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Category: Project

Description: The Guidance List for the repOrting of Bibliometric AnaLyses (GLOBAL) will provide minimum guidelines for the reporting of bibliometric analyses. Over the past decade, there has been a growing number of bibliometric analyses published in the peer-reviewed literature of varying quality. Despite this growth, surprisingly few published articles provide guidance on how a bibliometric analysis ought to be reported, and to our knowledge, these articles have been written based on the opinions/experiences of different researchers, as opposed to best evidence-informed practices. This known uptick in the publication of bibliometric analyses in combination with a lack of evidence-based guidance indicates the need to develop the proposed reporting guidelines. We propose developing these guidelines through a staged consensus process, involving a literature review and expert consultation to generate a series of candidate items, which will then be assessed by an international multi-stakeholder group in a multi-stage Delphi survey and refined through a checklist pilot. The intended objective includes that the proposed guideline will help promote transparency and completeness in reporting bibliometric and related analyses and provide a framework for authors to report methods and results. Applying the reporting guideline will assist editors and peer-reviewers, as well as the general readership, to understand, interpret and critically assess the quality of bibliometric methods and risk of bias in the reported outcomes.