Guidelines for Reporting Reliability and Agreement Studies-COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement Instruments2026 (GRRAS-COSMIN 2026)

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Jan Kottner
• Subject Area: Epidemiology and Medical Biometry/Statistics
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 560535232

Publication is the final stage of research. Reporting guidelines are structured tools to improve reporting and structuring of manuscripts. Use of reporting guidelines is mandatory when submitting manuscripts to international high quality scientific journals today. Reliability and agreement are basic properties of health measurement instruments including patient reported outcome measures (PROMs), performance-based instruments, or diagnostic test results describing different types of variation and measurement error. With the aim to improve the structure and completeness of research reports of reliability and agreement studies a multidisciplinary group developed the Guidelines for Reporting Reliability and Agreement Studies (GRRAS) in 2011. Since release, it has been cited many hundreds of times. Although the GRRAS are still widely applied, it is outdated regarding recent methodological developments in the field and regarding health research reporting guidelines. In addition, the COnsensus-based Standards for the selection of health Measurement Instruments (COSMIN) initiative published a substantial amount of guidance regarding the conduct and reporting of studies on measurement properties of PROMs. Recently, the COSMIN methodology was extended to other types of measurement instruments such as clinician reported outcome measures, performance-based tests and laboratory values, by developing a tool to assess the risk of bias of reliability and agreement/measurement error studies. Instruments to assess the quality for reliability and agreement studies have were also published by other groups. Although study reporting and risk of bias assessments are fundamentally different, both approaches should be harmonized. Only what is reported can be assessed. Therefore, reporting guidelines must contain the items for which the risk of bias is assessed. Another challenge is the ever-increasing number of reporting guidelines. To align wording and concepts, to improve usability and uptake the GRRAS and COSMIN initiatives should be combined. The overall aim of the project is to update the Guidelines for Reporting Reliability and Agreement Studies (GRRAS) and to align the reporting structure, reporting items and explanations with the relevant COSMIN framework. The updated GRRAS-COSMIN 2026 reporting guideline will focus on all types of tests, diagnostic procedures including clinician reported outcomes, performance-based test, or laboratory results irrespectively whether to be used as outcomes, baseline description, or for clinical routine use. The planned work includes a summary of published comments about GRRAS, empirical evidence and recent methodological discussions about reliability and agreement studies suggesting modifications or changes and the development, publication and dissemination of GRRAS-COSMIN 2026 following state-of-the-art methods.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: Canada, Denmark, Netherlands, USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professor Dr. Stig Brorson; Professor Dr. Byron Gajewski; Dr. Wieneke Mokkink; Professor Dr. Mohammed Shoukri; Professor Dr. David Streiner