Align Your Medical Journal with ICMJE Recommendations

Overview

“Our author guidelines say ‘follow ICMJE’, but our disclosure form is a home-made PDF, we have no trial-registration policy, and reviewers keep asking us what our authorship criteria actually are.” Health-sciences journals are expected by authors, indexing reviewers and funders to follow the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals. Most journals claim alignment; far fewer have policies, forms and workflows that actually match.

NeucitePress reviews your journal section by section against the current Recommendations, rewrites the policies and forms that fall short, takes the drafts through your editorial board, and trains your team to apply them.

Who this is for: medical, clinical and health-sciences journals, particularly those publishing clinical trials, that want their policies to match what they tell authors and indexers.

What’s Included

• Gap analysis against every section of the current ICMJE Recommendations, with a current-state report and prioritized roadmap
• Authorship policy — the four ICMJE authorship criteria, contributorship statements (CRediT), non-author contributor acknowledgment and author-order guidance
• Disclosure and conflict-of-interest workflow — adoption of the ICMJE Disclosure Form, collection workflow, manuscript disclosure section standards and reviewer disclosure process
• Clinical trial policy — prospective registration in a WHO-recognized registry, data-sharing statement requirements, reporting guideline (CONSORT and related) integration and protocol publication guidance
• Rewritten author guidelines, reviewer guidelines, public editorial policies page and submission checklists
• 2-hour training session for the editorial team
• Unlimited revisions to policy documents until your board approves them, and notification of major ICMJE updates for 12 months

How It Works

What Stays With Your Editors

The journal’s editors keep final authority over reviewer selection, editorial assessment and acceptance, and the editorial board approves every policy before it is adopted. NeucitePress runs the assessment, drafting, review and training process.

Important Limitations

• ICMJE publishes recommendations; it is not a certifying body, does not accredit journals, and no longer maintains a list of journals that follow the Recommendations. This service aligns your policies with the Recommendations; it does not confer any ICMJE status or membership.
• Designed for health-sciences journals; other disciplines are better served by the Editorial Policy Suite.
• Covers one journal; portfolio pricing on request.
• NeucitePress supplies the content; publishing it on your website is done by your team, or by NeucitePress at $200 per hour. Form integration with OJS or other submission systems may need additional development.
• Publishing standards guidance, not legal advice. New policies apply to future submissions; retrospective application is the journal’s decision.

Common Questions

Do we need to be an ICMJE member journal?
No. ICMJE membership is limited to a small group of journals. The Recommendations are published for any journal to adopt.

Does this help with MEDLINE, Scopus or Web of Science applications?
Those databases assess editorial policies, and clear authorship, disclosure and trial-registration policies are among the items they look at. Inclusion is decided solely by NLM, Scopus or Web of Science; NeucitePress prepares, remediates and submits and cannot sell inclusion.

How does this relate to COPE?
ICMJE and COPE are complementary. This service covers the ICMJE Recommendations; the Annual COPE / ICMJE Compliance Review audits both. Company-sponsored research is covered separately under GPP 2022.

Every engagement can begin with the Journal Health Check.