 Hello, ladies and gentlemen. It is a pleasure to be with you today for the presentation of the ICMJE Guidelines for Writing a Medical Research Paper. My name is Despina Sanadu. I'm a molecular biologist in training. I did my PhD at the University of Cambridge and I worked as an instructor at the Harvard Medical School. It has been now a couple of decades that I have been actively involved in research and scientific writing and publishing. And with these credentials, I would like to share with you my experiences and knowledge on this topic. So I will start by giving you a few words on today's agenda. We will talk about the importance of international guidelines and recommendations. We will talk about a brief introduction to the ICMJE Guidelines and then proceed to the specific recommendations for manuscript preparation, conducting clinical trials, research and publication ethics and then information on the guidelines for submission and peer review. So let's start with the importance of international guidelines and recommendations. What are specifically medical guidelines? They're basically simple structured tools which involve recommendations, checklists, flow charts, et cetera, that have been developed by experts in their respective fields, using explicit methodologies for medical researchers and healthcare professionals in order for them to be able to conduct and report a specific type of research in the best possible way. Now, there's a number of different healthcare and medical editorial associations, each one specializing on a slightly different area and all of them together, offering complementary information and tools for all of you actively involved in healthcare and medical research to be able to utilize to make life easier and to make the quality of your work significantly improved. So we have the, since 2015, the International Society for Medical Publication Professionals which has issued recommendations regarding the ethics that the ethics guidelines, the ethical rules that should be set in place when clinical trials are implemented by the academia and different companies. We have the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors which we will be talking a lot about today since 2017, which has issued a range of different recommendations about conducting, writing, publishing, reviewing medical research. The World Association of Medical Editors in 2017 has issued recommendations about how to avoid predatory and pseudo journals. 2018, we have the Enhancing the Quality and Transparency of Health Research Network or Equator, and we will be touching on that shortly. It contains a broad range of recommendations on how to present structure and present different types of research studies, valuable tools that it is very important for you to be aware of and now know how to use. And then we have the Committee on Publication Ethics or COPE, which has issued a number of ethics-related recommendations. So I will now like to zoom in and elaborate on the ICMJE guidelines and recommendations starting with an introduction on what's available there for you to use. So ICMJE is a small working group of general medical journal editors whose participants meet annually and fund their own work on the recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work in medical journals. Why are we emphasizing ICMJE and why are we devoting an entire presentation to that? It's because this organization embraces the world's finest medical journals, including the Lancet, British Journal of Medicine, the New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, Annals of Internal Medicine, et cetera. The statements, policies, and guidelines that are formulated by ICMJE are widely adopted and recommended by these and many more scientific journals internationally. And this is all in an effort to assist the medical community to assist you in unifying standards for publication of medical manuscripts. The purpose of the ICMJE recommendations includes the following. First of all, they've been developed to ensure the implementation of best practices and ethics standards while conducting reporting, editing, and publishing medical research. These guidelines are aimed at helping the authors as well as the editors and the peer reviewers to distribute accurate, clear, reproducible, and unbiased information. It is strongly recommended that these guidelines are followed along with the individual journals' instructions for authors in order to maximize quality consistency and ensuring uniformity of standards across the board in the medical field. If you're interested in the journals that follow the ICMJE recommendations, you can find this list in the link provided on this slide. Now let's look at some general guidelines. When we go about putting together a manuscript for a journal that we have selected to submit our work to, first of all, we need to consider the specific journals' editorial guidelines, carefully read and familiar with the submission procedures, and be aware and take into consideration the copyright and ethical guidelines. Now the ICMJE recommends that journals should encourage authors to follow specific reporting guidelines for different types of studies. And already there is a number of different recommendations and guidelines on how to implement a research study and present the findings of these studies. Now, as you are well aware, there is a number of different types of medical research. And in this diagram, you can see the presentation of the majority of these different types, the different categories. So medical research can be divided in primary research and secondary research. By primary research, we mean the research that generates primary