Peer review must often seem like a thankless task, but without it the BMJ could not survive. We depend on our bank of reviewers to help us assess the quality and usefulness of the 8000 manuscripts we receive each year. 

To thank reviewers we offer a year’s online subscription to bmj.com and, if a reviewer already has access to bmj.com, we encourage them to pass this
on to a colleague. We also provide reviewers with a Journal Activity Certificate for the BMJ. This keeps track of the work reviewers do for the BMJ and enables them to print off a certificate. We hope that this certificate may be helpful for reviewers who need to record reviewing as part of their continuing professional development activity.

Find a list of BMJ reviewers for 2006 here.

We give priority to articles that will help our readers - who are mainly doctors - to make better decisions about practice, policy, education, and research. Reviewers advise the editors, who are responsible for the final decision to accept or reject a manuscript.

The BMJ now has a system of open peer review. This means that reviewers have to sign their reports, saying briefly who they are and where they work. We also ask reviewers to declare to the editors any competing interests that might relate to articles we have asked them to review. Open peer review does not mean, however, that authors should feel able to contact reviewers directly to discuss their reports; all queries should still be directed through the editorial office.

Manuscripts sent for review are usually seen by at least two reviewers, and reviewers can access each other's reports on the same manuscript once the BMJ has made its decision. We hope that this will provide useful feedback and learning. 

We welcome feedback from our reviewers. If you have any comment you want to make, either on a manuscript you have reviewed and our decision on it or on our review process in general, we would be pleased to hear from you.

For more information on becoming a BMJ reviewer, some training materials, and detailed guidance to reviewers please follow the links on the left.

You'll also find there a link to resources for authors, where there is detailed information on the BMJ's peer review process, on the guidance and practical advice we provide for authors, and on our editorial policies. The BMJ transparency policy will save you lots of time because it pulls together in one place many separate editorial policies. It's there, for instance, that you'll find advice on what to do if you are concerned about the ethics aspects of a manuscript we have asked you to review or if you suspect plagiarism, duplicate publication, or scientific fraud.

One aspect of transparency that relates very directly to reviewers is the statement of provenance, which mentions whether a published article has been reviewed:

Article provenance

At the end of every accepted editorial, research article, clinical review, practice article, and analysis article the BMJ will add a statement explaining the article's status. The options are:

• non-commissioned, externally peer reviewed
• non-commissioned, not externally peer reviewed
• commissioned, externally peer reviewed
• commissioned, not externally peer reviewed