Journal Editors Group Research Articles

Reducing the risks of nuclear war; the role of health professionals

According to the United Nations, the risk of nuclear weapons use is higher than at any time since the Cold War: "The Russian Federation’s recent announcement of plans to station non-strategic nuclear weapons in Belarus represents the first 'nuclear sharing' agreement made since the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons entered into force in 1970." At this moment of extreme danger, we are preparing to distribute an editorial on the role of health professionals in reducing nuclear danger. We hope to time the announcement of the release of this editorial to the August 6 anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima to underline the very real danger that nuclear weapons may be used again. The editorial was co-authored by the group of journal editors and other supporters of the Nobel-prizewinning International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War listed below. All of the authors’ journals will be publishing the editorial. Having so many respected journals around the world publishing the editorial should attract political and media attention. We hope that giving health professionals a more prominent voice in this debate will encourage profound changes in the system of nuclear arms control that has resulted in the current dangerous situation that threatens the health of people and the planet.

A Disclosure Form for Work Submitted to Medical Journals: A Proposal From the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors.

Disclosure of an author's pertinent relationships may influence how readers assess a published work. An international group of medical journal editors proposes changes to how authors' disclosure in...

Perspectives on Sharing Models and Related Resources in Computational Biomechanics Research.

The role of computational modeling for biomechanics research and related clinical care will be increasingly prominent. The biomechanics community has been developing computational models routinely for exploration of the mechanics and mechanobiology of diverse biological structures. As a result, a large array of models, data, and discipline-specific simulation software has emerged to support endeavors in computational biomechanics. Sharing computational models and related data and simulation software has first become a utilitarian interest, and now, it is a necessity. Exchange of models, in support of knowledge exchange provided by scholarly publishing, has important implications. Specifically, model sharing can facilitate assessment of reproducibility in computational biomechanics and can provide an opportunity for repurposing and reuse, and a venue for medical training. The community's desire to investigate biological and biomechanical phenomena crossing multiple systems, scales, and physical domains, also motivates sharing of modeling resources as blending of models developed by domain experts will be a required step for comprehensive simulation studies as well as the enhancement of their rigor and reproducibility. The goal of this paper is to understand current perspectives in the biomechanics community for the sharing of computational models and related resources. Opinions on opportunities, challenges, and pathways to model sharing, particularly as part of the scholarly publishing workflow, were sought. A group of journal editors and a handful of investigators active in computational biomechanics were approached to collect short opinion pieces as a part of a larger effort of the IEEE EMBS Computational Biology and the Physiome Technical Committee to address model reproducibility through publications. A synthesis of these opinion pieces indicates that the community recognizes the necessity and usefulness of model sharing. There is a strong will to facilitate model sharing, and there are corresponding initiatives by the scientific journals. Outside the publishing enterprise, infrastructure to facilitate model sharing in biomechanics exists, and simulation software developers are interested in accommodating the community's needs for sharing of modeling resources. Encouragement for the use of standardized markups, concerns related to quality assurance, acknowledgement of increased burden, and importance of stewardship of resources are noted. In the short-term, it is advisable that the community builds upon recent strategies and experiments with new pathways for continued demonstration of model sharing, its promotion, and its utility. Nonetheless, the need for a long-term strategy to unify approaches in sharing computational models and related resources is acknowledged. Development of a sustainable platform supported by a culture of open model sharing will likely evolve through continued and inclusive discussions bringing all stakeholders at the table, e.g., by possibly establishing a consortium.

Misconduct in scientific publications

Last month I attended the I COPE Seminar - Committee on Publication Ethics (I SCOPE) which happened in Florianopolis (SC) during the meeting of the Brazilian Society for Scientific Editors (ABEC - Portuguese acronym). It was the first time that such type of event took place in South America.For those who do not know, COPE was founded in 1997 by a group of medical journal editors in the United Kingdom to discuss ethical problems in scientific publications. Now it has over 7000 members worldwide, has created a conduct code and advices editors on how to handle suspicious cases of ethical misconduct. The COPE guidelines may be freely assessed at www.publicationethics.org

Coping with Publication Misconduct

COPE, the Committee on Publication Ethics, was founded in 1997 by a small group of concerned biomedical journal editors in the United Kingdom. Over twelve years it has grown to more than 5,000 members worldwide, with several major scientific publishers signing up all their journal editors. It meets quarterly when editors seek advice on handling suspected misconduct. COPE publishes a code of conduct for member editors, guidelines on good publication practice and other matters, and flowcharts on how to deal with common problems, and provides a unique database of over 500 individual cases. It is now expanding beyond biomedicine and grappling with new problems related to the advent of new styles of electronic publication.

