Moving forward on tumor pathology research reporting: a guide for pathologists from the WHO Classification of Tumors EVI MAP Group.

Evidence-based medicine (EBM) can be unfamiliar territory for those working in tumor pathology research and there is a great deal of uncertainty about how to undertake an EBM approach to planning and reporting histopathology-based studies. In this article, endorsed by the WHO International Agency for Research on Cancer’s (IARC) International Collaboration for Cancer Classification and Research (IC3R), we aim to help pathologists and researchers to understand the basics of planning an evidence-based tumor pathology research study, as well as our recommendations on how to report the findings from these. We introduce some basic EBM concepts, the PICO model, thoughts on study design, and emphasize the concept of reporting standards. There are many study-specific reporting guidelines available, and we provide an overview of these. However, existing reporting guidelines perhaps do not always fit tumor pathology research papers, and so here we collate the key reporting dataset together into one generic checklist that we think will simplify the task for pathologists. The article aims to complement our recent Hierarchy of Evidence for Tumor Pathology and Glossary of Evidence (study) Types in tumor pathology. Together, these articles should help any researcher get to grips with the basics of EBM for planning and publishing research in tumor pathology, as well as encourage an improved standard of the reports available to us all in the literature.