Twelve Years of SRQR: A Meta-Research Evaluation of Qualitative Reporting Quality in Health Research

This project contains the preregistered protocol and materials for a meta-research study evaluating changes in qualitative reporting quality following publication of the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (SRQR) in 2014. The study examines qualitative articles published in five major health research journals (Academic Medicine, Medical Education, BMJ Open, Social Science & Medicine, and PLOS ONE) across two time windows: a pre-SRQR period (2010–2013) and a post-publication period (2020–2025). Articles will be evaluated using the SRQR-Derived Instrument (SRQR-DI), a 21-item operational scoring instrument developed for this study to assess transparency and completeness of qualitative reporting. Primary analyses examine whether reporting quality improved after SRQR publication and whether improvement differs across journals with different levels of SRQR endorsement. Secondary analyses examine item-level reporting patterns and the prevalence of ritual compliance—defined as the formal presence of reporting elements without substantive methodological disclosure. All study hypotheses, analytic models, and scoring procedures are preregistered prior to data collection. Materials deposited here include the full protocol manuscript, scoring manual, search strategies, and analysis scripts. This project supports transparency and reproducibility in meta-research on qualitative reporting standards.