GU Cancers 2019 | Improving statistic reporting guidelines for clinical research in urology

So about five years ago Jim Catto asked me to join European urologist statistical editor and I said fine, as long as we can change things up, let’s really take the issue of statistics in urology publishing seriously. And the obvious point of course is that journal publishing is all about data and we have to make sure that the data are appropriately analyzed. And so we put a number of interesting initiatives in place.

One is that we felt that any paper with substantive statistical analysis should be reviewed by a professional statistician. And the other idea that we had was to write some guidelines and these would have two purposes; one it meant that authors submitting to the Journal could see what we would expect from a statistical analysis, and also meant that the statistical reviewers would have a checklist of things to look for to make sure that the quality of the statistical reporting in papers submitted to European Neurology was adequate. And so we did that for several years. It was extremely successful and some of the other journals got interested in that approach.

So I’m very pleased to say that we recently published an update of that original guidelines paper in the top four journals so European Urology BJUI the journal urology and then the Journal of Urology we have all of the statisticians involved in those four journals. I think it was a total of 15 to 20 authors and all of us agreed on a set of reporting guidelines so that all authors submitting papers to those for journals will be expected to follow those guidelines.