In 1978, editors of medical journal first met informally in Vancouver British Colombia with the intention, objective or goal of establishing guidelines for the format of manuscript submitted to their journals.

With the passage of time or you may say gradually, this group expanded and became known as International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) is not an open membership organization.

Since 1978, multiple uniform requirements of Manuscripts, that are submitted to be published in the biomedical journals, have been produced by ICMJE.

The entire uniform requirements were revised in1997. Then sections were updated in 1999, and May 2000.

In May 2001, the selection was revised by ICMJE related to potential conflicts of interest. In 2003 the entire document was again revised and reorganized by the ICMJE.

The latest revision was prepared by the committee in July 2005. These recommendations or you may advices, are based largely or you may say mainly on the experience of some editors and authors and are a collective effort over the past many years.

Primarily it was intended to help authors and also help to create accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

The objective of these uniform requirements was reporting in manuscripts submitted for publication to any journal besides offering ease in editing.

Preparing a Manuscript: These guidelines provide adequate information for the authors how to prepare the manuscript for submission to biomedical journals.

It covers general principles, details about the Title Page, Conflict of Interest, Abstracts and Key Words, Discussion , Methodology, Introduction, Results and References.

Details are also provided about Tables, Illustrations, and Legends for figures or illustrations, Units of measurement, abbreviation and symbols.

While submitting the manuscript to the biomedical journals, and a Letter of Undertaking confirming its exclusive submission to that particular journal and willingness to pay publication charges if the respective journal has such a policy.

If the manuscript had been earlier submitted to another journal and was rejected, it is helpful to include previous editor and reviewer’s comments along with the author’s response to those comments as it will help expedite the review process faster.

Authorship: These ICMJE guidelines have clearly laid down the criteria for authorship. In case of large, multicenter group has conducted the study, the group is supposed to identify the individuals who accept the direct responsibility for the manuscript. Other members of the group are usually listed in acknowledgements.

Problems faced by Editors: Editing a peer reviewed medical journal particularly in less developed countries is a very arduous and stressful job.

The editors are faced with numerous problems which includes substandard quality of submissions, financial constraints, non-availability of good quality peer reviewers, duplicate submissions and so on.

If any journal can follow them in totality it will be ideal but as we know, ideal is not all the time feasible and practical in less developed countries faced with lot of financial constraints and lack of other facilities, resources.

The ground realities are absolutely different in part of the world. Hence biomedical journals from these countries should strive or you may say struggle to follow them as much as possible.

Medical Writing in most of these less developed countries is not well established and majority of the writers do it under compulsion to meet the requirements of selection or promotion.

This to has picked up during the last ten years when institutions like “Pakistan Medical and Dental Council” and another famous one i.e. Higher Education Commission more recently, has made it compulsory for faculty selection and promotions.

As stated or described earlier, the main or major objective of these Uniform Requirements by the ICMJE is to improve the quality of the manuscripts.

Many national organizations in various countries have similar objectives when it comes to scientific research and medical writing.

For example in Pakistan, the Pakistan Medical and Dental Council has tried to d that but could not achieve the desired objective because of half hearted efforts.

At present it has recognizes over forty medical and dental journals but a large number of them are no more published regularly. It also produced its own guidelines for biomedical journals which is a copy of the ICMJE guidelines.

Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts