In 1978, following a meeting in Vancouver, a group of editors of leading medical journals, the Vancouver Group, published a draft report outlining proposed requirements for standardising the format of citations and suggesting standard ways of preparing and submitting papers for publication in biomedical journals. The first formal version of the requirements was published in 1979, and since then the group, now known as the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), has published further versions of the document, the title of which was changed in 2013 to the ICMJE Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.
These documents have been greatly influential in biomedical publishing and have played an important part in various ways: encouraging publication of protocols in advance of studies; in the establishment of trial registries; in encouraging compliance with requirements for trial registration; in revealing potential conflicts of interest; in identifying publications that raise concerns and may be considered for retraction; in defining the nature of a peer reviewed journal; and many other matters. However, it is not clear to what extent the requirements/recommendations have helped authors rather than editors and may have encouraged journals to focus more on process than on content. A systematic review of the evidence that reflects the extent to which the requirements/recommendations laid down in the ICMJE documents have been effective and beneficial in changing publication practices in biomedical journals would be of interest.