Scope for Improvement in the Guidelines Provided to Authors in Biomedical Journals from Assam:A Comparative Analysis with Core Clinical Journals

Introduction: "Instruction to authors" given in journals may play a vital role in creating awareness about various aspects of scholarly communication, more so for naive authors. Aims: To find out whether biomedical journals from Assam offer directions to write and report scientific manuscript in a standardized and transparent manner by referring to guidelines endorsed by International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) or similar sources in their instructions given to authors; if not, identify the aspects on which they lack. Methods: Biomedical journals published from Assam and Core Clinical Journals were located from the National Science Library, India and National Library of Medicine, USA respectively. The instructions to authors or similar guideline for the included journals were surveyed and data regarding ten pre-specified domains were collected. The domains analysed were whether they provideany instruction to authors, guidelines for manuscript preparation for articles of different formats, word limits; define authorship criteria and misconduct; endorse ethical clearance, declaration of conflict of interest, trial registration, guidelines for research reporting; prohibit duplicate submission. Results: Ten biomedical journals from Assam were located and compared with a randomized sample of 10 of the 119 Core Clinical Journals. Compared with the Core Clinical Journals, biomedical journals from Assam were lacking in all the domains analyzed. Conclusion:The biomedical journals from Assam have not referred to most of the studied domains in their instructions to authors.