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Thank you for considering the BMJ as the right place for your article.

The BMJ’s Impact Factor is 12.827 (ISI Web of Science, 2008). About 1.3 million unique users download 5.9 million pages from bmj.com each month (ABCe audit, October 2008).

Overall requirements for all articles

Please ensure that anything you submit to the BMJ conforms to the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors uniform requirements for manuscripts submitted to biomedical journals and also to the BMJ's general article requirements.

Research articles

For detailed advice on preparing and submitting original research articles please follow the highlighted link or click on the menu item to the left of this column.  Articles should be submitted as “Research" via our online editorial office.

All original research articles are submitted, although we may invite submission (without promising acceptance) if we come across research being presented at conferences, see it in abstract form or on a research registry, or if the authors make an inquiry about the suitability of their work before submission.

However, it is not always possible for us to answer all presubmission inquiries, particularly at busy times of the year, and we hope that this checklist may help you decide whether the BMJ is the right journal for your research. In addition, this editorial explains what kind of research we give priority to, and what services we offer to authors of research: Why submit your research to the BMJ? If you're still unsure about your choice of journal, these hints may help you to decide.

Open access. The full text of every research article published in the BMJ is immediately accessible on bmj.com to everyone at no charge. The full text of all research articles is also sent, without further intervention from the author, to PubMed Central, the National Library of Medicine's full text archive, which makes it fully accessible without delay. This means that the BMJ immediately fulfils the requirements of the US National Institutes of Health, the UK Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, and other funding bodies to make publicly funded research freely available to all.

We audit the performance of all BMJ research articles, using a wide range of indicators to assess their impact on readers and their dissemination to the wider world.

Case reports

The BMJ does not publish standard case reports. However we do publish articles about real cases as long as they are suitable for presentation in specifically educational formats. These include Lesson of the Week, Interactive Case Report, Evidence Based Report, Drug Point (all of which appear in the Practice section), Endgames case reports and picture quizzes, and as very brief reports accompanying Minerva pictures. For each of these you will need to provide a signed BMJ consent form from the patient.

If you would like to submit a more straightforward case report, or if your submission to the BMJ in one of the above cateories does not succeed, you might like to try submitting to our sister journal BMJ Case Reports. Full information is at http://casereports.bmj.com/instructions-for-authors

The BMJ rarely publishes case series because they do not usually provide evidence that is sufficiently useful or robust for our general readers.

Other article types

We are pleased to consider submitted articles for these sections, which carry a mix of commissioned and submitted articles (please click on the highlighted words below or the links in the index on the left to see specific advice on these article types):

For advice on:

• rapid responses and letters to the editor
• obituaries
• personal view
• fillers
• Minerva pictures
• Endgames

please scroll down this page.

Note that some types of BMJ article - news, features, observations, head to head, views and reviews - are generally commissioned by the editors. 

Letters (Rapid responses)

Please note that all letters to the editor must be submitted as Rapid responses to articles published on bmj.com. Use Search on http://bmj.com  to find the article you are responding to and then click on the link at the top of the page marked "Respond to this article".  This is the only way to submit a letter to BMJ: all letters that appear in the print BMJ and on bmj.com have arrived initially as Rapid responses.

Obituaries

We welcome obituaries for doctors within the first year of their death. Please send as a Word file to obituaries@bmj.com. We assume that material is sent exclusively to us, and we publish the full versions we receive on bmj.com. We produce the short obituaries in the print issue from these full versions. They are a maximum of 150 words, including biographical details: the last position held, date of birth, place and year of qualification, postgraduate qualifications if applicable, and date and cause of death. We publish pictures, which can be sent electronically or as photographs, when we can. We generally commission the full page obituaries for the print BMJ from professional writers: these are usually about doctors and are published no more than three months after death.

Personal view

These are opinion-based essays, usually including up to 850 words of highly readable and compelling text by a single author, with no references. We can, however, publish references in a web extra supplement on bmj.com, and we will consider personal views written by more than one author. We publish anonymous personal view articles only by special arrangement when it would be impossible for the article to appear with the author's name. These articles should be submitted as “Personal View" via our online editorial office.

