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ICMJE 2025 Recommendations Update

Recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE)

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.

General information on the ICMJE recommendations

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.

January 2025 Update of ICMJE Recommendations

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”:

  • The words “retractions” and “republications” have been deleted from the title of Section III.A, and this section has been renamed as “Corrections and Version Control”. Moreover, clarifications have been added to this paragraph, in particular on the time limit for correcting errors, with the recommendation that that a correction is not necessary when the article was published more than 10 years ago.
  • The words “expressions of concern” and “retraction” have been deleted from the title of Section III.B, which has been renamed as “Scientific Misconduct”.

In Section IV “Manuscript Preparation and Submission”:

  • The responsibility of the authors in ensuring that references are cited accurately (precision and relevance) has been added to Section IV.A.3.gi.

Editorial on predatory journals: how to protect yourselves?

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!

* Current ICMJE Members:

  • Annals of Internal Medicine
  • British Medical Journal (BMJ)
  • Bulletin of the World Health Organization
  • Deutsches Ärzteblatt (German Medical Journal)
  • JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association)
  • Journal of Korean Medical Science
  • المجلة الطبية التونسية (Medical Tunisia)
  • Medwave
  • Nature Medicine
  • The New England Journal of Medicine
  • New Zealand Medical Journal
  • PLOS Medicine
  • The Lancet
  • The U.S. National Library of Medicine
  • The World Association of Medical Editors