Photo of the ACCORD Steering Committee, from a meeting at Green Templeton College in Oxford, UK, 27 September 2022
Following robust preparatory work, a Delphi process is underway to validate and refine a reporting guideline for consensus-based research, titled ACCORD (ACcurate COnsensus Reporting Document). The guideline is expected to be submitted to a peer-reviewed journal in the first half of 2023.
The need for improved reporting of consensus-based research
In medicine, consensus-based research is used to provide guidance when the available data on a particular topic are inadequate, contradictory, disputed, limited, or absent. The most dramatic recent example was the need to make wide-ranging public health decisions during the emergence of a new virus and the resulting global pandemic. However, such approaches are used routinely with respect to rare diseases and in many areas of medicine when there are disagreements, such as the current debate in liver disease regarding the use of the term “non-alcoholic” or “metabolic-associated” fatty liver disease (NAFLD / MAFLD).
As with all research, transparent reporting is essential to ensure readers can be confident in the findings of the work and the approaches used to obtain them. However, there is no broad-based reporting guideline – no equivalent of CONSORT or PRISMA – for consensus-based research.
ACCORD: an unexpected journey
Perhaps surprisingly, the genesis of ACCORD was a member query on the ISMPP Connect community discussion board: what would be the appropriate reporting guideline for a consensus study?
When it became clear that there is currently no such guideline, two ISMPP members, Will Gattrell and Niall Harrison, set out to understand how the gap could be filled. With the assistance of ISMPP, they recruited a multidisciplinary Steering Committee representing clinicians, methodologists, publication professionals, patients, journal editors and publishers, and the pharmaceutical industry. The full Steering Committee is listed at the end of this update.
The ACCORD protocol, based on the EQUATOR Network guidance for the development of reporting guidelines, was published in Research Integrity and Peer Review in June 2022. As a critical early step, a systematic literature review was carried out to identify current evidence on the reporting quality of consensus-based research. This work was presented at the 2022 International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication in September, and was published in full in BMJ Open in the same month.
The findings from this work have been used to identify preliminary items that could be included in a reporting guideline, and the draft checklist is being validated by an expert panel for review and voting in a Delphi process.
Future milestones
The ACCORD Delphi panel stage is expected to be completed by the end of 2022. Based on these results, the Steering Committee will develop and submit the guideline for peer review and publication, alongside a full explanation and elaboration document that will provide suggestions on the interpretation and use of the guideline. It is anticipated that these will be published in 2023.
The Steering Committee has already begun active planning for the next phase of ACCORD, which will be to raise awareness of the guideline and ensure that researchers using consensus methods are considering the guideline when appropriate. We encourage the ISMPP membership to support this endeavor!
Further information
Follow @accordstatement on Twitter for project updates. Access the ACCORD web page on the ISMPP website for project information.
Read the ACCORD publications:
- The ACCORD protocol: Gattrell WT, et al. Research Integrity and Peer Review 2022;7:3. https://researchintegrityjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s41073-022-00122-0
- The ACCORD systematic review: van Zuuren EJ, et al. BMJ Open 2022;12:e065154. https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/12/9/e065154
- Peer Review congress poster, including explanatory video: Logullo P, et al. International Congress on Peer Review and Scientific Publication, 8-10 September 2022, Chicago, IL, USA. Poster PRC22-0583.
https://www.congressposter.com/p/nvsyoqhwxmogcfqi
The ACCORD Steering Committee
Please contact the co-Chairs if you have any questions about ACCORD.
Co-Chairs
- Will Gattrell, Bristol Myers Squibb (william.gattrell@bms.com)
- Niall Harrison, Open Health (niallharrison@openhealthgroup.com)
Steering Committee
- Paul Blazey, University of British Columbia
- Keith Goldman, AbbVie
- Amit Pali Hungin, University of Newcastle
- Ellen L. Hughes, Open Health
- Patricia Logullo, University of Oxford and the EQUATOR Network
- Amy Price, Stanford School of Medicine and Patient Editor, BMJ
- Esther J. van Zuuren, Leiden University Medical Centre
- Christopher C. Winchester, Oxford PharmaGenesis
- David Tovey, Journal of Clinical Epidemiology
With thanks to Zbys Fedorowicz (Veritas Health Sciences Consultancy, Huntingdon, UK) and Jan W Schoones (Leiden University Medical Center, Leiden) for assistance with the systematic review, Rob Matheis and ISMPP for project sponsorship, and Helen Bremner, Amie Hedges and Mark Rolfe from Oxford PharmaGenesis for medical writing and project management support.