Pleasing both authors and readers

BMJ 1999;318:888-889 ( 3 April )

Editorials

Pleasing both authors and readers

A combination of short print articles and longer electronic ones may help us do this

Papers pp 897 -914

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

To succeed, journals need to please both authors and readers. There is, however, a tension between the needs of the two, particularlywhen the authors are mostly researchers and the readers mostlypractitioners. Practitioners like research articles to be shortand sweet, whereas researchers want $---$ rightly $---$ to include enoughmaterial for critical readers (often other researchers) to beable to appraise the study and if necessary repeat it and also,increasingly, to be able to include it in a systematic review.Journals have struggled with this tension for years, and oftenthe result is that we please nobody. Research among readers consistentlyshows that research articles are not well read, while many studieshave shown that essential data are often missing from researchreports. Now the electronic revolution offers us a chance to pleaseboth readers and authorssimultaneously.

Today's BMJ includes four papers where a short version is published . . . [Full text of this article]

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