Screening research papers by reading abstracts: Review may be eternal but rejection is swift

doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7469.801-d

BMJ 2004;329:801 (2 October), doi:10.1136/bmj.329.7469.801-d

Letter

Screening research papers by reading abstracts

Review may be eternal but rejection is swift

The first 100% of the full text of this article appears below.

EDITOR—I hope that "eternal review" used in this editorialby Groves and Abbasi was a typo and did not refer to a Kafka-esqueprocess of articles circulating around the postal service (orinternet) ad infinitum.¹

I am pleased to say that this is not an accurate descriptionof the review process for papers I have been involved in thathave been submitted to the BMJ. These were rejected swiftlyand efficiently.

Jeremy N V Miles, lecturer in biostatistics

University of York, York YO10 5DD jnvm1@york.ac.uk

Competing interests: None declared.