On Exemplary Scientific Conduct Regarding Submission of Manuscripts to Biomedical Informatics Journals

As the Editors of leading international biomedical informatics journals, the authors report on a recent pattern of improper manuscript submissions to journals in our field. As a guide for future authors, we describe ethical and pragmatic issues related to submitting work for peer-reviewed journal publication. We propose a coordinated approach to the problem that our respective journals will follow. This editorial is being jointly published in the following journals represented by the authors: Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, International Journal of Medical Informatics, Journal of Biomedical Informatics, Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association , and Methods of Information in Medicine .As editors, we have collectively experienced at least one of the following occurrences recently: (1) Concurrent duplicate submissions : The same set of authors submits essentially identical manuscripts to two separate journals concurrently, without disclosure to the editorial staffs of either. The authors may mistakenly believe that it is permissible to do so because the respective journals have minimally overlapping audiences. (2) Serial unaltered submissions (“journal shopping”) : Authors submit a manuscript to one biomedical informatics journal, and, after peer review, it is not accepted for publication, and a critique is provided. The authors do not make any of the changes suggested by the previous review and instead submit the unchanged manuscript immediately to a second journal, without disclosing the existence or results of the previous review by the first journal. (3) Serial minimally altered republication : Authors publish a preliminary manuscript as part of conference proceedings. Mistakenly believing that conference publications do not count as “official” publications (of note, several informatics conference proceedings, such as MEDINFO, MIE, and the AMIA Fall Symposium, are indexed …