Summary

As the Editors of leading international biomedicalinformatics journals, the authors report on a recentpattern of improper manuscript submissions to journalsin our field. As a guide for future authors, we describeethical and pragmatic issues related to submittingwork for peer-reviewed journal publication. We proposea coordinated approach to the problem that ourrespective journals will follow. This Editorial is beingjointly published in the following journals representedby the authors: Computer Methods and Programsin Biomedicine, International Journal of MedicalInformatics , Journal of Biomedical Informatics ,Journal of the American Medical InformaticsAssociation , and Methods of Information in Medicine.