For unsolicited submissions, please first send us a short summary/abstract of your proposed article (500 words max) by email to review@icrc.org. The summary should include a brief overview of the main arguments raised in the article, and most importantly explain why this topic fits within the editorial line of the journal (for further reference, please visit our Guidelines for Authors). The Review will inform you of its decision within 2 weeks maximum. Following a positive assessment, the editorial team will request the author for the submission of their full article to be placed through the normal review process followed by the journal.

Supplementary materials

Material that is not essential to understanding or supporting a manuscript, but which may nonetheless be relevant or interesting to readers, may be submitted as supplementary materials. Supplementary materials will be published online alongside your article, but will not be published in the pages of the journal. Types of supplementary materials may include, but are not limited to, appendices, additional tables or figures, datasets, videos, and sound files.

Supplementary materials will be published with the same metadata as your parent article, and are considered a formal part of the academic record, so cannot be retracted or modified other than via our article correction processes. Supplementary materials will not be typeset or copyedited, so should be supplied exactly as they are to appear online. Please make sure you are familiar with our detailed guidance on supplementary materials prior to submission.

Where relevant we encourage authors to publish additional qualitative or quantitative research outputs in an appropriate repository, and cite these in manuscripts.

Use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools

We acknowledge the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the research and writing processes. To ensure transparency, we expect any such use to be declared and described fully to readers, and to comply with our plagiarism policy and best practices regarding citation and acknowledgements. We do not consider artificial intelligence (AI) tools to meet the accountability requirements of authorship, and therefore generative AI tools such as ChatGPT and similar should not be listed as an author on any submitted content.

In particular, any use of an AI tool:

to generate images within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, and declared clearly in the image caption(s)
to generate text within the manuscript should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, include appropriate and valid references and citations, and be declared in the manuscript’s Acknowledgements.
to analyse or extract insights from data or other materials, for example through the use of text and data mining, should be accompanied by a full description of the process used, including details and appropriate citation of any dataset(s) or other material analysed in all relevant and appropriate areas of the manuscript
must not present ideas, words, data, or other material produced by third parties without appropriate acknowledgement or permission

Descriptions of AI processes used should include at minimum the version of the tool/algorithm used, where it can be accessed, any proprietary information relevant to the use of the tool/algorithm, any modifications of the tool made by the researchers (such as the addition of data to a tool’s public corpus), and the date(s) it was used for the purpose(s) described. Any relevant competing interests or potential bias arising as a consequence of the tool/algorithm’s use should be transparently declared and may be discussed in the article.