Ensure You Contextualize the Patient Population in Manuscripts

Writing a medical publication? Be sure that you follow the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) Guidance [http://www.icmje.org/], the gold-standard.

In May 2022, the ICMJE guidance (Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals) was updated.

The previous ICMJE guidance clearly defined that the patient population needs to be adequately characterized, including age, sex, race, main inclusion/exclusion criteria, and disease under study. In the recent update, guidance was included suggesting that additional information describing how the study sample population relates to the larger population of interest be included.  Many manuscripts tend to focus on their own specific data and miss this contextualization.  

Justin McLaughlin, CEO