Reproducibility checklists at journal submission time have proliferated since the late 2010s. The major ones — the TOP guidelines for transparency and openness, ARRIVE for animal research, CONSORT for clinical trials, PRISMA for systematic reviews, the Nature reporting summary, the Cell Press STAR Methods, the various journal-specific reproducibility checklists — overlap substantially and differ in detail. For an author preparing a submission, the proliferation can feel like make-work. This post walks through what’s actually different across the checklists and what authors should do to satisfy them efficiently.
The TOP guidelines as the common spine
The Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines, articulated by Nosek and colleagues in 2015 and now in version 2.0, are the closest thing the reproducibility-reporting world has to a common spine. TOP defines eight standards (citation, data transparency, analytic-methods transparency, research-materials transparency, design and analysis transparency, preregistration of studies, preregistration of analysis plans, replication) with each at one of three implementation levels (disclosure, requirement, verification).
The CASRAI TOP guidelines entry tracks the working framework. Most journal reproducibility checklists are TOP-aligned at some level, with the journal’s specific requirements being a particular implementation of the TOP framework.
The EQUATOR-listed guidelines for specific study types
The EQUATOR Network maintains a catalogue of reporting guidelines by study type. The major ones for systematic reviewers, clinical trialists, observational-study authors, animal-research authors, and qualitative researchers (PRISMA, CONSORT, STROBE, ARRIVE, SRQR) are well-established. Each has its own checklist with discipline-specific items.
The relationship to TOP: EQUATOR guidelines are study-type-specific reporting standards; TOP is a cross-study-type transparency standard. Both apply; they overlap (PRISMA’s analysis-transparency items overlap with TOP’s analytic-methods transparency standard) but they cover different surface area.
The journal-specific checklists
Several journals run their own reproducibility checklists at submission.
Nature‘s reporting summary, in its 2018 form with subsequent revisions, asks structured questions about statistical reporting, sample size, randomisation, blinding, replication, software, code, and data. The summary is published alongside accepted papers.
Cell Press’s STAR Methods requires a structured methods section with key resources, experimental models, and detailed methods. The structure has a learning curve but, once mastered, produces a more complete methods section than free-form prose.
PLOS journals have a comprehensive checklist covering data availability, code availability, ethics, conflict of interest, and statistical reporting. The checklist is integrated into the submission system; non-compliance triggers automated query.
Several discipline-specific journals run discipline-specific checklists (the AAAS journals’ image-manipulation policy, the BMJ’s reporting-of-changes-from-protocol policy, the NEJM’s data-sharing statement).
What authors should do efficiently
The proliferation of checklists can feel onerous. Three observations make it tractable.
First, the checklists are largely complementary. An author who has good reproducibility practice (preregistration, transparent reporting, data and code deposit, structured methods) satisfies most checklist items by default. The checklists ask whether the practice was followed; if it was, the answer is yes. The work is in the underlying practice, not in the checklist completion.
Second, the checklists converge across journals. A submission prepared for a journal with a rigorous reproducibility checklist is largely ready for other journals’ checklists with minor adaptations. Authors who prepare their reproducibility documentation early — at the analysis stage, not at the submission stage — find this efficient.
Third, the checklists are educational. A first-time author who works through the Nature reporting summary or the PLOS checklist learns what to attend to in their next submission. The skill compounds; an experienced author can complete the checklist for a new submission in under an hour.
The integration with reproducibility infrastructure
The CASRAI reproducibility domain tracks the infrastructure that supports checklist completion. The key elements: preregistration on OSF or equivalent; data deposit with a DataCite DOI; code deposit on GitHub plus Zenodo with a DOI; protocol deposit on Protocols.io or equivalent; reporting against the EQUATOR guideline appropriate for the study type.
An author with these elements in place produces submission-ready reproducibility documentation in routine practice. The journal checklist then becomes a verification step rather than a content-generation step.
What journals should do
For journals, two recommendations.
First, align the journal-specific checklist with TOP and EQUATOR rather than inventing local variants. The TOP-aligned items can be presented in the journal’s preferred format; the underlying questions converge.
Second, integrate the checklist into the submission system as a structured workflow, not as a free-text disclosure. Structured questions with controlled-vocabulary answers support both automated query and post-publication aggregation; free-text disclosures support neither.
What funders should do
Funders increasingly require reproducibility-relevant disclosures in proposals (data-management plans, code-sharing plans, preregistration commitments). The funder-side requirements interlock with the journal-side checklists: a proposal that commits to preregistration on OSF and the resulting paper that reports against the preregistration on OSF closes the loop. The funder-journal alignment work coordinated by EQUATOR Network and several research funders is producing measurable progress.
What CASRAI recommends
Four practical recommendations. First, treat reproducibility documentation as analysis-stage work, not submission-stage work; the checklists then become verification, not work. Second, use the EQUATOR-listed guideline for your study type as the primary reporting target; the journal-specific checklist is then a secondary verification. Third, deposit data, code, protocols, and preregistrations as you go; the deposits become the citations in the checklist. Fourth, treat the checklist completion as a learning opportunity for the next submission; the skill is portable.
For the broader system, the convergence of journal-checklist requirements with EQUATOR guidelines and with TOP is the right direction. The remaining work is in tooling: a submission system that consumes structured reproducibility metadata from the underlying repositories (data DOIs, code DOIs, preregistration links) and produces the journal-specific checklist auto-populated, with the author verifying rather than entering. Several publisher pilots are testing this; the integration through 2026-2027 should make checklist completion substantially less burdensome.
