Reporting reviews for publication in the Journal.

INTRODUCTION: The Journal has recently up-dated its guidelines for Reviews in order to provide authors with guidance on the types of reviews the Journal accepts and how these need to be structured. We want to publish reviews that are relevant to mental health nursing practice and/or consumers of mental health services but these reviews need to be rigorously designed and reported in a way that enables each step to be replicated. Less rigorously designed reviews such as narrative and critical reviews may still be of value, particularly if they are re-structured as an essay/debate. The up-date of the Guidelines was prompted by the quality of some of the reviews the Journal was receiving and so we thought it might be useful to identify the common problems (failure to report the review according to guidelines, lack of structure in the Introduction, absence of quality appraisal or inadequate detail, insufficient detail of the search strategy, data extraction not related to review question, lack of synthesis, poorly structured discussion and limited discussion of implications for practice); and how these might be addressed. Reporting the review: Many reviews submitted to the Journal lack detail on components of the review process and for this reason need to be reported according to guidelines. The Journal requires that reviews be reported according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta- Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines (h t t p ://prisma-statement. org) which were designed to ensure reviews were reported in a transparent way to enable replication. While these reporting guidelines are developed for systematic reviews and meta-analyses, and there may be other types of reviews submitted, authors need to use the headings from the checklists in as far as they are relevant e.g., a meta-analyses may not be reported and risk of bias may not have been used to evaluate the studies, but the review needs to include the processes for analyses and quality appraisal. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.