Submission of a reporting checklist is required for the Journal of Dairy Science and JDS Communications. These checklists help to ensure clear and complete reporting of your study, which assists reviewers and readers of your work. We have provided the links below to help authors complete a suitable checklist to upload with their manuscript.
Animal Studies
- REFLECT: Reporting Guidelines for Randomized Controlled Trials in Livestock and Food Safety (checklist)
- ARRIVE: Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments (Use full checklist)
- PRISMA: Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (checklist)
- STROBE-Vet: Strengthening the Reporting of Observational Studies in Epidemology – Veterinary Extension (checklist)
- MERIDIAN: Menagerie of Reporting guidelines involving Animals links to manually fillable checklists
Use of Reporting Guidelines in JDS and JDSC
The Journal of Dairy Science and JDS Communications endorse the use of an appropriate reporting guideline when writing any research manuscript. This is a widespread practice and common requirement in leading scientific and medical journals. Reporting guidelines help to ensure complete and accurate reporting of a study, which contributes to reproducibility and allows for critical appraisal of the work, as well as eventual inclusion of the study in systematic reviews and meta-analyses. Reporting guidelines do not prescribe study design or analysis but have been shown to improve the clarity and completeness of reporting. The EQUATOR Network gives general information on why guidelines are useful.
A collection of reporting guidelines for research with animals, including all of the following, is available at MERIDIAN. For controlled trials and experiments with animals, the REFLECT (Reporting Guidelines for Randomized Controlled Trials in Livestock and Food Safety) checklist is recommended. A slightly different version for pre-clinical animal experiments is the ARRIVE checklist. For observational studies, refer to the STROBE-Vet checklist. For systematic reviews and meta-analyses, use the PRISMA checklist. We have prepared a modified checklist (appended) for studies that do not involve animals. The checklist must indicate where in the manuscript the content addressed by each item of the checklist is reported or state that the item was not considered in the study and why not (e.g., if you did not use blinding, your article should explain why not and discuss this limitation explicitly). Reviewers will be instructed to consider the completeness of your reporting in light of these guidelines. Meeting these basic reporting requirements will greatly improve the value of your manuscript, may facilitate the peer review process, and may enhance its chances for eventual publication.
For all sections of each journal, we encourage you to submit a completed checklist from the relevant guideline, appended at the end of your manuscript, indicating the manuscript line number(s) on which each checklist item is found.
Checklists are not simply an administrative hurdle. We ask you to complete a checklist because this helps you to ensure that you have included all of the important information in your article, and because it helps our editors and reviewers to complete the same check. If the checklist indicates an item that you have not provided in your manuscript, please add the relevant information or explain in the manuscript text why this information is not relevant to your study.