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Background  There is evidence that direct journal endorsement of reporting guidelines can lead to important improvements in the quality and reliability of the published research. However, over the last 20 years, there has been a proliferation of reporting guidelines for different study designs, making it impractical for a journal to explicitly endorse them all. The objective of this study was to investigate whether a decision tree tool made available during the submission process facilitates author identification of the relevant reporting guideline.    Methods  This was a prospective 14-week before–after study across four speciality medical research journals. During the submission process, authors were prompted to follow the relevant reporting guideline from the EQUATOR Network and asked to confirm that they followed the guideline (‘before’). After 7 weeks, this prompt was updated to include a direct link to the decision-tree tool and an additional prompt for those authors who stated that ‘no guidelines were applicable’ (‘after’). For each article submitted, the authors’ response, what guideline they followed (if any) and what reporting guideline they should have followed (including none relevant) were recorded.    Results  Overall, 590 manuscripts were included in this analysis—300 in the before cohort and 290 in the after. There were relevant reporting guidelines for 75% of manuscripts in each group; STROBE was the most commonly applicable reporting guideline, relevant for 35% ( n  = 106) and 37% ( n  = 106) of manuscripts, respectively. Use of the tool was associated with an 8.4% improvement in the number of authors correctly identifying the relevant reporting guideline for their study ( p  < 0.0001), a 14% reduction in the number of authors incorrectly stating that there were no relevant reporting guidelines ( p  < 0.0001), and a 1.7% reduction in authors choosing a guideline ( p  = 0.10). However, the ‘after’ cohort also saw a significant increase in the number of authors stating that there were relevant reporting guidelines for their study, but not specifying which (34 vs 29%;  p  = 0.04).    Conclusion  This study suggests that use of a decision-tree tool during submission of a manuscript is associated with improved author identification of the relevant reporting guidelines for their study type; however, the majority of authors still failed to correctly identify the relevant guidelines.    Electronic supplementary material  The online version of this article (10.1186/s41073-017-0044-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Simple decision-tree tool to facilitate author identification of reporting guidelines during submission: a before–after study