ICMJE recommendations

The ICMJE recommendations (full title, Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals) are a set of guidelines produced by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors for standardising the ethics, preparation and formatting of manuscripts submitted for publication by biomedical journals. Compliance with the ICMJE Recommendations is required by most leading biomedical journals. As of 2017, over ~3274 journals worldwide followed the Uniform Requirements.

The recommendations were formerly called the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (abbreviated URMs and often shortened to Uniform Requirements).

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) was originally known as the Vancouver Group, after the location of their first meeting in Vancouver, British Columbia in Canada. Current members of the ICMJE are:

The citation style recommended by the ICMJE Recommendations, which is also known as the Vancouver system, is the style used by the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), codified in Citing Medicine.

References are numbered consecutively in order of appearance in the text – they are identified by Arabic numerals enclosed in parentheses.

Example of a journal citation:

URM includes a mandate for manuscripts describing human interventional trials to register a trial in a clinical trial registry (e.g., ClinicalTrials.gov) and to include the trial registration ID in the abstract of the article. The URM also requires that this registration is done prior enrolling the first participant. A study of five high impact factor journals (founders of ICMJE) showed that only 89% of published articles (articles published during 2010-2011; about trials that completed in 2008) were properly registered prior enrolling the first participant.

The ICMJE also developed a uniform format for disclosure of competing interests in journal articles.

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