title: Developing a set of guidelines for your research field: a practical approach.
abstract: Since 2008, the autophagy community has periodically published a set of guidelines, currently titled "Guidelines for the Use and Interpretation of Assays for Monitoring Autophagy." The newest version of the guidelines was published in 2016. There are many reasons for establishing a set of guidelines in a given research field. This Perspective explores some of these reasons, including standardizing nomenclature for better communication, improving reproducibility, and making it easier for newcomers to enter the field. It also includes the approach I have used to generate and update the guidelines that are now widely used in the autophagy field. The suggestions are not meant to be formulaic, and the method is certainly not perfect. Instead, this should be viewed as a starting set of, well, guidelines.
authors.affiliation: Life Sciences Institute, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2216 klionsky@umich.edu.
authors.forename: Daniel J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Klionsky
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001343:Autophagy; D001681:Biological Assay; D035843:Biomedical Research / Q000592:standards*; D055785:Gene Knockdown Techniques; D049452:Green Fluorescent Proteins / Q000235:genetics / Q000378:metabolism; D017408:Guidelines as Topic; D006801:Humans; D015203:Reproducibility of Results
chemical_list: D049452:Green Fluorescent Proteins