Authors should remove information from photographs and manuscripts that might identify a patient. Where this is impossible, submissions must be accompanied by a written release from the patient. One option is the Science Insights® Release Form for Photographs of Identifiable Patients.

The ICMJE and, therefore, Science Insights® require investigators to register trials in acceptable clinical trial registries before the onset of patient enrollment. Manuscripts describing the primary results of nonregistered trials will be turned away prior to peer review.

The ICMJE requires that “any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention and comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome” must be registered before the start of patient enrollment. To be acceptable, a registry must be owned by a not-for-profit entity, be publicly accessible, and contain the 20 fields required by the World Health Organization (WHO). View a list of acceptable registries on the WHO website.

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Each manuscript will be checked on submission to determine whether the study needed registration, and, if registered, whether the registration is complete and meaningful. No manuscript will enter the editorial process until it has passed this screen.

Only pilot (phase 1) trials that began on or after July 1, 2008, must be registered before first patient enrollment.

WHO maintains a list of acceptable registries. Besides, ICMJE will accept registration in any of the primary registries that participate in the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP).

Data obtained by microarray must be submitted to a repository such as the Gene Expression Omnibus or ArrayExpress before manuscript submission. Raw and transformed datasets for each microarray experiment must be provided through the repository. The accession number for each experiment or series must be provided in the Methods section of a manuscript. If data are password-protected, the user name and password must be provided in both the cover letter and the Methods section of the manuscript at the time of submission. A criterion of publication is full access to the relevant datasets through a publicly accessible repository.