Brief report: reporting practices of methodological information in four journals of pediatric and child psychology.

Objective: To replicate Sifers, Puddy, Warren, and Roberts (2002) examining reporting rates of demographic, methodological, and ethical information in articles published during 1997, and to compare these rates to those found in articles published during 2005, in order to determine whether and how reporting practices of these variables have changed over time.

Methods: We examined reporting demographic, methodological, and ethical information in articles in four journals: Journal of Pediatric Psychology, Journal of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology, Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, and Child Development. Reporting rates during 2005 were compared to articles published during 1997.

Results: These four journals improved on many of the 23 variables compared to Sifers et al. including increases in the reporting of ethnicity, attrition, child assent procedures, socioeconomic status, reliability, and reward/incentive offered to participants.

Conclusions: Improvements in descriptive information have implications for interpretation, replication, and generalizability of research findings.