An inside look at the APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards

Harris Cooper, PhD, and David Frost, PhD, discuss the APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards (JARS) and their implications for research in psychology.

Harris Cooper is the Hugo L. Blomquist Professor Emeritus in the Department of Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. Cooper is the current Editor of American Psychologist and served as chair of the first task force that developed APA Style JARS.

David Frost received his PhD from City University of New York and serves as a professor of social psychology at University College of London.

Marla Bonner: Hello, I’m Marla Bonner. Welcome to APA Journals Dialogue, a podcast featuring research from the Journals program of the American Psychological Association. Today, we look at an article from American Psychologist.

In early 2018, American Psychologist published two APA Style Journal Article Reporting Standards, or JARS, reports.

JARS are a set of guidelines that help journal authors communicate important aspects of their research. The guidelines promote transparency and scientific rigor, as usage of JARS enables reviewers, editors, and readers to better understand the author’s process and research purpose.

We’re pleased to have with us today two members of the working group that developed JARS: Drs. Harris Cooper and David Frost. Welcome.

Thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate it.

Dr. David Frost: Thank you for having me.

Dr. Harris Cooper: Thanks for inviting me.

Marla: Can you tell us a little bit about the importance of JARS? Why do we have these standards?

Dr. Cooper: Well, I’ll go first. There are really two important motivations for having reporting standards. The first is to ensure quality—we look to reports to find out how studies were conducted, and if we don’t have enough information about the methods that were used we’ll find that it makes it difficult to come to a conclusion about whether or not the methods correspond with the inferences that are drawn and the inferences that we would like to make.

The other motivation for us doing this was to make it easier for studies to be replicated. We know there’s a crisis, I would call it, I guess, in our ability to reproduce findings from earlier studies, and one of the reasons for that may be that the methods that are being used are not similar enough, and having explicit and transparent standards makes it much easier to understand the results of replications.

Marla: Thank you. Dr. Frost, did you have anything to add to that?

Dr. Frost: Sure, just a few additional points.

I think the great thing about having something like the JARS for psychology as a discipline is that it really does move us towards a shared set of expectations around the reporting of research across the discipline, especially as psychologists are using an increasingly wide array of methods in their work.

And in some ways, journals, editors, readers are struggling to keep up, so having JARS and a collective sense of what information should be expected in a manuscript to enable it to be adequately evaluated by not just journal editors and reviewers, but readers, too, I think is increasingly important.

Marla: I would agree; those are very important standards. And as I understand it, JARS were actually developed 10 years ago, and it’s a working document that had an important update this year. Can you tell us what that update entailed?

Dr. Cooper: There were really two updates.

The first was around work that’s done involving quantitative methodologies. We originally set up the JARS in order to allow it to be expanded as well as revised. So in this particular iteration, we added what we refer to as “modules” that relate to the reporting of things like single subject research, longitudinal research, research in measurement, etc., which was not part of the original JARS, as well as made minor modifications to the original document itself.

It was also a time for us to add qualitative research, which was what Dr. Frost was involved with.

Marla: So that’s actually a really good segue to the next question, and Dr. Frost, you can jump in here: Can you elaborate on the differences between JARS–Quant and JARS–Qual?

Dr. Frost: Yes, actually. I think that, like Dr. Cooper said, is one of the main differences in this new iteration of the JARS, and this is the first time that APA standards have included qualitative and, also importantly, mixed methods in the JARS.

And it’s gonna be a really great resource for an increasing number of researchers using these kinds of methods and approaches in psychology, given they’ve often struggled in the past when preparing manuscripts for submission to journals.

Because we didn’t have JARS reflecting expectations for qualitative and mixed methods research, qualitative researchers were often asked to adhere to standards that weren’t appropriate for qualitative work because qualitative work comes from different epistemological backgrounds and we can’t expect that everyone is operating from the same perspective across the variety of methods that I referred to before.

So, qualitative researchers often found that they were in a position where they had to educate editors and reviewers about basic assumptions and defend the value of qualitative and also mixed methods research.

And also editors and reviewers faced a lot of challenges when they were trying to process manuscripts that involved qualitative and mixed methods, so having APA really get behind these ways of operating in the field, which, I mentioned before, are becoming increasingly represented in the work that psychologists do, is really important and, I think, an important aspect of what’s new in the JARS this year.

Marla: So, who might JARS be useful for?

Dr. Cooper: I think JARS is useful especially for graduate students as they’re learning the research process, but, really, it’s for everybody.

Anybody who’s writing a research report will find, in many ways, a checklist that can be used, even before you begin doing your research, that helps you make sure you touch all the bases. And you can be a senior faculty member or an undergraduate doing an honors’ thesis and find great guidance in the JARS.

Marla: And that’s actually really important. Dr. Frost, you wanted to add to that comment?

Dr. Frost: Yeah, I also just wanted to note that, as other disciplines, like sociology and other social sciences, are becoming increasingly reliant on APA standards for their journals, it’s really important to recognize that JARS will be useful for researchers and editors and readers in many social sciences, not just psychology.

Marla: So you both kind of touched on the fact that it’s useful for everyone, but could you elaborate a little bit more on how it’s especially relevant for early-career psychologists?

Dr. Cooper: David, do you want to do that?

Dr. Frost: Sure! I think, as Dr. Cooper mentioned, that this is something that’s relevant for researchers, not just the established who are preparing manuscripts for submissions to journals, but also across the training curricula that we have in psychology, thinking about introduction to psychology being more representative of the kinds of expectations for research across a variety of methods (quantitative, qualitative, mixed methods approaches in the field).

And as early career researchers, people who are finishing up doctoral training, recently finished doctoral training, I think having published standards from my side of the work around qualitative and mixed methods research is especially important, because there’ll be more opportunities now for publication for research from qualitative and mixed methods approaches, and we also hope, in developing the JARS–Qual, that this kind of work across qualitative and mixed methods approaches will be more positively evaluated in hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions as well.

Marla: Sounds terrific! Well, Drs. Cooper and Frost, we really appreciate your time today. Thank you for joining us, and we really appreciate your work in this area. We hope to have you back on our podcast very soon!

Dr. Frost: Thank you for having us!

Dr. Cooper: Thank you!

Marla: To read the article and learn more about JARS, please visit our website at https://apastyle.apa.org/jars.

Thank you for joining us. I’m Marla Bonner with APA Journals Dialogue.