Research reporting standards provide minimum guidelines and recommendations for reporting research methods and results transparently and in sufficient detail that methods can be critically evaluated and results can potentially be reproduced.
Reporting standards can differ based on discipline, type of study or data (clinical trial, biodiversity information), or the type of tissue/organism studied. They may take the form of reports, checklists or machine-readable (XML) standards.
Publishers may require authors to follow certain reporting standards. These requirements are often specified in Instructions to Authors for specific journal titles. Likewise, repositories that accept data sets will also generally recommend or require the use of specific standards in order to describe the data being deposited in a clear and uniform way.
Reporting standards have been developed for diagnostic test studies, randomized controlled trials, meta-analyses of RCTs, observational studies and meta-analyses of observational studies, and many more.