data. And this can be basic research, clinical research or epidemiological research. Now, each one of these categories, as you can see on your slide, is subdivided in a number of different types or subtypes of medical research. For each one of those, there are different recommendations and guidelines as to how these studies should be structured, specific considerations to be aware of, how the data from these studies should be reported. And then we have the secondary research, which largely involves meta-analysis, reviews and systematic reviews. Again, there are specific recommendations for the secondary research type of studies. Now, ICMGE recommends using the appropriate guidelines, looking into the specific guidelines for the different types of research. And this information can be found, grouped together in a very easy and straightforward for you to use database, the one provided by the Equator Network, the one we mentioned just earlier. So if you log into, if you go to their website, what you will find in the beginning is a search tool, a very useful search tool where you can indicate the type of study that you're interested in, the clinical area or the section of the report, or use free text to search for what recommendations are already available out there to help you in the presentation of your study, in the structure of your study and presentation of your study. So on the right-hand side of this slide, you can see examples of a series of different reporting guidelines that are available. But if you actually try using this tool, you will come to realize that there are many more recommendations out there which very much help all of us in research to do our work even better and in a uniform fashion. Now, if you click on each one of these recommendations, you will find detailed information. For example, if you click on, I picked here the Prisma 2020 statement, which is an updated guideline for reporting systematic reviews. You will find the recommendations for how to report, how to prepare your manuscript, reporting the findings from a systematic review that you have done. Now, another tool that is available to search for international recommendations and guidelines is through the NIH, the National Institute of Health and specifically the National Library of Medicine. So if you go to this website, you can see how you can find by organization or guideline different types of guidelines, again, for the different types of studies. So this is an additional tool that I believe you will find useful. An example, if you click on Moose, these would be recommendations for observational studies in epidemiology. You will find the fine details for how to report such findings. Now, let's move a step ahead and look into the ICMGE recommendations for manuscript preparation. So once you've become familiar with the guidelines and recommendations for your specific type of research, then comes the point where you need to structure your manuscript. So how do we go about doing this? When structuring your research paper, you have the title, the abstract, the introduction methodology results, discussion, conclusion, and bibliography. I'm sure most of you are familiar with these different sections of a manuscript. This is what the final outcome will look like. When it comes, however, to preparing your manuscript, the order of writing the different sections is somewhat different and it is advisable to use the order presented in this slide. So we start with the methodology, then we write the results, the introduction, then the discussion, then the conclusions, and at the very end, it is recommended to write the title and the abstract. Let's look at one of those points in more detail. When it comes to starting with the methodology, what do we put in this section? So the methodology must include details about any animal models that have been used or any biological material or any patients that were included in the study. If we're talking about animal models, we need the specifics of this animal model, how it was generated, how it was bred, under what conditions it was kept, what it was fed, the age of the animals that were used for the study, the gender, and so on and so forth. If we're talking about biological material, we need to specify when, where, and how, how it was absorbed and exactly how it was processed. Also we need to ensure that all ethical approvals were in place for any one of these experiments. If we're talking about studies on patients, then we need to include demographics, we need to include all the clinical characteristics, we need to specify inclusion and exclusion criteria from the study. Again, ensure that we have worked and performed our study in accordance with all the necessary ethics guidelines and regulations in the country where the project is implemented. And then we proceed to describe in as much detail as possible the experimental or sampling design. We need to specifically mention the agents that were used, including the brands, concentrations of the different reagents and compounds that were used, incubation times, temperatures, et cetera. You need to be very detailed to the extent that if someone wanted to reproduce your work at a different time, in a different lab, in a different part of the world, they could follow your instructions as provided in the methodology section and perform the same study and obtain the same result. So this is why it's so important to provide full details. When it comes to equipment, you need to provide details for any advanced equipment that you used, any software, advanced software that you used and the settings that you used for your study. Also, if data analysis were used, you need to