How publishing works in this field
Reporting guidelines apply to qualitative and mixed-methods work, not just to trials. COREQ covers interviews and focus groups, SRQR covers qualitative research more broadly, and journals increasingly require a completed checklist. They ask for things authors often omit: the interviewer's relationship to participants, how saturation was judged, and how the coding frame was developed.
Service-user and patient involvement is now reported as part of the method. Who was involved in setting the question, designing the instruments or interpreting the findings, and at what stage — several journals have a dedicated section for this, and its absence is noticed.
What slows papers down here
Consent with vulnerable participants is the most frequent ethical query: capacity to consent, proxy consent, the right to withdraw where care relationships make refusal costly, and safeguarding when disclosure happens mid-interview. A generic ethics sentence does not answer these.
Anonymisation in small settings is harder than it looks. A single service, a single ward or a rare condition can identify participants even without names, and reviewers ask how that risk was managed when quotations are detailed.
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Questions we are asked in this field
COREQ for interviews and focus groups, SRQR for qualitative research more generally, and the mixed-methods guidance where both strands are substantial. The journal usually names its preference; where it does not, COREQ is the commonest expectation in this field.
Remove or generalise role, site and timeline details, not just names, and consider whether a combination of details identifies someone. Say in the methods what was changed and why. Reviewers prefer a stated approach to an assurance.
Increasingly yes. Journals ask who was involved, at what stage and with what influence on the work. "Patients were consulted" without detail reads as a formality rather than a method.