gms | German Medical Science

Background/research question: Methodological issues (e.g., ignoring missing data, high risk of confounding, irrelevant outcomes, flawed subgroup analyses) often limit the value of health research. Methodological issues are common despite the availability of explicit methods guidance. One important reason is that health researchers cannot easily find relevant methods guidance because of highly variable terminology for methods topics and the lack of appropriate index terms in MEDLINE. To improve the findability of methods guidance articles, we initiated the development of the Library of Guidance for Health Scientists (LIGHTS, www.lights.science).

Methods: LIGHTS provides a living inventory of methods guidance articles. We include articles that state the objective to provide methods guidance for health researchers. We accept all types of methods guidance including conceptual planning, design, conduct, analysis, interpretation, reporting, and quality assessment. To identify articles, we developed a multi-layered search strategy including a systematic search in key medical and methodological journals, scraping of key websites, and suggestions from researchers. A team of health researchers, information specialists, and methodologists continuously identifies and manually indexes eligible guidance documents. A new taxonomy for health research methods provides index terms and a comprehensive collection of synonyms for methodological concepts.

Preliminary/expected results, outlook: LIGHTS is a new open-access, peer-supported initiative to effectively support health researchers, statisticians, methods consultants, methods developers, ethics boards, peer reviewers, journal editors, funding bodies, and others who are looking for methods guidance. At the conference, we will show a poster illustrating the concept, development methods, and user-interface of LIGHTS.

Competing interests: All authors declare no conflict of interest.