specify how it was done, the software, the tools, the algorithms, or if there was statistical analysis, again, all the specifics about what you chose to use, including threshold, et cetera. Once you've completed the methodology section, it's time to write the results. The results must include distinct sections for each subset of experiments, for each subset of findings. So each section should have a clear aim of the subset of experiments. So why did you do this set of experiments? What was the rationale of this strategy? Why you chose to do this? How you applied the methodology for the specific set of experiments to answer the specific question and then a detailed description of your observations. Now, it is extremely important when it comes to presenting your observations that this is done in the most objective and descriptive manner possible. So the results must include figures and tables and diagrams depending on what is best to show your data. It's up to you to choose the best format to demonstrate what your findings were. Very important that you ensure highest quality, highest resolution of any photos and figures, absolutely no manipulation of photos. They need to be exactly as you obtain them, exactly as you saw your results. You need to be careful of the appropriate size and choice of colors. And for that, you need to take into consideration the requirements of the journal you will be submitting your manuscript to. In keeping in mind that diagrams are often a very useful tool if used appropriately. Now, if you have a lot of data and not everything can fit in the main body of the manuscript, you can include it as supplementary material. And each journal has its different guidelines about how to include supplementary material. But it is the location where you pretty much have unlimited space for any additional information data you want to provide to the readers. Another consideration that I would like to touch on is depositing your raw data to publicly available databases. And for some types of data, this is strongly recommended or even required by specific journals. Prime example of that would be omics data, genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics data, where some journals actually require that you submit the raw files to public databases before submitting your manuscript. Some quick tips for authors for the results section include only those results that are relevant to your research question. It is often tempting, especially for younger scientists to include every single experiment and every single piece of data they've generated when preparing their manuscript. Now, this is not always the best for your readers who need to see a concrete story. So ensure that you have a clear structure of your manuscript before you start the question. I'll decide right up front which of all your data are well suited into the story you will be presenting. When it comes to presenting your results, choose the best suited order. You don't necessarily have to present them in the order you generated them. Sometimes you have to consider presenting them in a different order that will make more sense to the readers. Use graphs as an alternative to tables that may have too many records and not be very reader-friendly. Avoid duplicating information in tables, graphs, or figures, and the text. So make sure that the information is presented once in a manuscript, not in multiple places in a manuscript. Choose separate reporting of data by demographic variables such as age and gender. And provide a conclusive statement based on the observations of each section. So once you've presented all your data and your observations, it's very reader-friendly to have a summary or a concluding remark at the end of each results section. Once you're done with the results, it is recommended that you go ahead and write the introduction. The introduction needs to explain why your specific research project matters, to explain why the scientific question you pursued was important and how answering it with the work that you did advances the respective field forward. So the introduction must include the appropriate background of the topic, you must explain what is the bigger problem that you're trying to address with your work and why this is important. You need to summarize the information that's available to date and indicate what are the major open questions in this field. Then you specify the aims and hypothesis of your study and of course include throughout your introduction all appropriate citations. It's a fine balance between having too little which would suggest that you're not well aware of the literature in this field and the other end of the spectrum which is including too many which will overwhelm your reader and will probably go over the limits for citations that different journals have. Something to be aware of when you start writing a manuscript. Once you're done with your introduction, it's time to put together your discussion. This is the section that will encapsulate the study design and main outcomes in an initial paragraph and then it will go on to elaborate on the significance and implications of your findings. So individual paragraphs should detail different major outcomes of your work so you will have multiple paragraphs each one discussing each of your major findings. It's important to include a discussion on related studies, how they compare to yours, how their findings compare to yours, if they're consistent, if they're disagreements, how they complement each other and how altogether they advance the field forward. Remember to discuss any unexpected findings. Try to give explanations for potential discrepancies that may be observed. And