Reporting Standards Working Group
Chairs: Ian Wilson, Imperial College London and Jennifer Kirwan, Berlin Institute of Health
Ongoing activities:
As part of the overall mQACC initiative, an international working group has been formed with representatives from government, academic and commercial organizations to develop and promote consistent, meaningful and pragmatic community reporting standards in publications (and other documents) describing untargeted metabolomics studies (metabolic phenotyping/metabolomics) that detail the advisable quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC) measures. This represents part of a strategy to educate the research community about the importance of QA and QC in untargeted metabolomics and promote good practices.
Many groups have established their own QA/QC protocols; however, there is as yet little consensus as to how the methods and processes employed before, during and after data acquisition should be reported in publications. A consistent, meaningful and rational approach is necessary for the field to progress in a way that allows the community to gauge their effectiveness in practice and in the quality of the resulting data. The guidelines developed by this working group will represent a necessary step in defining best practices in order to obtain harmony for reporting standards engaging the community and publishers. We hope this will promote a vigorous discussion eventually achieving a broader consensus as to what, in the end, should be provided.
Anticipated deliverables:
The initial deliverable will be a manuscript containing recommendations on the data to be included in publications to ensure that sufficient detail is provided on the instrumental analysis QA/QC practices used, together with a description of how the data derived from the QC samples were analyzed, assessed, accepted and interpreted.
Additional publications are anticipated, as additional recommendations for other segments of the metabolomics study paradigm emerge based on developments in the methodology used in metabolomic studies as the field evolves.
In addition to publications, these recommended reporting practices will be disseminated to the community via the interactive routes of workshops and conferences (training courses and oral/poster presentations). We will engage with journal editors, data repositories and grant awarding bodies to encourage adoption of these strategies as part of criteria for the acceptance process.