Screening research papers by reading abstracts

doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7464.470

BMJ 2004;329:470-471 (28 August), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7464.470

Editorial

Screening research papers by reading abstracts

Please get the abstract right, because we may use it alone toassess your paper

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

The BMJ receives approaching 8000 manuscripts each year andaccepts only about 7% of them. Editors reject about 60-70% oforiginal articles without external review. When a paper is clearlyunsuitable for the BMJ just one editor can make the decisionto reject it. When the decision is less clear other editorsare involved.

The low acceptance rate makes the BMJ a big rejection machineand leaves many of our customers dissatisfied. But triagingpapers at an early stage allows us to spend as much time andeffort as possible on the peer review, commissioning, and editingof material that we think will be relevant, useful, and importantto our readers, material that we want to publish. Furthermore,rejecting unsuitable papers quickly allows the authors to submittheir work to another journal. That delay may be as little asa few hours. Daily duty editors make initial decisions within24 . . . [Full text of this article]

Trish Groves, coordinating editor

BMJ (tgroves@bmj.com)

Kamran Abbasi, acting editor

BMJ

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