The mission of the BMJ is to lead the debate on health and to engage, inform, and stimulate all doctors and health care researchers in ways that enable them to make better decisions and improve outcomes for patients.
Underpinning these aims, the BMJ has a set of ethical editorial principles, an ethics advisory committee, and a commitment to transparency. We try to ensure that readers, authors, and editors know as much about the background to each other’s work as possible. We do this through policies such as open peer review, declaring competing interests, and explaining the role of the bodies that fund research.
But there are many other policies and principles that help the BMJ to be an ethical publisher, and we have brought all of them together in this single transparency policy. The first two items summarise our basic general advice to authors about submissions. You can reach the other policies listed below simply by clicking on the links.
We will add to the BMJ’s transparency policy as often as we need to. Please contact us if you feel there is anything missing.
Requirements for all BMJ manuscripts
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.
We have found that it is easiest for everyone if all the information we require (see below) is contained in your manuscript. Therefore the manuscript file that you attach should include:
- Title - All manuscripts
- Names, addresses, and positions of all authors plus email address for corresponding author - All manuscripts
- Copyright - All manuscripts - A statement in the manuscript that “The Corresponding Author has the right to grant on behalf of all authors and does grant on behalf of all authors, an exclusive licence (or non exclusive for government employees) on a worldwide basis to the BMJ Publishing Group Ltd, and its Licensees to permit this article (if accepted) to be published in BMJ editions and any other BMJPGL products and to exploit all subsidiary rights, as set out in our licence (http://resources.bmj.com/bmj/authors/editorial-policies/copyright).” We no longer need to see a hard copy of the signed form.
- A competing interest statement - All manuscripts- (Either a statement in the manuscript describing the interests of all authors or a declaration "All authors declare that the answer to the questions on your competing interest form are all No and therefore have nothing to declare"). We no longer need to see a hard copy of the signed form.
- Details of contributors and the name of the guarantor - All original research articles
- Signed patient consent form. Publication of any personal information about a patient in the BMJ, for example in a case report or clinical photograph, will normally require the signed consent of the patient.
- Details of ethics approval (or a statement that it was not required) - All original research articles
- Details of funding - All original research articles
- Description of the role of the study sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication - All original research articles
- Statement of the independence of researchers from funders - All original research articles
- If you are submitting an original research article please send with your manuscript the following, as appropriate:
- for a randomised controlled trial
- a checklist, abstract, and flowchart in accordance with the appropriate CONSORT guidelines (CONSORT has different versions, for instance for cluster RCTs)
- the trial protocol
- the registration number of the trial and the name of the trial registry
- assurance, in the cover letter, that a clinical trial funded by a pharmaceutical company follows the guidelines on good publication practice
- QUOROM checklist and flowchart for a systematic review
- MOOSE checklist and flowchart for a meta-analysis of observational studies
- STARD checklist and flowchart for a study of diagnostic accuracy
- the BMJ health economics checklist for a health economics analysis
- explicit statements of the quality of evidence and strength of recommendations, preferably using the GRADE system (we encourage but do not insist on this), for a clinical guidelines article.
Article provenance
Who had the idea, and was the article externally peer reviewed? At the end of every accepted editorial, research article, clinical review, practice article, analysis article, feature, and head-to-head article the BMJ will add a statement explaining the article's provenance. The options are:
- not commissioned; externally peer reviewed
- not commissioned; not externally peer reviewed
- commissioned; externally peer reviewed
- commissioned; not externally peer reviewed
- commissioned, based on an idea from the author; externally peer reviewed
- commissioned, based on an idea from the author; not externally peer reviewed
Other aspects of transparency
Please click on the links to find these policies:
