Using reporting guidelines in sports and exercise medicine research: why and how to raise the bar?

Have you already heard about the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT), Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA), or Consensus on Exercise Reporting Template (CERT)? Are you using these reporting guidelines (RGs)? And if so, how? These, and other guidelines, should be used when submitting research manuscripts to most of journals in the field of sports and exercise medicine. But why are they so important?

This editorial has two goals: (1) to illustrate how reporting quality differs from methodological quality and why complete reporting is key to maximise the clinical impact of research and (2) to be a call to action for journal editors, peer reviewers and authors to effectively use RGs to improve reporting according to the needs of the sports and exercise medicine community.