Background：Editors and reviewers of academic journals often find that authors submit guidelines that lack a lot of key information and critical content, which affects the judgment of the quality of the guidelines. Methods, Transparency Ecosystem for Research and Journals in Medicine (TERM) Working Group summarized the essential recommendations that should be considered to review and publish a high-quality guideline.
Results: These recommendations from editors and reviewers included the ten components of essential requirements. 1. Systematic review of existing relevant guidelines: Submit a systematic review of existing relevant guidelines as an attachment, or add the main findings of the systematic review in the guideline. 2. Guideline registration: Submit a registration number and report the number in the guideline. 3. Guideline protocol: Submit a guideline protocol and report where the protocol is available in the guideline. 4. Stakeholders: Submit a document of which stakeholders were involved in guideline development and what their corresponding roles and specific tasks. 5. Conflicts of interest: Submit a declaration form of conflicts of interest (both financial and nonfinancial) for each member, as well as management methods, process, and results. 6. Clinical questions: Submit a document of the methods and processes used to collect and select clinical questions. 7. Systematic reviews: Submit systematic reviews that supported recommendations. 8. Recommendation consensus: Submit a document of decision-making process and minutes of meetings from evidence to decisions. 9. Guideline reporting: Submit a table indicating on which page and in which section the relevant content appears based on AGREE reporting checklist or the RIGHT checklist. 10. External review: Submit a document of the external review process, the review comments, and the guideline changes made to these comments.
Conclusions: The above 10 components are the essential requirements that we believe a high-quality guideline should follow when it published. We abbreviate them as PAGE (essential requirements for Publishing clinical prActice GuidelinEs). We recommend that guideline authors use them as an important reference when they submit their guidelines to promote transparency. Editors can also consider adding PAGE criteria in Introduction for Authors.