STROBE-MR: Guidelines for strengthening the reporting of Mendelian randomization studies
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Genomics, Epidemiology, Public Health
- Keywords
- reporting guidelines, mendelian randomization, STROBE-MR
- Copyright
- © 2019 Davey Smith et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2019. STROBE-MR: Guidelines for strengthening the reporting of Mendelian randomization studies. PeerJ Preprints 7:e27857v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27857v1
Abstract
While the number of studies using Mendelian randomization (MR) methods has grown exponentially in the last decade, the quality of reporting of these studies often has been poor. Similar to other reporting guidelines such as CONSORT (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) for randomised trials and STROBE (STrenghtening the Reporting of Observational studies in Epidemiology) for observational studies in epidemiology, the STROBE-MR working group aims to provide guidance to authors on how to improve reporting of MR studies and help readers, reviewers, and journal editors to evaluate the quality of the presented evidence.
Empirical evidence indicates that many reports of MR studies do not clearly state or examine the various assumptions of MR methods and report insufficient details on the data sources, which makes it hard to evaluate the quality and reliability of the results. The STROBE-MR guidance covers both one sample and two sample MR studies. At present, the draft checklist consists of 20 items, organized into the title and abstract, introduction, methods, results and discussion sections of articles.
As these guidelines aim to reach the entire MR community, we would like to give everyone the opportunity to contribute their comments. The following draft of the STROBE-MR checklist is open for public discussion and all feedback will be taken into account during its next revision. For feedback, please use the comment section below this post on PeerJ Preprints.
We hope the final guidelines will serve the entire community and contribute to improving the reporting of MR studies in the future.
Author Comment
The following draft of the STROBE-MR checklist is open for public discussion and all feedback will be taken into account during its next revision. For feedback, please use the comment section below this post on PeerJ Preprint.
