The New ICMJE Recommendations

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) has updated and renamed its “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals” that standardise the approach for preparation of manuscripts and that are followed by the majority of biomedical journals.

The most substantive revisions are discussed on the ICMJE website.

Read the new “Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals” (ICMJE Recommendations)

Section 2 of the ‘Manuscript preparation’ section refers to the use of reporting guidelines and EQUATOR resources:

2. Reporting Guidelines

Reporting guidelines have been developed for different study designs; examples include CONSORT (www.consort-statement.org) for randomized trials, STROBE for observational studies (http://strobe-statement.org/), PRISMAfor systematic reviews and meta-analyses (http://prisma-statement.org/), and STARD for studies of diagnostic accuracy (www.stard-statement.org/). Journals are encouraged to ask authors to follow these guidelines because they help authors describe the study in enough detail for it to be evaluated by editors, reviewers, readers, and other re-searchers evaluating the medical literature. Authors of re-view manuscripts are encouraged to describe the methods used for locating, selecting, extracting, and synthesizing data; this is mandatory for systematic reviews. Good sources for reporting guidelines are the EQUATOR Net-work (www.equator-network.org/home/) and the NLM’s Research Reporting Guidelines and Initiatives (www.nlm.nih.gov/services/research_report_guide.htm”