We have recently introduced the Materials, Design, Analysis, and Reporting (MDAR) framework aiming at helping authors, editors, and other interested parties to increase reporting transparency within life science manuscripts. The MDAR checklist serves as a generic, minimum reporting standard for life science studies and is organized into three different sections: Materials, Design, and Analysis.
To support scientists in checking their research and reporting, it is now possible to automatically create an MDAR report via the SciScore tool:
By submitting a manuscript to sciscore.com, the Sciscore system returns an MDAR checklist within a minute, which is completed automatically using information detected in the method section.
In the checklist, missing information is noted with a “Not detected” and information not currently checked appears as “Not currently checked by SciScore”.
The report can then be submitted together with the manuscript or can be used to self-assess own’s research reporting for completeness.