Reviews of the measurement properties are emerging as the preferred source of evidence to inform the selection of an outcome measurement instrument for research or clinical practice[[1], [2], [3], [4], [5]]. OMERACT (Outcome Measurement in Rheumatology), uses the results of these reviews as the evidence base to select instruments that represent a domain in a Core Outcome Set (COS) [6,7]. A COS reflects the minimum set of outcomes to be included in all clinical trials or longitudinal outcome studies in an area, thus allowing for better communication between trials and offering more confidence in meta-analyses.

Reviews of measurement properties are also resource intensive and challenging. The instrument selection process used by OMERACT has been described in detail elsewhere [5,6]. It follows the same tenets as other systematic reviews [6,8,9]: 1) a clear research question, 2) a thorough review of the literature to identify the evidence, 3) a check of the quality of the methods used in included studies in order to check for risk of bias in the estimation of the measurement property, 4) extraction of summary data and 5) a synthesis of the findings.

Additional considerations add to the complexity of conducting reviews of measurement properties. First, multiple parallel reviews may run simultaneously, with separate evaluations for each measurement property. Second, there is an additional step of comparing the results of measurement property standards to accepted standards of performance (e.g. thresholds for “good” validity or reliability). Finally, conclusions (synthesis) need to be made for each measurement property before a decision is made for the instrument as a whole. Consequently, a review of measurement properties evaluates and synthesizes a sizeable amount of information. Whilst end users such as (measurement) researchers might be familiar with the complexities of this type of review, often the audience for these reviews intend to apply the results to complete core outcome sets, or to include in their research (such as clinical trials or implementation studies). The former expect transparent accounting of the methods and rigour used in the review; the latter requires results to be presented in a manner that facilitates accurate interpretation of what was done to reach the final conclusions. A knowledge translation (KT) tool might help achieve both.

To date, reviews of measurement properties have varied in how they represent their findings, with some providing large narrative tables [10], and others assigning specific numeric scores to indicate the quality of an instrument [[11], [12], [13]] . Reporting standards recently published encourage the adoption of structured, transparent reporting of measurement property reviews [14]. To the best of our knowledge, none have tackled the optimal way results could be reported to show the elements of the review process so that the report is “assisting the end user in understanding how and why specific recommendations were made”[15].

The focus of this manuscript is on the development of a KT tool called the SOMP (Summary of Measurement Properties) table used to communicate the results of a review of measurement properties for an outcome measurement instrument.