Research & PolicyFree
COREQ Checklist Review for Manuscripts
Send the manuscript, get all 32 checklist items located in your own text by page and sentence, or flagged absent.
River reads your manuscript and works through the checklist item by item, looking for each one in your actual text. Every item comes back with one of four verdicts: located and verified, with the page and the sentence; stated somewhere other than where the checklist claims; implied but never actually written down; or absent. Absent items come back with the sentence to add and where it belongs. The deliverable is a checklist you can submit, whose page references have been followed rather than typed from memory.
Search this and you get the blank checklist, over and over, plus guides telling you to complete it honestly. The standard is a 32-item checklist for interviews and focus groups, and journals ask for it with page numbers filled in. That column is where self-assessment fails. An author knows their own reflexive position, so they tick the item in good faith, and the manuscript never says it anywhere a reader can find.
Written for the author on a submission deadline, the supervisor reading a student's first qualitative paper, and the reviewer asked whether a manuscript meets the standard it claims. It picks up where the analysis stops: themes with their negative cases attached and a codebook with its change log produce most of what the checklist asks about. Where the transcripts themselves are the gap, consistent speaker labels and separated identifiers come first. The check is worth running before the cover letter, not after a desk rejection.
Six of eight reflexivity items were not in the text
Take a qualitative manuscript ready for submission, with the checklist already filled in by the first author. Working through all 32 items against the text gives four verdicts. Nineteen are located and verified. Four are stated somewhere in the paper but not on the page the checklist named. Five are implied without ever being written down. Four are absent. Nineteen of 32 items, 59.4 per cent, are where a reader following the checklist would find them.
The other thirteen, 40.6 per cent, need work, and they are not spread evenly. The checklist has three domains: eight items on the research team and reflexivity, fifteen on study design, nine on analysis and findings. Of the thirteen problems, six sit in the eight-item reflexivity domain. That is 75 per cent of one domain failing while study design runs at 26.7 per cent and analysis and findings at 33.3 per cent.
That concentration is predictable and it is exactly what self-assessment cannot catch. Reflexivity items ask who interviewed the participants, what their credentials were, what relationship existed beforehand, and what assumptions they brought. An author knows all four about themselves, so ticking them feels accurate. None of the four appears in the manuscript. The four items on the wrong page are the worse group in practice, because a reviewer who follows a page reference and finds nothing stops trusting the rest of the column.
How it works
Send the manuscript
The draft as it stands, plus any checklist a co-author has already filled in.
Locate every item
Each of the 32 items searched for in your text, by page and by sentence.
Sort the failures
Wrong page, implied but unstated, and genuinely absent kept as three separate groups.
Write the gaps
A draft sentence for each absent item, placed in the section that should carry it.
What you get
- All 32 items with a page and a sentence, or an explicit gap flag
- Items stated somewhere other than where your checklist claims, which a reviewer will follow
- Items you know but never wrote down, separated from items genuinely missing
- Failure rate by domain, because reflexivity fails at a different rate from methods
- A draft sentence for every absent item, and the section it belongs in
- A submittable checklist whose page references were followed rather than typed from memory
Common questions
Is this the same as a self-assessed checklist?
No, and the difference is the page column. A self-assessment records what the author knows about their own study. This run records what a reader can find in the text. The two agree on most items and diverge exactly where the manuscript assumes something it never states, which is the part a reviewer notices.
My journal wants a different standard. Does that work?
Yes. The mechanism is locating items in text, and it does not care which item list it is working from. The other common qualitative standard is a synthesis of recommendations rather than an interview-specific list, which suits work that is not interviews or focus groups. Name the one your journal asks for and the run works through that instead.
Will completing the checklist make my paper better?
Not by itself. A reporting standard governs what you disclose, not whether the study was well done. What it does catch is the paper whose method cannot be evaluated because a reader cannot tell who collected the data or how saturation was judged. Where the paper also has a quantitative strand, the joint display it needs is a separate gap.
What if an item genuinely does not apply?
Then it gets marked not applicable with the reason, and the reason goes in the checklist rather than being left blank. A blank cell reads as an omission to an editor. A stated reason reads as a decision. Focus-group items in an interview-only study are the usual case and they take one line each.
Does it rewrite my manuscript?
No. It gives you a draft sentence for each absent item and names the section that should carry it, and you write the paper. Several items need information only you have, such as who conducted the interviews and what training they had. The run marks those as requiring your input rather than inventing a plausible answer.
When should I run this?
Before the cover letter, and again after revision, because a revision that adds two thousand words moves every page number in the column you already submitted. Running it once at first submission and never again is how a checklist ends up pointing at the wrong pages of the accepted version.
What do I get back?
A Sheet with one row per item: the item text, the verdict, the page and sentence where it was located, and the fix. A Doc listing the absent items with the text to add, the wrong-page items with their real location, and the failure rate by domain.
COREQ Checklist Review for Manuscripts
Fill in the form and your workspace opens with the work already underway.