Short Communication Guidelines for professional practice in reporting information about measurement instruments in health research Evelyn Perloff a,1 , Fred B. Bryant b,* a Behavioral Measurement Database Services, Inc., P.O. Box 110287, Pittsburgh, PA 15232, USA b Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, 1032 W. Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60660, USA article info Article history: Received 11 April 2016 Accepted 28 April 2016 Available online 1 June 2016 The goal of this article is to propose a set of guidelines aimed at changing professional practice with respect to how in- vestigators report information about the measurement in- struments used in their research, in order to enhance the replicability and utility of research in the health sciences. Based on a combined century of work in the field of mea- surement, we have identified several commonly used report- ing practises that undermine the replicability and utility of health research. These unsound reporting practices make it difficult or impossible for other researchers to replicate the instruments and measurement procedures of prior in- vestigators, and thereby impede scientific progress. As a consequence of these suboptimal reporting practices, if a new study fails to replicate earlier findings, one cannot know whether this failure to replicate is because the earlier findings are spurious or because the new study has used different measures compared to earlier researchers. If investigators in a particular field of research cannot repeat the methods of measurement used in previous studies, then this field is not practicing science. The problems we have identified involve current practices in reporting the development of new instruments and the modification of pre-existing instruments in peer-reviewed health journals. Unfortunately, these problematic reporting practices are all too common in the health sciences. The fact that these issues are ignored in current published guidelines for research practice and reportingdfor example, in public health, 1 epidemiology, 2 medicine, 3 clinical trials, 4 and psy- chology 5 dunderscores the need for additional reporting guidelines concerning measurement methods and instru- mentation. Below we highlight these problematic reporting practices, presenting them in terms of a set of basic questions that published health research articles too often fail to address concerning the development and modification of measurement instruments. Finally, we present a set of guidelines for reporting measurement in health research. Problems with reporting the development of new instruments A. What is the new instrument intended to measure? One of the most serious problems in measurement reporting in health research is the frequent failure of de- velopers of new instruments to explain the purpose of their instrument. This serious oversight makes it impossible to know exactly what a given instrument is intended to measure. Without a clear, precise definition of the target construct that an instrument is designed to measure, there is no way for * Corresponding author. Department of Psychology, Loyola University Chicago, 1032 W. Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL 60660, USA. Tel.: þ1 773 508 3033. E-mail addresses: bmdshapi@aol.com (E. Perloff), fbryant@luc.edu (F.B. Bryant). 1 Tel.: þ1 412 687 6850. Available online at www.sciencedirect.com Public Health journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/puhe public health 139 (2016) 224 e227 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.puhe.2016.04.015 0033-3506/© 2016 The Royal Society for Public Health. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.