some quick tips to bear in mind are summarized in this slide. For the discussion, it's helpful to begin by briefly summarizing the main findings and call plausible explanations for them. Differentiate between and explain results that have clinical and statistical significance. Avoid statements on economic benefits and costs unless the manuscript includes the appropriate economic data and analysis. So try to remain focused on discussing your actual observations, your actual data. Discuss the influence or association of variables such as ethnicity, sex, and or gender on your findings and emphasize the new and important aspects of your study along with the implications of these findings for future research. This is a very important point because this is what will help the reader appreciate the greater implications of your work for their respective field and also provide them with the vision of how this will evolve in the years to come. Avoid claiming priority or alluding to work that has not been completed and avoid exaggerating the significance of your observations. So again, it's a fine balance between saying too little and saying too much about the significance of your findings. You need to be as objective and accurate as possible. At the end, closer to the end of the discussion, we often include a limitation section which is very useful for the reader. Limitations very refer to issues related to the study design, the study population, sample size, study duration, the factors that were evaluated, limitations of the methodology, the number of replicates, the materials and so on and so forth. You know best what the limitations were for your study and it's important to be upfront and discuss these limitations, why they had to be this way, the fact that you are aware of them and how this may interfere with your observations. Now at the end of the discussion, we have the conclusion section that should summarize the key findings and highlight their short, medium and long-term implications in the respective medical and scientific fields. The other section, very important section that one needs to compile is the abstract. The abstract must convince the reader to keep reading. So it's very important that you put together an abstract that's objective, informative, but at the same time exciting. It must include key points from the background rationale methodology, results and conclusions in a way the abstract is a miniature manuscript if you want. Make sure to provide sufficient detail for the reader to be able to pre-create, talks about, but at the same time, make sure that it's lavery differently. Remember that different journals have different limits for abstract size as well as abstract structure and keep these recommendations and guidelines in mind when you prepare your abstract. Then is the right time to consider what the title of your manuscript will be. Remember that title is the reader's first impression of a research paper. It must be concise, accurate, original, captivating and include field-specific keywords. Usually the title is where the most important finding is explicitly stated. Now when preparing the title page, as you're coming closer to your submission, remember that the title page will need to have author information. So the different authors in the agreed order from first to last corresponding author indication, whether there's equal contribution by some of the authors, you must provide the full details of the department institution, contact information, email, et cetera, as well as the author's ORSID ID. Then we have the disclaimers on sources of support. We need to be clearly stated, indicated, mention funding sources or anything else that was provided to you in order to perform your work. Indicate the word count, the number of figures and tables and ICMJE encourages journals to adopt the uniform disclosure form, which is developed for disclosure of relationships and activities. So all this information will be clearly provided to you, requested by you, by each journal. So the journal that you choose to submit to. Make sure you read their instructions and follow them closely. Now we have the references section, where authors need to provide direct references to the original research sources for any information that any data that they're citing. So then we have different kinds of references. If you want, there are references to papers that have been accepted and published. This is the most common form of references used. But there are also cases where we have manuscripts that have been accepted, but not yet published. There may be in press or forthcoming and this is indicated as such because you don't yet have the full details to provide in the bibliography section. There's manuscripts that have been submitted but not accepted yet. And there you can state these manuscripts are in submission. And then there's research that has been performed other individuals that has not yet reached the point of being included in a manuscript, but that has been communicated to you and you have requested and obtained permission to mention it, written permission. So in such cases, which are quite rare, but in such cases, you need to indicate whose observations these were, that you have written permission to mention them and you can indicate that these are unpublished observations courtesy of professor, doctor, so and so. ICMG has a list of dos and don'ts when it comes to putting together the references section. So it recommends that authors, peer reviewers and editors do not use references for promoting self-interests. This means that the references you choose to include in a manuscript must be there because they are an excellent fit