New Working Group: INCF WG on ARTEM-IS

The new ARTEM-IS Working Group aims to develop tools for the ARTEM-IS standard for electrophysiological methods reporting. ARTEM-IS is short for an Agreed Reporting Template for EEG Methodology - International Standard and is designed to make reporting EEG methodology easier and more accurate, by providing specific fields for specific details. 

ARTEM-IS was first presented in an invited session at LiveMEEG 2020, a virtual event on good scientific practices in EEG and MEG. The ARTEM-IS statement is open for signatures and available on OSF.

Due to the complexity of electroencephalography, EEG research contains multiple degrees of freedom in different stages of data acquisition, processing and analysis. This allows large-scale flexibility, and approaches can vary greatly between different research contexts or projects. Technical reporting of steps in the methodology is also highly convoluted, and verbal descriptions can obscure procedural details.

Systematic reviews of EEG literature have highlighted specific and actionable weaknesses in the way that methods are typically reported - in particular, a lack of specificity about individual methodological decisions in the methods sections of journal articles. Accurate reporting is critical for transparent, reproducible, replicable research in the scientific record, and also allows advanced forms of meta-science to be conducted. 

In a recent preprint, the group’s four chairs, Suzy J Styles, Vanja Kovic, Han Ke, and Anđela Šoškić, conclude that “new tools are needed to overcome the limitations of current prose methodology descriptions, and that these tools should be developed through community consultation to ensure that they have the best utility for EEG stakeholders”. 

Besides developing a user-friendly reporting tool, the group plans to deliver a human-readable template for description of a study, as would be suitable for submission as a supplementary document at the time of journal article submission, or alongside a preregistration. Training materials for EEG researchers will also be developed.

Read more:
ARTEM-IS statement

Preprint “Towards ARTEM-IS: an evidence-based Agreed Reporting Template for EEG Methodology - International Standard”