Trish Groves

Dear Colleagues, Biomedical journals have seen steady increases in submissions recently, partly owing to the introduction of legislation requiring clinical trial results reporting and to industry sponsors’ policies that encourage publication of even early phase studies. Meanwhile, new journals continue to launch every week, providing an ever greater choice of places to publish research.

Trish Groves, deputy editor 1BMJ, London WC1H 9JR, UK tgroves{at}bmj.com Trish Groves argues that telling authors who has reviewed their paper has helped to make the process fairer, but Karim Khan (doi:10.1136/bmj.c6425) is concerned that it stops reviewers from being completely frank When I arrived at the BMJ in 1989 I often had to cut (with scissors) and paste (with glue) the highlights of a reviewer’s report on to another sheet of paper and photocopy it.

Please get the abstract right, because we may use it alone to assess your paper The BMJ receives approaching 8000 manuscripts each year and accepts only about 7% of them. Editors reject about 60-70% of original articles without external review. When a paper is clearly unsuitable for the BMJ just one editor can make the decision to reject it. When the decision is less clear other editors are involved.