Applying the STARD (Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy) checklist to the 2007 Transfusion article ‘Evaluation of a new enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for detection of Chagas antibody in US blood donors’

A group of scientists and journal editors developed the STARD (Standards for Reporting of Diagnostic Accuracy) checklist to improve the reporting of diagnostic accuracy. This checklist provides a standardised framework to ensure all relevant information is considered and no potentially important parameters are inadvertently overlooked. Whilst the quality of reporting is crucial to the understanding of a test's potential performance characteristics, this checklist can and should be used not only to assess the reporting itself, but also to question any potential flaws in the assay inadvertently overlooked or not challenged by others. This article uses the STARD checklist to look at a recent report on a new assay for Chagas disease and examines the strength of this work against a standard review tool. Potential issues associated with the reporting of the work as well as potential issues with the assay are identified and additional questions are posed that might help clarify the issues identified.

The Bulletin's new look

We start 2002 with a new-look Bulletin. The new design while being visually more attractive gives us more information to the printed page, faster production time, and cost savings we can channel into the work of ensuring the quality and accuracy of the information we print. Another improvement is that with the table of contents now all in one place on the outside back cover, it is easier to see at a glance what each issue is about. With the new design come updated guidelines for contributors (see pp. 85-86). We will now be following closely the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals (URMSBJ, available from http://www.icmje.org/index. html). These are commonly known as the Vancouver Guidelines, after the group of journal editors who met there in 1978 to draw up the first version. The resulting guidelines are now followed by several hundred biomedical journals throughout the world, thereby facilitating the work of authors in preparing their manuscripts. Changes have also been made to the online version of the journal (www.who.int/bulletin). An important development is the arrangement we have made with SciELO (Scientific Electronic Library Online, www.scielo. br), a project administered by the BIREME centre (www.bireme.br) of the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO). Originally conceived to provide free online access to leading Latin American journals, BIREME has now started to run thematic sites. The first of these sites is concerned with public health and the Bulletin is now hosted on it at http://www.scielosp. org/bwho where the full text and figures of Bulletin articles can be consulted in both PDF and HTML formats. SciELO is linked to MEDLINE/PubMed, so anyone searching those databases who retrieves an abstract or title of a Bulletin article can click on the Go to Publisher Site icon to obtain free access to the full text of the relevant article. We will be working further with SciELO to increase the Bulletin's visibility and distribution, and are in discussions with the US National Library of Medicine about including the Bulletin in the PubMed Central database. Another development is a CD-ROM containing the entire text of issues from the beginning of 1999 to the end of 2001. This is in the final stages of production and will be distributed early this year. It will be fully searchable, facilitating rapid retrieval of articles by means of any name or term in the text. In the same spirit we are installing a new manuscript tracking system which, when fully operational, will let authors submit manuscripts online. They will receive a password which will enable them to follow the progress of their manuscripts through the review and production processes. …

The quest for unbiased research: randomized clinical trials and the CONSORT reporting guidelines.

AbstractThe large and increasing number of randomized clinical trials in all of medicine has prompted the introduction of guidelines that are intended to improve the quality of the research and of the published papers derived from such investigations. These guidelines for reporting clinical trials, the Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (the CONSORT statement) were set forth by a group of journal editors, statisticians, biomedical investigators, and editors. The CONSORT statement has been published in several major medical journals and is likely to have a major impact on editorial policies as well as the design of such investigations. I have invited Dr Kenneth F. Schulz of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a leading investigator in the evaluation of clinical trials and a participant in the design of the CONSORT guidelines, to prepare this brief summary for the Annals. The CONSORT statement is expected to have a substantial effect on the peer review of clinical trials, and it promises to elevate the quality of such investigations. Future submissions to the Annals will be evaluated in the context of these guidelines.

Gastroenterology in the last decennia and initiatives in medical ethics: coincidence or linkage?

A quarter of a century ago ethics was an esoteric term, known to theologians and philosophers, but unknown as a discipline to the majority of doctors. Since then, however, ethics has become a substantial part of clinical medicine and health research. Ethics as an area of interest for Danish gastroenterologists appeared from several foci in the early days. One angle was an almost revival-like interest in research methodology and its ethical dimensions. Other angles were derived from Danish gastroenterologists' experiences transferred from other disciplines before the birth of Danish gastroenterology. From the time of these early incentives Danish gastroenterologists have constituted a platform for the implementation of the basic principles, lying behind medical ethics, now in collaboration with other parts of the medical profession. The topics are reflected in a number of publications and in the various practical diversions. An interest in information of patients appeared at an early stage. Publication ethics as a subdiscipline involved Danish gastroenterologists and has led to contributions within the framework of the International Group of Medical Journal Editors. Research ethics, a central topic throughout all years, has led to such important initiatives as the Second Helsinki Declaration and the establishment of a national control system for medical research in man. A further ramification of ethics is scientific dishonesty and good clinical practice. Here a recent initiative has led to the establishment of a national Committee on Scientific Dishonesty. Under the auspices of the OMGE (Organisation Mondiale de Gastroentérologie) Danish gastroenterologists have investigated transnational and transcultural differences in gastroenterologists' attitudes to information of patients and relatives and have unmasked considerable and important differences throughout the world. Medical ethics has, together with scientific methodology, to some extent reunited the sub-specialized fragments of the mother disciplines medicine and surgery and in this way has acted as partes pro toto.