Qualitative rigor
Journals want a completed reporting checklist with every qualitative submission: each item, and where your manuscript reports it. Drop in the manuscript, confirm the passages the tool finds for each item, and export the table ready to upload.
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Pick the checklist your journal asks for, drop in the manuscript, and confirm where each item is reported. Everything stays in this browser and is saved as you go.
Interviewer/facilitator
Name which author or authors conducted the interviews or ran the focus groups.
Credentials
State the interviewer's qualifications or credentials (for example PhD, MD, RN).
Occupation
Say what the interviewer's job or role was at the time of the study.
Gender
Report whether the interviewer was male or female (or their gender).
Experience and training
Describe the interviewer's experience with, and training in, qualitative methods.
Relationship established
State whether a relationship existed with participants before the study began.
Participant knowledge of the interviewer
Describe what participants were told about the researcher—their goals, or why they were doing the research.
Interviewer characteristics
Report characteristics of the interviewer that might shape the data—assumptions, interests, possible biases, reasons for doing the research.
Methodological orientation and theory
Name the methodological orientation that underpins the study (for example grounded theory, phenomenology, content or thematic analysis, ethnography).
Sampling
Explain how participants were selected (for example purposive, convenience, consecutive or snowball sampling).
Method of approach
Say how participants were approached—face to face, by telephone, by mail or email.
Sample size
Report how many participants took part.
Non-participation
Report how many people declined or dropped out, and why.
Setting of data collection
Say where the data were collected (for example a participant's home, a clinic, the workplace, or online).
Presence of non-participants
State whether anyone other than the participants and researchers was present.
Description of sample
Describe the important characteristics of the sample—demographics, dates of data collection.
Interview guide
Say whether questions, prompts or guides were provided by the authors, and whether the guide was pilot tested.
Repeat interviews
Report whether any interviews were repeated, and if so how many.
Audio/visual recording
Say whether audio or video recording was used to collect the data.
Field notes
Say whether field notes were taken during or after the interviews or focus groups.
Duration
Report how long the interviews or focus groups lasted.
Data saturation
Say whether data saturation was discussed, and how it was judged.
Transcripts returned
Say whether transcripts were returned to participants for comment or correction.
Number of data coders
Report how many people coded the data.
Description of the coding tree
Say whether the authors provided a description of the coding tree or codebook.
Derivation of themes
Explain whether themes were identified in advance or derived from the data.
Software
Name any software used to manage the data.
Participant checking
Say whether participants gave feedback on the findings.
Quotations presented
Say whether participant quotations were used to illustrate themes and findings, and whether each was identified (for example by participant number).
Data and findings consistent
Check that the data presented are consistent with the findings claimed.
Clarity of major themes
Present the major themes clearly in the findings.
Clarity of minor themes
Describe diverse cases or discuss minor themes.
Reference · for the curious
Reporting guidelines exist because qualitative studies are hard to appraise from the outside. A reader cannot judge a finding without knowing who collected the data, how participants were chosen, and how themes were derived. COREQ and SRQR list those details, and most health and medical journals now ask authors to show where each one appears in the manuscript.
COREQ (Tong, Sainsbury and Craig, 2007) has 32 items and is written for studies that collect data through interviews or focus groups. It is detailed about the encounter itself: who the interviewer was, their relationship with participants, where and how long the interviews ran, whether field notes were kept, and whether transcripts went back to participants.
SRQR (O'Brien and colleagues, 2014) has 21 items that apply to any qualitative design—ethnography, case studies, document analysis as well as interviews—and follows the structure of a paper from the title to the funding statement. Journals that do not specify one generally accept either; COREQ is the more common request for interview studies in health research, and the EQUATOR Network lists both.
Reviews of published qualitative studies consistently find the same gaps. The research-team items are the most neglected: the interviewer's credentials, gender, experience and relationship with participants are frequently absent, even though they shape what participants say. Other frequent omissions are the duration of interviews, whether field notes were taken, whether the interview guide was piloted, how many people coded the data, and whether saturation—or some other stopping rule—was considered.
