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Medicine & Health Sciences: Clinical research, public health, biomedical research, health services, and healthcare practice.
In medicine and the health sciences, editors and reviewers read a manuscript as the record of a study. They check whether the design, participants, interventions, outcomes, and analyses are reported fully enough to be appraised, repeated, or included in a later systematic review. Much of that expectation is written down in reporting guidelines, the ICMJE Recommendations (external link), and each journal’s instructions for authors.
Preparation is therefore as much about completeness and consistency as about prose. Statements on ethics approval, consent, trial registration, funding, competing interests, and data sharing are assessed alongside the science, and gaps in them can hold up a submission before peer review begins. This page outlines what the field typically expects; how those expectations apply to your manuscript depends on the study design and the target journal.
Most health journals expect authors to follow the reporting guideline for their design: CONSORT for randomized trials, STROBE for observational studies, PRISMA for systematic reviews, CARE for case reports, and many others collected by the EQUATOR Network (external link). Journals often ask for the completed checklist at submission, with page or section references showing where each item appears.
Studies involving people usually need a statement naming the approving ethics committee or institutional review board, the approval reference, and how consent was obtained or why it was waived. The wording should match what the committee approved. Editing can make the statement clearer, but it cannot supply or alter approval details.
Under the ICMJE clinical trials policy (external link), member journals expect trials to be registered in a public registry at or before the time participants are first enrolled. ICMJE also asks trial reports to include a data sharing statement covering whether deidentified participant data will be shared, which data, when, and under what conditions.
Drug names (generic rather than brand names, as many journals request), diagnostic criteria, outcome definitions, and units need to stay identical across the abstract, text, tables, and figure legends. Abbreviations are usually defined at first use in both the abstract and the main text, and many journals discourage nonstandard abbreviations altogether.
Funding and competing interests are commonly declared on the ICMJE disclosure form (external link) or a journal’s equivalent. Case reports and clinical images carry a separate obligation: the ICMJE guidance on protecting research participants (external link) advises against publishing identifying details unless they are essential, notes that masking the eye region does not make a photograph anonymous, and calls for written consent where a patient could be identified.
Checklists are often completed early, and the cited page numbers drift as the text is revised. Editors notice when an item marked as reported cannot be found, or when the numbers in a flow diagram differ from those in the results.
Sample sizes, percentages, and effect estimates can diverge between the abstract, tables, and text after several rounds of analysis. In clinical research these discrepancies raise questions about data integrity, even when the cause is only an outdated draft.
Verbs such as “reduces” or “prevents” are routinely questioned when the design supports association only. Matching the strength of the wording to the design is one of the most common revision requests in health journals.
A missing registration number, an ethics statement without an approval reference, or a data sharing statement that commits to nothing specific can lead a journal to return a manuscript before review. Each journal’s instructions set out which statements it needs and where they belong.
Many health journals serve both practitioners and researchers. The introduction needs to establish clinical relevance quickly, while the methods must satisfy readers who will appraise risk of bias line by line.
More on this in how to choose a journal beyond its impact factor.
Checks that clinical terminology, abbreviations, and reported numbers stay consistent across the abstract, text, tables, and figure legends.
Prepares structured abstracts, declaration sections, and references to the target journal’s instructions, and cross-checks checklist page references against the final text.
Compares journals by readership, article types, ICMJE alignment, indexing, and data sharing policy before you commit to a submission.
Helps organize point-by-point responses when reviewers ask for added analyses, more cautious causal language, or missing reporting items.
Official guidance worth reading alongside your target journal’s instructions.
A practical, area-by-area checklist for the final stage before submission, from author guidelines and declarations to reporting guidelines, ORCID, and the last read-through.
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Not formally, but following the relevant guideline still helps. Reviewers in health research often appraise manuscripts against CONSORT, STROBE, PRISMA, or similar standards whether or not the journal requires the checklist, so reporting those items makes the study easier to assess. The EQUATOR Network (external link) lists guidelines by study design.
Editing can make these statements clearer and place them where the journal expects them. It cannot create approval references, registration numbers, or consent that did not exist, and every detail must match your records. Questions about whether a study needed approval belong with your ethics committee or institution.
Policies differ. ICMJE expects registration at or before first enrollment and warns that trials registered late risk being inadmissible to its member journals; where an exception is made, authors are asked to state when the trial was registered and why registration was delayed. Check the target journal’s policy and report the registration date accurately.
Suitability is confirmed during an initial consultation, once the study design, specialty, length, and target journal are known. If a manuscript needs subject knowledge that is not available for the project, that is said plainly before any work is agreed. Start with a short description of your study.
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