LIGHTS

LIGHTS aggregates and indexes peer-reviewed methods guidance articles to support planning, designing, conducting, analyzing, interpreting, reporting, and assessing the quality of health research involving human subjects or populations.

Key Features:

• Inclusion criteria: Journal articles that provide guidance on planning, designing, conducting, analyzing, interpreting, reporting, and assessing the quality of health-related research, excluding basic and animal research and focusing on human-centric studies.
• Manual curation: Health researchers, information specialists, and methodologists manually identify and index relevant documents.
• Search strategy: Focused searches of specific journals and specialized databases and incorporation of suggestions from the research community, applied because keyword-based searches in MEDLINE produced excessive hits.
• Automated terminology matching: An automated matching system aligns alternative methodological expressions (e.g., "loss to follow-up" with "missing data") to harmonize heterogeneous terminology.
• Content inventory: As of September 20, 2022, contains 1,246 articles categorized into 336 reporting guidelines, 80 quality assessment tools, and 830 other methods guidance articles.

Scientific Applications:

• Researchers: Provides indexed methods guidance for planning, design, analysis, interpretation, reporting, and quality assessment of human health research.
• Statisticians and methods consultants: Supports selection and application of appropriate statistical and methodological approaches.
• Guideline and tool developers: Informs development and refinement of reporting guidelines and quality assessment tools.
• Peer reviewers, journal editors, ethics boards, and funders: Aids assessment of methodological rigor and reporting quality in submissions and proposals.

Methodology:

Manual identification and indexing by health researchers, information specialists, and methodologists; focused searches of specific journals and specialized databases; incorporation of suggestions from the research community; automated matching of alternative methodological expressions; inclusion limited to journal articles addressing planning, design, conduct, analysis, interpretation, reporting, and quality assessment of human health research.