Strengthening The Organization and Reporting of Microbiome Studies (STORMS): A Reporting Checklist for Human Microbiome Research

Background: Human microbiome research is a growing field with the potential for improving our understanding and treatment of diseases and other conditions. The field is interdisciplinary, making concise organization and reporting of results across different styles of epidemiology, biology, bioinformatics, translational medicine, and statistics a challenge. Commonly used reporting guidelines for observational or genetic epidemiology studies lack key features specific to microbiome studies. Methods: A multidisciplinary group of microbiome epidemiology researchers reviewed elements of available reporting guidelines for observational and genetic studies and adapted these for application to culture-independent human microbiome studies. New reporting elements were developed for laboratory, bioinformatic, and statistical analyses tailored to microbiome studies, and other parts of these checklists were streamlined to keep reporting manageable. Results: STORMS is a 17-item checklist for reporting on human microbiome studies, organized into six sections covering typical sections of a scientific publication, presented as a table with space for author-provided details and intended for inclusion in supplementary materials. Conclusions: STORMS provides guidance for authors and standardization for interdisciplinary microbiome studies, facilitating complete and concise reporting and augments information extraction for downstream applications. Availability: The STORMS checklist is available as a versioned spreadsheet from https://www.stormsmicrobiome.org/.