBE extension) |
| Randomised controlled trial | CONSORT |
| Trial protocol | SPIRIT |
| Systematic review or meta-analysis | PRISMA |
| Scoping review | PRISMA-ScR |
| Diagnostic or prognostic accuracy study | STARD |
| Prediction model development or validation | TRIPOD |
| Health economic evaluation | CHEERS |
| Quality improvement project | SQUIRE |
| Qualitative research | COREQ or SRQR |
| Animal research | ARRIVE |
| Surgical innovation and technique development | IDEAL framework |
All of these are catalogued by the EQUATOR Network, which is where you should go rather than relying on a table in a blog post — including this one. Guidelines are revised, and EQUATOR always carries the current version.
The surgical family, in more detail
SCARE — surgical case reports
Built on CARE but adapted for surgery, where the operative detail is the scientific content. It presses on the things surgical readers need and generic guidelines miss: a clear operative description, the surgeon's relevant experience where it bears on the outcome, the technique used and why it was chosen over alternatives, and structured follow-up with a defined endpoint.
The most common SCARE failure is an operative description written as narrative rather than as method. Another surgeon should be able to read your Methods and understand exactly what you did — approach, instruments, key steps, closure — closely enough to attempt it.
PROCESS — surgical case series
The guideline authors most often need and fewest have heard of. A case series is not a long case report; it makes a claim about a group, and that claim depends entirely on how the group was assembled.
PROCESS therefore focuses on selection: were the cases consecutive or selected, over what period, at how many centres, with what inclusion and exclusion criteria, and how many eligible patients were left out. A series of "our twelve best outcomes" is a different scientific object from "all twenty-nine consecutive patients", and readers cannot tell which they are looking at unless you say.
STROCSS — surgical observational studies
For surgical cohort, cross-sectional and case-control studies. It extends STROBE with the surgical variables that determine whether results transfer: surgeon volume and experience, learning curve position, centre type, standardisation of technique across operators, and perioperative care pathways. Two units performing "the same" operation may differ in ways that matter more than the intervention.
IDEAL — surgical innovation
Not a checklist but a framework, describing the stages a surgical innovation passes through: Idea, Development, Exploration, Assessment, and Long-term study. Its value is in preventing overclaiming. A first-in-human technique is an Idea-stage report, and presenting it with the confidence of an Assessment-stage trial is the characteristic error in surgical innovation writing. Naming your stage is a form of honesty that reviewers notice.
CHEERS — economic evaluations
If your paper contains a cost-effectiveness claim, CHEERS applies. It requires the perspective of the analysis, the time horizon, the discount rate, the currency and price year, how costs and outcomes were valued, the model structure, and sensitivity analyses. Cost claims made without these are uninterpretable — a "cost saving" means nothing until the reader knows whose costs, over what period, in which year's money.
How to use a checklist properly
The failure mode is completing it at the end as an administrative exercise. Three better habits:
- Read the guideline before you write. It is a de facto outline. Writing to it is faster than retrofitting to it.
- Complete it against page and line numbers. Most journals require this. It also forces genuine verification — you cannot record a line number for something you did not write.
- Where an item does not apply, say so and why. "Not applicable — single-centre study, no randomisation" is a legitimate entry. A blank is not.
State it in the manuscript
One sentence in Methods:
This case series is reported in line with the PROCESS guideline.
Or:
This study was conducted and reported in accordance with the STROCSS criteria.
Reviewers look for this sentence, and its absence is read as a signal about the rest of the paper.
What guidelines cannot do
They cannot rescue a study that was not designed to answer the question. A perfectly reported underpowered series is still an underpowered series — the checklist simply makes that visible instead of letting it hide behind confident prose.
That visibility is the point. Reporting guidelines exist so readers can see what was actually done and judge it themselves, rather than taking the authors' summary on trust. Used before writing rather than after, they also make the paper easier to write, because most of the structural decisions have already been made for you.
Our expectations for each article type are on the Author Guidelines and Types of Articles We Publish pages. See also our guide to CONSORT, PRISMA and STROBE, and to writing a case report with CARE.