ICMJE 2025 AI Authorship Rules: What Every Researcher Must Know Before Submitting
Most authors who disclose AI use in a manuscript put the sentence in one place: the Methods section, right after the statistics paragraph. Under ICMJE's AI authorship guidance, that placement is only correct about half the time. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors treats writing assistance and analytical AI use as two separate disclosures that belong in two different sections — a distinction most cover letters and manuscripts still get wrong.
What ICMJE Actually Restricts
ICMJE does not ban using AI to help prepare a manuscript. What it restricts is credit. Per ICMJE's guidance on AI use by authors, chatbots and AI tools "cannot be responsible for the accuracy, integrity, and originality of the work," so they cannot be listed as an author or co-author, and cannot be cited as one. Authorship in the ICMJE framework requires someone who can be held accountable — an AI system cannot sign a conflict-of-interest form or answer a reviewer's follow-up question.
Where the Disclosure Actually Goes
This is the part most authors skip past. ICMJE's authorship and contributions guidance splits placement by function: AI used for writing assistance belongs in the acknowledgment section, while AI used for data collection, analysis, or figure generation belongs in the Methods section. A manuscript that used an LLM to tighten the Discussion's prose and used a separate tool to help select a statistical test needs two disclosures in two places, not one blanket sentence in Methods.
Authors defaulting everything to Methods, or skipping the acknowledgment disclosure because "it was just wording help," are not following the letter of the guidance even when they think they are disclosing fully.
The Cover Letter Disclosure Most Authors Skip
Disclosure inside the manuscript is not the whole requirement. The same ICMJE page requires authors to describe AI use in the cover letter as well as "the submitted work in the appropriate section if applicable." A cover letter with no AI mention, paired with a manuscript that discloses AI assistance in the acknowledgments, is an inconsistency an editorial assistant can catch in seconds — and it reads worse than a full, specific disclosure would have.
The description that survives editorial screening names the tool and states what it did: drafting a paragraph, restructuring a section, or assisting with a specific analysis. A generic "AI tools were used in the preparation of this manuscript" sentence does not meet the bar ICMJE is describing.
What Counts as Significant Use
ICMJE expanded this guidance with a new AI-specific section covering authors, reviewers, and editors in its January 2026 update. That expansion formalized what many journals had already been asking for informally: which stage of manuscript preparation the AI touched, beyond the bare fact that it was used at all. Individual journals still vary in how strictly they enforce the acknowledgment-versus-Methods split, so checking a target journal's own author instructions remains necessary even after meeting ICMJE's baseline.
What Happens If You Don't Disclose
Accountability sits entirely with the human authors. ICMJE states plainly that "humans are responsible for any submitted material that included the use of AI-assisted technologies," which means authors are expected to review AI-generated content line by line, confirm no plagiarism exists in AI-produced text, and ensure quoted material carries correct attribution — the same standard as for a co-author's contribution. Nondisclosure "may require corrective action and may be construed as misconduct" under ICMJE's research integrity sections. Given how fabrication rates in AI-assisted references have climbed in the same period this guidance was written, editors have reason to treat an undisclosed AI-writing pass as a flag worth investigating, not a formality.
Verifying AI-generated content before it reaches an editor is the same discipline that catches citation hallucination before it catches you.
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