Reply: How is the compliance of the published studies on WHO5 recommendations for basic semen analysis?

Abstract

Sir, We thank Zhang and Dong (2023) for their interest in our work and their valuable comments. We agree with the authors that our findings are ‘of great clinical significance for solving the problem of basic semen analysis standardization’ and that following the up-to-date evidence-based recommendations provided by the WHO manual for semen analysis is critically important if you want to minimize technical errors when assessing the different semen characteristics ( Vasconcelos et al., 2022). As the authors note, our article focused on manuscripts published in Human Reproduction and Fertility & Sterility only. We agree with the authors that our finding that the majority of manuscripts did not fully illustrate that they followed WHO recommendations for semen analysis, despite citing that they did, may be just the tip of the iceberg, with the problem likely to be present in manuscripts published in other human reproductive biomedicine journals. We chose to focus on the two leading journals first to see whether (i) we could identify a problem with transparent reporting of the technical methods used to perform a semen analysis and (ii) whether future research is therefore needed. Given our findings, we therefore consider further study of manuscripts published in other human reproductive biomedicine journals, including the ones highlighted by Zhang and Dong (2023), an important area of research as it will allow us to gauge fully the extent of the problem.