Uniform guidelines for biomedical journals

The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (IJCME) is a group of science editors from 12 different journals. They have defined a standard set of rules and guidelines for preparing documents for their journals.

These rules are called the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals, and cover a number of areas, including the authorship of papers, conflicts of interest, editorial policy and the formatting of documents.

The IJCME website is a really good resource for all scientists who write papers, from students to professors. We recommend that all researchers should read the website and become familiar with these guidelines.

Most medical and biomedical journals request that scientists submitting papers to their journals follow all (or most) of the Uniform Requirements.

The “Preparing a Manuscript for Submission to a Biomedical Journal” section provides instructions for basic document formatting and contains a detailed list of items that should be included in each paper. The full document is available here.

We suggest you take some time to read the full document, as it is very useful and informative.  The guidelines are similar to the instructions to authors for most biomedical journals.

However, you should always check your journal’s instructions to authors, and make sure your document follows the journal’s instructions exactly.