to the content of the manuscript and not for any other personal advancement, promotion or any other matter that's of self-interest. Authors should refrain from citing articles published in predatory and pseudo journals. They should avoid citing personal communication unless it is essential information and it is unavailable from a public source. You should be careful to avoid citation errors. So make sure that you verify references using official electronic bibliographic sources such as PubMed and make sure that you go for the original source. Now, some recommendations by ICMGE that go beyond the actual manuscript preparation but are valuable for implementing your studies in an appropriate fashion so that the data can be included in your manuscript and published. So let's look at some recommendations for conducting clinical trials. According to ICMGE, a clinical trial is any research project that prospectively assigns people or a group of people to an intervention with or without comparison or control groups to study the relationship between a health-related intervention and a health outcome. Now, ICMGE has a clinical trial registration policy that's quite specific and very useful. It recommends that all medical journals ensure that clinical trials are registered in a public trial registry at or before the time of first patient enrollment as a mandatory condition for publication. ICMGE accepts publicly accessible registration in any registry that is a primary register of the WHO, the World Health Organization, International Clinical Trials Registry Platform or in clinicaltrials.gov. Secondary data analysis of primary clinical trials should not be registered as a separate clinical trial and authors are encouraged to include a statement indicating that results have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal, wherever this is the case. Now, there is a number of different clinical trial registries, the ones that are accepted by ICMGE include the ones shown in your slides, so clinicaltrials.gov, the ISRCTN registry and CTR and so on and so forth. There's a number of different registries one can use depending on their preferences. The links, web links are available here and welcome to use them and surf on their websites to become familiar with how they work and what they require for registering a clinical trial. Now, let's look at the ICMGE recommendations for authorship. Once you have prepared your project, completed your project, prepared your manuscript, ensure that your clinical trial has been registered and everything is in place. Some important considerations and recommendations. Now, authorship is an important matter and close to heart to all those who are involved in research because it's a way to attribute publications to authors. It has direct academic, social and financial implications. It conveys responsibility, endorses ethics and integrity of your work. It's an integral component of an academic, a scientific and often a medical career. Therefore it is very important to be careful how authorship is given under what circumstances to individuals. According to ICMGE, all authors share responsibility and accountability for the published content of a manuscript. Therefore, it is important that all the authors are in agreements to be accountable for all aspects of the work that is being published. It's important that significant contributions to the conception or design of the research idea or acquisition and analysis or interpretation of data for the project is acknowledged in the form of authorship. So anyone who has been part of any of these steps should have the right to be an author on the manuscript. Additionally, individuals who have been involved in drafting the manuscript or revising it critically for crucial intellectual content should also be included as authors. This does not include individuals who have checked for grammar errors or editing errors or the use of English, for example. This would be considered important but minor intellectual contributions. And therefore these individuals would not be entitled by this contribution alone to become authors on a manuscript. And of course, in order to be an author on the manuscript, one needs to provide consent on the final version of the manuscript to be published. So they must have read the final version and confirm that they agree with all the work that has been done, the way it's presented, the way it's interpreted and the way the manuscript is structured. Another section where ICMJE has specific recommendations is about research ethics and publication ethics. Let's look at with more detail some of these points. Now, fundamental principles of research ethics in general include honesty, objectivity, integrity, carefulness, openness, respect for intellectual property, confidentiality, wherever that's due, respect to colleagues, social responsibility, non-discrimination, competence, legality, animal care, human subjects protection, responsible publication and responsible mattering. Each one of those words that were included in the previous slide can be entire chapters and long discussions. However, they're grouped together for your convenience and in the context of this presentation. Now, having seen the main principles of ethical research, there's the other side that should be mentioned and these are some major types of scientific misconduct. So where ethics recommendations have not been abided to. Some major types of research scientific misconduct include author omission or ordinary authorship where authors are included when they shouldn't be there because they haven't made a significant contribution, failure to publish results of clinical trials, so leaving