Fillers

These should be submitted as “Fillers" via our online editorial office. We try to make the best use of every page of the printed BMJ, so we use small gaps to publish fillers. Most fillers have the added advantage of entertaining readers and making them think. We welcome articles of up to 600 words (we also like and need much shorter ones) on topics such as:

• A patient who changed my practice
• A memorable patient
• A paper that changed my practice
• The person who has most influenced me
• My most informative mistake
• Any other story conveying instruction, pathos, or humour
• Endpieces - quotations of no more than 80 words (often fewer) from any source

If the filler refers to an identifiable person we will need written consent to publication from that person or a relative.

Minerva pictures

These should be submitted as “Minerva" via our online editorial office and should follow our specific advice on submitting images. Please provide two or three sentences (no more than 100 words) explaining the picture, and please send us the signed consent to publication from the patient. We need written consent from every patient, parent or next of kin, regardless of whether the patient can be identified or not from the picture.

Please make sure that the text includes all authors’ names together with their job titles and addresses (including departments’ and hospitals’ names) at the time the patient was seen, and the email address of the corresponding author. We also need to recieve statements of competing interests and copyright/licence to publication.

Pictures we are more likely to accept are those which offer an educational message and which will publish clearly and depict the abnormality obviously. Minerva pictures with the following characteristics are not usually accepted because they lack educational value for general readers:
1. showing foreign bodies
2. showing the results of gross trauma
3. with poor image quality, even if the story is sound and interesting
4. with pictures and stories which are simply "text book" presentations
5. reporting cases of very rare clinical presentations
6. submissions which simply criticise other clinicians, or the patient.

Endgames

This BMJ section aims to help doctors prepare for their postgraduate examinations. We welcome submissions of two types of article:

1.      Case reports

2.      Picture quizzes

• Planning your article: we prefer questions on common topics rather than clinical rarities. To avoid duplication please check which Endgames topics we have already published on.
• Style and structure: give your Endgame a title that doesn’t give away any answers. Case reports and picture quizzes share the same four headings: case history, questions, short answers, and long answers:
• Case history: the maximum wordcount is 200. The history should contain details of how that patient presented, preferably using the patient’s own words (eg “chest pain” rather than “myocardial infarction”), and any additional details needed to answer the questions. As we want genuine rather than fictional scenarios, you’ll need to get the patient’s written consent to publication before submitting your Endgames to us.
• Questions: we would like something between three and five questions. Each question should have only one part. Bear in mind that all questions are visible to the reader at the outset, so don’t reveal the answer to an early question in a later one.  If you’re asking sequential questions don’t start with a difficult one, as it risks turning potential readers off.
• Short answers: each question should have a concise answer, ideally in no more than one sentence. This will appear in the print BMJ.
• Long answers: each question should have a long answer, which should expand on the short answer and will be available online. The combined length of the answers should not exceed 800 words. The content of the answers should be up to date and evidence based. Please don’t copy long passages from textbooks or journal articles. Credit anything you quote to the sources.  You can illustrate long answers with pictures, figures, and boxes.
• Illustrations: picture quizzes should include a maximum of two illustrations (photographs, images, electrocardiograms etc), submitted as jpeg files of 300 dpi. Please provide two versions of each picture: a “clean” image, and one with the abnormalities labelled. The total space for illustrations in the print BMJ for a picture quiz is approximately 7.2 cm by 7.2 cm. Please consider whether the feature(s) you’re trying to demonstrate will be visible when your illustration is reduced to that size. Remember that if you have two pictures the individual images will be smaller. It’s very hard to interpret small radiographs.
• Before submission: show your article to one or more doctors who are taking the relevant postgraduate exam. This will help you to fine tune any questions that readers don’t understand.

Things to remember with your Endgames submission: signed BMJ patient consent form, statements in the manuscript accepting the BMJ licence for publication and declaring any competing interests, name and current post and work address for all authors, email address for the corresponding author.

Then please submit your articles as a Word document via our online editorial office. Ensure that you choose “Endgames” as the article type.

Download your Endgames leaflet here.