Reporting guidelines for experimental research: A report from the experimental research section standards committee.

The standards committee of the Experimental Research section was charged with preparing a set of reporting guidelines for experimental research in political science. The committee defined its task as compiling a set of guidelines sufficient to enable the reader or reviewer to follow what the researcher had done and to assess the validity of the conclusions the researcher had drawn. Although the guidelines do request the reporting of some basic statistics, they do not attempt to weigh in on statistical controversies. Rather, they aim for something more modest but nevertheless crucial: to ensure that scholars clearly describe what it is they did at each step in their research and clearly report what their data show. In this paper, we discuss the rationale for reporting guidelines and the process used to formulate the specific guidelines we endorse. The guidelines themselves are included in Appendix 1.