Peer review by editors and external reviewers is usually based on a mix of evidence and opinion and may not always lead to the best decision. We welcome serious appeals, and many succeed.

If you believe that we have rejected your article wrongly, perhaps because we have misunderstood its scientific content, please submit an appeal (rebuttal) letter from your author area at our online editorial office. Do not try to submit a revised version of your article at this stage.

If we agree, on reading your rebuttal letter, that your appeal is warranted we may then invite you to submit a revised version of your article that we will enter again into our peer review process.

Please include as much detail in the rebuttal letter as possible. If we have provided comments from external peer review and/or from the full editorial committee please respond to these, point-by-point, in your appeal letter. It will be easier for us to decide what to do if you send a very detailed letter.

Appeals clarifying and offering to revise specific parts of the article, for instance the analysis of original research data, tend to succeed much more often than appeals against essentially editorial decisions where we did not think the BMJ was the right journal for the article because it did not fit well with BMJ readers' needs and interests. Nevertheless, if you feel able to explain and justify clearly in your rebuttal letter the work's importance, relevance, and usefulness to BMJ readers, it may be worthwhile appealing. We give priority to articles that help our readers (who are mainly doctors) to make better decisions, whether they are clinicians, policy makers, educators, or researchers.

Please note that an invitation to submit a revised version after appealing is not a guarantee of acceptance: your article will enter the peer review process again and might still be rejected at any stage.

Lastly, we can consider only one appeal per manuscript, so please spend as much time and effort on writing the rebuttal letter as you think necessary to put the case clearly - you have one chance, so use it well. We have found that  prolonged negotiation over rejected papers are usually unsatisfactory for both authors and editors, so we no longer engage in this.