data out, duplicate publications, trying to publish the same work twice, data fabrication, making up data that was never observed. These are major, major types of misconduct that should absolutely never be done by scientists. Data falsification, so modifying your results to better suit the point you're trying to make, absolutely unacceptable, image manipulation to modify what was actually there, plagiarism or sub-plagiarism and bear in mind that whether this is done intentionally or unintentionally, it is still considered plagiarism and you have to be very careful to avoid it and non-disclosure of conflict of interest. Now each one of these points is so important and so major that it can have huge implications not only for your manuscript, but for your career and for the future of your lab and on occasions for the future of your organization. So it's extremely important to be very careful to avoid at any cost these types of scientific misconduct. Now how scientific misconduct dealt with, there's a long list of different approaches that are being taken for different scenarios, but in the case of manuscripts, if there is suspicion of scientific misconduct, the editor will initiate appropriate procedures detailed by committees such as the Committee on Publication Ethics Code. The institution's funders and readers may be informed about this. The expression of concern may be published while the outcome of the code is pending and retraction may have to take place if there is proof of scientific misconduct. Needless to say that it looks extremely bad on someone's CV to have a retracted manuscript. It can have very serious repercussions for their career. Another very important aspect is the protection of research participants where there have been such participants in a study. So planning, conducting and reporting human research should be following the Helsinki Declaration as revised in 2013. The authors must have the approval to conduct research from an independent local, regional, or national review body. And here I must note that different countries have different regulations. So it's very important that you ensure you follow the national recommendations wherever you are based at the time you are performing such a project. Remember the patient's right to privacy and how this should never be violated without informed consent. So you can only go as far as you have permission from the patient as to what information you can include in the study and disclose in a publication. Identifying information such as names, initials, hospital numbers should not be published unless absolutely essential and only if consent for that has been obtained, informed consent. Patients informed consent should be well documented and archived with the journal authors of both as per local regulations or laws. And the journals have the right and should request to view copies of these informed consents to ensure that everything has been implemented as per guidelines. Now, when it comes to working with animal models, one needs to be very careful to protect animal rights. So authors should indicate whether institutional and national standards for the care and use of laboratory animals were followed when performing and reporting these experiments. Authors may follow the International Association of Veterinary Editors Consensus of the Guidelines on Animal Ethics and Welfare for Animal Research Ethics. You can see the link at the bottom of this slide with the full details of how to best protect animal rights and to report what has been done in your manuscript. Another parameter is safe storage of your research data. ICMGE recommends that authors should maintain all the primary data and analytical procedures supporting the published results for a minimum of 10 years. So you must ensure that you have safely stored and have multiple copies, backup copies ideally of your primary raw data and analytical procedures. To ensure long-term availability, the ICMGE encourages the safe storage of the data in a data repository. Furthermore, it is recommended that editors of different journals encourage authors to make the raw data available to public data repositories, such as the ones mentioned earlier. A few words on publication ethics, ICMGE has specific recommendations to avoid duplicate publications. So with that, I would like to specify the different types of duplicate publications that one may encounter. These could be a duplicate submission of the exact same work, unacceptable, a secondary publication, prior and duplicate publication with overlapping sections. Now, overlapping publications result, as you know, in significant distortion of empirical evidence and really lead to waste of reviewers and editors resources on time. They create confusion, they don't serve any scientific purpose, they can be misleading, and unfairly occupy the limited space available in different journals. So this is not an ethical approach to pursue, and now there are guidelines as to how to avoid duplication of the published information. Now, there are some exceptions for overlapping, not duplicate, but overlapping publications, and I'd like to specify these and clarify it in this slide to facilitate you. So exceptions would be a follow-up and significantly updated article on a published preliminary report, an article that reinterprets or re-analyses published data for a different audience in a different perspective. Exception would be the submission of e-prints of original articles in repositories or the translation of an original article with proper attributions and credits. Now, the ICMGE recommendations for overlapping publications include the following. First of all, it is the authors responsibility