January 31, 2025
The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) is a working group of editors from general medical journals*. Each year, its members update the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.
Each medical writer in our team follows the recommendations developed by the ICMJE to write manuscripts for peer-reviewed journals, in parallel with the appropriate study-specific EQUATOR (Enhancing the QUALITY and Transparency Of health Research) guidelines and the instructions to authors for the target journal. The January 2025 update of the ICMJE recommendations has just been published.
The ICMJE recommendations take stock of “best practice and ethical standards in the conduct and reporting of research and other material published in medical journals”, and “help authors, editors, and other individuals involved in peer review and biomedical publishing create and distribute accurate, clear, reproducible, and unbiased medical journal articles.”
These recommendations include details of the roles and responsibilities of authors, contributors, reviewers, editors, publishers, and content owners, as well as of the publishing and editorial issues related to publication in medical journals. The ICMJE recommendations also provide guidelines on the preparation and submission of manuscripts, which should be followed by authors alongside the specific instructions for their target peer-reviewed journal.
In addition to the member journals*, many other journals state that they follow the ICMJE recommendations. A list of these journals can be found on the ICMJE website (https://www.icmje.org/journals-following-the-icmje-recommendations/). The list is prepared following requests from editors who have contacted the ICMJE, but its completeness and accuracy is not verified by the ICMJE, as specified on the website.
An annotated version of the January 2025 update of the ICMJE recommendations provides a quick overview of changes made since the previous update in January 2024.
Several changes have been made to Section II.C. regarding “Responsibilities in the Submission Peer Review Process”:
In Section III “Publishing and Editorial Issues Related to Publication in Medical Journals”:
In Section IV “Manuscript Preparation and Submission”:
The official PDF of the current ICMJE recommendations can be downloaded from the ICMJE website: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/
Translations are available at: https://www.icmje.org/recommendations/translations/
In parallel with the update of these recommendations, the ICMJE has also published an editorial in each of its member journals to highlight the dangers posed by predatory journals and pseudo-journals: Predatory Journals — What Can We Do to Protect Their Prey?
These entities falsely present themselves as scholarly journals to deliberately encourage authors to submit their work and to pay the associated fees. Unfortunately, predatory journals and pseudo-journals are not uncommon: an estimate from 2021 identified more than 15,000 potentially illegitimate journals!
Our medical writing team recommends reading this editorial in which the ICMJE members specify the strategies used by these journals, call on authors to be vigilant, and provide advice on how to choose a target journal, such as by consulting the ThinkCheckSubmit.org website. They also indicate what institutions and funders, as well as journal editors and publishers, can do to help authors avoid falling into the clutches of predatory journals and pseudo-journals.
* Current ICMJE Members: