Reproducibility failures quietly undermine one of neuroscience's most promising therapeutic tools. Transcranial electrical stimulation — used to modulate cognition, mood, pain, and motor function — has accumulated a large clinical literature, yet comparing studies across labs has remained frustratingly difficult because researchers describe their methods in wildly inconsistent ways. A standardized reporting framework could meaningfully shift what the field can conclude from its own data.
Using a structured Delphi methodology across three iterative rounds, 38 domain experts evaluated an initial pool of 70 candidate reporting items for transcranial electrical stimulation (tES) studies. Consensus was defined through three quantitative thresholds: interquartile deviation below 1.00, positive response rate above 60%, and mean importance rating below 3. Sixty-six items survived this process and were organized into five domains — participants (12 items), stimulation device (9 items), electrodes (12 items), current (12 items), and procedure (25 items). A condensed 26-item essential checklist was also derived for practical use. The resulting RATES checklist is intended to guide both study conduct and peer review.
This development is best understood as infrastructure rather than discovery — the kind of methodological groundwork that only becomes visible when it is absent. The tES reproducibility problem is well-documented: electrode placement, current density, montage geometry, impedance monitoring, and sham protocols vary so substantially across publications that meta-analyses routinely flag heterogeneity as unresolvable. RATES addresses this directly, though its real-world impact will depend entirely on uptake by journals and funders. Similar consensus checklists in other domains — CONSORT for clinical trials, PRISMA for systematic reviews — took years to gain traction and still face compliance gaps. The 38-expert panel is reasonably sized for a Delphi study but skews toward academic research centers, potentially underrepresenting clinical translation contexts. This is incremental but genuinely necessary work: the kind that makes future discoveries interpretable.