审稿意见 小心方法学部分的指南引用给自己埋坑

展示一个近期遇到的审稿意见，审稿人是针对研究的方法学部分提的。

Methods: Although the present study was a prospective cohort, the ESC Guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of heart failure which was used for eligibility assessment was established in the 2021.

审稿人的问题意思是

研究是一个12年到19年的前瞻性队列，方法学部分写的指南用的是2021年的心衰指南。

确实有点奇怪了，纳入的人群是从2012年~2019年的，用的指南是2021年的，就看起来好像有点像回顾性的研究。

如果是前瞻性的，往前看的话，应该用这个研究最开始的时候的指南，比如说2008年有心衰的指南，2016年又更新了心衰的指南，那么2012-2016就要用2008年的指南，然后2016年以后用的是新的2016年心衰指南。

下面展示一下给审稿人的回复

Thank you for your valuable comments on our study. We acknowledge that we made a mistake when writing the manuscript. While our study was indeed conducted as a prospective observational cohort study between 2012 and 2019, we inadvertently wrote this 2021 guideline in our manuscript. We apologize for this oversight and the confusion it may have caused.

To rectify this error, we would like to clarify that the diagnostic criteria used in our study were based on the ESC guidelines available at the time of patient inclusion. We sincerely appreciate your attention to detail and thank you for bringing this to our attention. We have revised this description in the manuscript. The revised content related to the question is as follows (page xx, lines xx):填写文中相应修改的内容。

总结一下，如果是回顾性队列的话，指南可以用研究人群纳入时间点以后的指南；如果是前瞻性队列的话，指南还应该使用研究开始之前的指南，中间如果有指南的更新的话，注意更新的时间截点指南的使用。

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