to inform the journals if the work has been previously posted on a preprint server. Authors must not simultaneously submit the same manuscript in same or different language to more than one journal. Authors must not publish a paper that substantially overlaps with a prior publication, without appropriate attribution and all necessary clarifications and approval. In the submission letter, authors must absolutely clearly state if the submitted manuscript reports work that has already been reported in large parts in a published article. So one needs to be crystal clear as what it is they're submitting. If there are any parts overlapping with previously published work, why this is overlapping, how is this justified and ensure that the editor has a perfectly clear view as to what it is you're submitting. Now, the ICMGE rules for secondary publications, authors should have permission from both journals, primary and secondary publishers. The priority of primary publication should be valued by keeping a publication interval agreed by both editors. The article for secondary publication, which could be an abbreviated version, is intended for a different set of audience. The secondary version accurately reflects authors' data information and the interpretations of the primary version. The secondary version informs its audience that the paper has been published in whole or in part elsewhere and the title should indicate that it is a secondary publication of a primary publication. Now, when you actually follow all these recommendations and reach the point of submission and hopefully peer review, what are the ICMGE recommendations to help you there? In terms of submission requirements, it is recommended that a full statement to the editor about all submissions in previous reports that might be regarded as redundant publication of the same or very similar work are indicated. A statement should be there about the financial or other relationships and activities that might lead to conflict of interest. So be upfront clear about any potential conflict of interest. Make sure there is an authorship statement, the contribution and indication of the contribution of the different authors. Contact information for all authors responsible for communicating about revisions, approvals, proofs, et cetera. And then a letter to the editor that should inform them about the actual content of the manuscript and in addition to the novelty contribution to the field, et cetera, should also indicate if any concerns have been raised regarding the conduct of the specific research or if any corrective action has been recommended previously. Now, some tips for authors here. Avoid publishing in predatory journals. Make sure that you're aware how to spot them, how to identify them and make sure you avoid them. Evaluate the integrity, history, practices and reputation of the journals that you will be sitting. Your precious work. Follow guidance from various organizations such as the World Association of Medical Editors that we mentioned earlier in order to identify the characteristics of reputable journals and choose one of those journals to submit your work. And if needed, seek the assistance of experienced scientists, especially if you're in doubt about either predatory journals or about the journals that would be a good fit for your specific research work. So in summary, as we're coming to the end of this presentation, most leading biomedical journals require compliance with ICMJ recommendations. A detailed understanding of these guidelines can assist you in conducting and publishing credible, detailed and well-documented research. All authors must remember that individual publishers may have individual interpretations and implementations of the ICMJ recommendations. So it is important that first of all, you are aware of the ICMJ recommendations, but also that you carefully read and become familiar with the specific guidelines, instructions to all those of the journal you will be submitting your work to. With this, we're coming close to the end of the presentation. I would like to wish you very good luck with your publications. I would like to provide a coupon here on this website, on this slide, by Enagle to thank you for your attention and to encourage you to use the Q&A button for any questions that you may have. I look forward to answering them. Thank you once again for your attention. I can see we already have some questions, so let me go through them and start answering them for you. Okay, so we have a great question. It says some recent publications, including review articles, include statements supported by old publications. Would you advise to include the recent publication as a supporting reference or the old original publication? It is best if you're talking about data that has been generated to include the original publication where this data was first generated. If you're talking, though, about latest developments in the field and how new recommendations, new guidelines or new interpretations of previous findings are changing, then it is best to cite the most recent work with the latest interpretation recommendation, et cetera. So there's a distinction and you have to choose which one is the most appropriate to cite each time. But if it's data, you will be talking about the original publication of the research data is the best source. Okay, here's another great question. How can I identify the difference between first author, co-author, and corresponding author? Is there a clear line? Okay, so this is a question that many people ask over and over throughout their career, but usually the first author is the one who has performed the majority of the research