[Development of Reporting Guidelines of Articles in the Public Health Weekly Report]

Reporting guidelines can be defined as "checklists, or flow charts developed according to well-known methodology to use when reporting the research of a specific type of study design." Reporting guidelines are known to be an important means of improving the quality and scientific rigor of academic journals. The purpose of this study was to develop reporting guidelines for the major manuscript types of the Public Health Weekly Report (PHWR): outbreak reports, survey reports, surveillance reports, policy notes, and recommendation reports. The development of reporting guidelines was carried out in the following order: committee formation, literature review, review of existing reporting guidelines, drafting, development of explanation and elaboration (E&E) papers, and external review. Through this process, G-CORE (Guideline for Community Outbreak Investigation REport), Reporting guideline checklists called G-SURE (Guideline for SUrvey REport), G-SIRE (Guideline for Surveillance REport), G-SCOPE (Guideline for Standardize Criteria Of Policy rEporting), and G-RECO (Guidelines for RECOmmendation reporting) were developed, and E&E papers for the corresponding reporting guidelines were also developed. Each reporting guideline includes a checklist of items to be reported in the title, abstract, summary, background, methods, results, discussion, and other information, and the E&E papers consist of commentary, explanation, and appropriate examples for each checklist. Policy means such as education, template creation, and monitoring will be needed so that these reporting guideline items can be properly implemented in submitted manuscripts, and it will be necessary to conduct an evaluation of the quality of reporting in the future.