The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report is the CDC's weekly journal, read
by the public health community, clinicians, researchers, teachers, students
and the news media. Its instructions to authors set five criteria for
publication, and one of them is unusual enough to be worth knowing about.
The five criteria
| Appropriateness | Useful to MMWR's readership, based on science (especially epidemiology) or on public health policy or practice. Recommendations must be consistent with CDC policy |
| Originality | Not previously posted on preprint servers, published elsewhere, or containing primary results already released — presentation at a scientific meeting excepted |
| Quality | Accepted scientific methods, with sufficient data to address the topic |
| Timeliness | See below |
| Clarity | Succinct, logically organised for the reader, with minimal acronyms and initialisms |
The timeliness rule
Reports should contain the most current data, and **the most recent data
should not be older than 2 years at the time of submission**. **Data from
outbreaks and other public health investigations should not be older than 10
months.**
Most journals have no such rule. MMWR does because it is not an archive: it
exists so that a health department can act on what it reports this week. A
finding from an outbreak eighteen months ago may be true and no longer
actionable — the outbreak is over, the strain has changed, the response has
already been decided.
The ten-month limit for outbreak data is the sharper of the two, and it
effectively sets a deadline for anyone investigating one: write it up while it
still matters.
Four kinds of report
MMWR Weekly publishes **Full Reports, Outbreak Reports, Policy Notes, and
Notes from the Field** — the last being the short-form report used for a
single unusual finding that others need to know about quickly, which is the
category the timeliness rule most obviously serves.
Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
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