Reports communicate final research findings to different policy end-users or even general audiences. Working papers are unreviewed live documents that are shorter than reports, and have a similar structure to a scientific article.

Reports contrast with scientific articles by providing more detail on the analysis performed, thus being typically longer (e.g. over 20 pages) while being easily readable by non-expert audiences. When reports are too long (e.g. more than 50 pages), a summary report may need to be produced.

Working papers are a midway version of a report and a scientific article. They are shorter than reports and have similar structures to scientific papers. However, they are not peer-reviewed, should be understood as live documents which can be subject to change, and should be clear to researchers and non-researchers.

In this post, the focus is given to reports, although most aspects mentioned are applicable to working papers.

Writing a Report or Working Paper

Reports follow a standard structure (Morgain & Robbins, 2019):

  • Executive Summary
  • Actions and Recommendations
  • Main content
    • introduction
    • topical chapters
    • conclusions
  • References and Appendixes

The first two sections communicate the key findings, implications, and analysis recommendations. They should be concise, objective, and tailored to the report’s target audience. If the report is tailored to policymakers, methodologies and technical information can be presented in Annex or as an additional report.

Authoring and Editing

Reports can have a long list of authors and contributors. If the author list is long, main authors are defined and responsible for the report’s core writing. The main authors engage with other contributors for specific inputs. Institutions that commissioned the reports, are usually responsible for the editing role and the report writing coordination. To clarify authorship and contributions, follow the practice of attribution. As in scientific articles, a section on acknowledgements can be included to recognise other relevant contributions to the analysis or to the report elaboration (e.g. review).

Writing and reviewing

The report writing process can be organised in different ways. An example is the definition of the scope of the report and the elaboration of an outline draft which is discussed among authors, contributors and main stakeholders. The drafting of the main report body follows, as well as the identification of key insights and preliminary actions and recommendations. In terms of writing style, plain English facilitates understanding of the text and gets the message across more easily.

The first draft is then reviewed by the key stakeholders and institutional partners and can even be discussed with a broader group involved in the analysis. After this first review round, the authors revise the report, which can implicate changes in the analysis. The second review round follows, and should involve the same partners as in the first review but can be extended to wider audiences. After review completion, the report is updated, and a final version is then circulated among the target audience. The time for report writing, and review rounds, should be included in the project timeline.

Publishing and disseminating

Authors and project partners should also decide if and how the report versions are made available among the project team and the public, such as publishing pre-prints (e.g. on Research Square) of report versions and/or of the final draft. Supporting documentation can be made available through repositories (such as GitHub) or other pre-prints if an additional report, or the annexes, are to be published separately from the main report. Dataset can be made available through e.g. Zenodo. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) should be generated for the report and all the relevant outputs.

You may be interested in the following relevant practices for publishing reports or working papers.

Pre-Registration of Research Protocols

It may be appropriate to consider registering or publishing the research protocol.

Find more about the pre-registration practice

Licensing

Reports and working papers should be released under an open license, such as a CC-BY 4.0, which stipulates the terms under which the content can be used and the authors attributed.

Find more about the license practice

Attribution

Reports can have a long list of authors and contributors. Using the Contributor Roles Taxonomy allows a range of different contributions to be recognised.

Read more about the attribution practice

Metadata

Any publication should be accompanied with machine-readable metadata which describes the authors, license and other crucial information. This allows the publication to be found in search results, re-used in accordance with the license, and correctly cited.

Find more about the metadata practice

Referencing

Original sources of images, graphs and other media, as well as concepts directly reported must be properly documented and cited.

For more information, see the Referencing practice

Version Control

For very complicated or technical documents, it may be useful to adopt a convention for versioning the document as it is worked upon, or using a version control system to assist collaboration on the text.

Read more about the version control practice

Useful resources for writing

For tips on how to write in plain English and for general advice on writing for varied audiences.

This material is derived from the CCG review of good enough practices, released under a CC-BY 4.0 license.