The Endocrine Society Council recently established a “Sex Steroid Assays Reporting Task Force (SSARTF)” with the following charge: to perform a review of journal policies (our journals and sister journals) related to sex hormone measurement reporting requirements; to recommend to Council through the Publications Core Committee (PCC), a sex hormone measurement reporting policy that ensures our journal policies are not contradictory, and to then make recommendations on how to implement and communicate the new policy to authors, reviewers and readers of our journals. The SSARTF met by video conferencing as well as email and phone communication to develop the new Instructions to Authors. First, our research revealed that few journals have specific policies relating to the reporting of sex hormones or more generally steroid hormone assay measurements. Although the science of optimal assay measurements for many analytes is always in flux, all felt that the Endocrine Society should lead the field towards optimization of measurement of steroid hormones in research publications to impact the validity of the science and ultimately the care of our patients. As the draft guideline was developed, the SSARTF felt that the charge was overly narrowly restricted in specifying sex hormones and that the instructions could be widely applied to all steroid hormones. Our goal was to provide a set of instructions that were clear and concise.
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Wierman et al. (2014) studied this question.