work, the experimental work, the research work that is included in the manuscript. So it's the one who's actually done if it's a wet lab type of research, the most of the experiments. Co-authors are all the individuals who have contributed intellectually and practically at the scientific level always for the implementation of this project. So depending on the amount of work that they have contributed to a project, that will affect, in a way, determine the order in which they appear in the author list. Now the corresponding author is the one who usually serves as the PI of the lab, is the person who conceptualized the project, who decided the strategy that will be followed, supervise all other members of the team, the one who was responsible for preparing part of or for assessing, evaluating, contributing to the final version of the manuscript. And often the corresponding author, in addition to what I already mentioned, is often the one who had the funding or one of the authors who had the funding to implement this project, to perform this project. But every time you have to weigh how much each individual contributed in order to reach these decisions. Great. We have a technical question. Where can the recording of this webinar be watched? The Enago team will be the right one to answer this question, so I'm sure they will provide you with an answer for that. How to deposit the data on a repository. Are the repositories free? Yes, the repositories are free and each one will have specific instructions on the format that your data should have and the steps you need to take to deposit your data. So for each repository, there are different instructions on how to do it, but it definitely needs to be in a personalized fashion so it will be clear who submitted it, when they submitted it, and it will have specific information on the type of files that you will be depositing and the description of these files that is required. Great question. Another question is how long do I wait before withdrawing my manuscript from a journal? Now, this is a tricky question because we don't usually withdraw a manuscript from a journal unless there is something very wrong. So maybe you want to come back with more specifics about your question so that I can answer it appropriately. We have another question here with increasing availability of published articles online. As an author, what is the best way to handle gray literature and sources references that are not available online? Should the accessibility of those references to readers be a great concern to authors? Again, it would be helpful if you wanted to provide an example as to the sources that you're talking about, sources that are not available online. I'm not sure specifically what you have in mind. Please elaborate and I'll be happy to address. What's important is that any source that we cite is from reputable sources. Publicly or commercially available, but credible sources. That is very important. So you always need to be careful and aware of that when choosing what to base your research on and what to cite. If there are not credible references that you're including, your project and your work loses credibility. Okay, great. So thank you for clarifying your point. In regards to the question, do I wait before withdrawing my manuscript from a journal? Our colleague here clarified that what they mean is, for example, if the manuscript has been with a journal for almost two years due to delays from reviewers. Admittedly, this is an excessive period of time. Two years is a very long time to be with reviewers. And it certainly raises concerns about that journal. It is always entirely up to you to decide where you draw the line and how long you want to wait for a journal to give you a final answer on whether they're requesting revisions or accepting your manuscript. So it's a very personal decision. Often with high impact prestigious journals, one is willing to wait and pursue it for longer. Whereas with lower impact journals, less prestigious journals, if you want, sometimes you want to move on faster. But this is a very personal decision. Okay, here's another great question. Are authors in breach of IP if they upload full text articles of their work in cases where publishers hold the copyright? Yes, this is a very sensitive matter to be careful of. It is advisable that you check very carefully with the publisher and the specific copyrights before you upload your published article. So yes, please check with the publisher on a case by case scenario. Okay, great. So we have a clarification about the question that was raised earlier about gray literature and how to cite it. And our colleague here clarifies that they mean internal documents, reports or old articles that have not yet been digitalized. So if something is published in print or online version or even if it's old and has not been digitized yet, it is fine to cite it as long as it is a credible source that you are citing. However, when it comes to internal documents and reports that have not been officially published have not been peer reviewed, then I would advise against it. Unless it is a credible source that somehow can be referenced, officially referenced. So it's best to stick to literature and sources that are official and other readers can trace and identify. Okay, so I'm very happy with all these exciting questions you have sent in. I very much thank you for your attention. I think we're now coming close to the end of our webinar. I hope it was useful to all of you. I once again wish you very best of luck with your manuscript preparation and submission and look forward to interacting with you in a future webinar. All the best. Take care.