Several of those are one sentence each once the numbers exist. For saturation, the thematic saturation calculator produces a reportable statement in Guest and colleagues' notation. For the number of coders and their agreement, the intercoder reliability calculator pools agreement from an NVivo, ATLAS.ti or MAXQDA export and writes the paragraph. For the description of the coding tree, a structured codebook is easier to report than a list of themes; the codebook generator gives each code a definition, inclusion and exclusion rules and an example.
The usual way to complete a checklist is to open the journal's PDF form the day before submission and search the manuscript for each keyword. The tool reverses that: it reads the manuscript once, splits it into sentences tagged with their section, and lists for every item the sentences that probably address it. Confirming a suggestion fills the location; marking an item not applicable records why; and the list of gaps at the end is a to-do list for the manuscript rather than for the form. Locations are recorded by section and paragraph because page numbers change with every journal template; replace them with page numbers in the final version if the journal asks.
Every item needs an answer, but not every item needs to be done. A single-interview design does not repeat interviews, and many studies deliberately do not return transcripts to participants. Saying so—"not applicable: single interviews", "transcripts were not returned, to limit participant burden"—is complete reporting. What reviewers flag is an applicable item that simply does not appear.
It does not judge quality. A sentence that mentions saturation satisfies the item's reporting requirement whether or not the saturation argument is convincing; appraisal tools such as the CASP qualitative checklist address rigour, and reporting checklists address transparency. The scan is a set of English-language keyword patterns, so it will miss items phrased unusually and occasionally point at a sentence that uses the right words for a different purpose. And it does not reproduce the published wording of either checklist, which remains under the journals' copyright—the item descriptions here are paraphrases, and the links in the tool go to the originals. The IRR reporting generator does the same job for the reliability statement specifically, audited against the GRRAS guideline.
COREQ—the Consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research—is a 32-item reporting checklist for studies using interviews or focus groups, published by Tong, Sainsbury and Craig in 2007. Its items fall into three domains: the research team and reflexivity (who collected the data and their relationship with participants), study design (sampling, setting, data collection) and analysis and findings (coding, themes, quotations). Many health and medical journals require a completed COREQ checklist, with the page on which each item is reported, at submission.
COREQ is specific to interviews and focus groups and asks detailed questions about how they were run—who interviewed, for how long, whether field notes were taken. SRQR, the Standards for Reporting Qualitative Research (O'Brien et al., 2014), has 21 broader items that apply to any qualitative design, including ethnography, case studies and document analysis, and follows the structure of a paper from title to funding. Use COREQ for an interview or focus group study unless the journal names SRQR; use SRQR for other designs. The EQUATOR Network lists both.
No. The checklist asks you to state where each item is reported, and some items genuinely do not apply—repeat interviews in a single-interview design, for example, or returning transcripts when that was not part of the protocol. Mark those as not applicable and say why. What reviewers object to is an item that applies but is silently absent, such as how many people coded the data or whether data saturation was considered.
Each item has a set of patterns for the phrases authors typically use when reporting it—“audio-recorded”, “field notes”, “purposive sampling”, a named analysis package, a number of participants. The scan splits your manuscript into sentences, remembers the nearest section heading, and lists the sentences that match each item, best first. It is a pointer, not a judgement: a match does not mean the item is reported adequately, and a sentence phrased unusually can be missed. Every suggestion needs your confirmation.
No. Both checklists are published under the journals' copyright, so this tool uses the item numbers and topic names by which they are universally cited, and describes what each item asks for in its own words. The export notes that the descriptions are paraphrased and gives the DOI of the published checklist; if your journal supplies its own form, copy the locations from the export into it.
Written by Enrique Gutiérrez, PhD (Computer Science)—founder of Tagaroo and Associate Professor of Computer Science, working on inter-rater reliability, measurement and annotation methodology (ORCID).
Last verified: 25 September 2026. Formulas, thresholds and cited figures on this page were checked against their original sources on that date. Every calculation runs in your browser; nothing you enter is transmitted or stored.
How many people coded, whether a codebook exists, how themes were derived, whether saturation was assessed—Tagaroo keeps that record as the analysis happens, with every coder's decisions, the codebook versions and the agreement between them, so the analysis section of the checklist writes itself.
COREQ and SRQR checklist builder · tagaroo.ai/materials/coreq-checklist · figures verified against primary sources 2026-09-25. Educational scoring aid, not a diagnosis, and not reviewed by a licensed clinician.