The <i>BMJ</i> is evolving
Authors: Fiona Godlee
Journal: BMJ (2006)

The BMJ is evolving, and with this first issue of 2006 you will see some changes. The most obvious of these are some new section headings, but wider changes are afoot which will culminate in a redesign of the journal in July.

The changes stem from a series of conversations we have had with doctors, healthcare researchers, and policy makers in the UK and overseas. These have told us a lot about how people use information and what they look for in the BMJ. They confirmed what we know to be the BMJ's strengths—broad appeal across medicine and health care, reputation for courage and integrity, mix of serious science and analysis with practically useful material, readability, hard hitting journalism, and entertaining comment. But they also told us that readers are confused about what the BMJ is and who it is for. Is it mainly for general practitioners (the hospital doctors thought so) or mainly for hospital doctors (as the general practitioners thought)? Is it about clinical medicine or public health? And is it a journal or a magazine?

Confusion is not necessarily a bad thing. It is often the springboard to creativity and innovation. In this case we think it tells a success story. The BMJ's strength as a general medical journal is that it can remind doctors that they are still all part of one commuity. The BMJ has broken the mould of traditional medical journals. It reaches beyond a single group of doctors. It is one of the few journals that can bridge the gap between primary and secondary care and between research and practice. It bridges other gaps too: between doctors and other health professionals, between doctors and patients, between younger and older practitioners, and between treating individuals and populations.

It has also become more than just a journal. Journals were defined by our focus groups as being carriers exclusively of peer reviewed research and in depth clinical reviews; they saw them as factual, dry, and to be archived for future reference (often without being read). But neither is the BMJ simply a magazine carrying only news, updates, and comment. A magazine was defined by our focus groups as being tabloid, opinionated, humorous, colourful, and to be thrown away after being read, or even before. Many of those we spoke to want us to choose between these stark extremes, but we think that making a choice would mean going backwards.

We think the BMJ can be both a journal and a magazine. After all, one of the world's most respected science journals, Nature, is exactly that. But to fully achieve this alchemy, we know we have to take a step up in both directions. To be a great journal we aim to further strengthen the research and reviews that we publish and experiment with new ways of presenting them to readers. To be a great magazine we will develop the BMJ's look and feel, further increasing its readability and providing an even greater variety of content.

Strengthening the research we publish means doing what all good journals are doing to attract the best research in their field. We aim to focus on research that will help doctors make better decisions. We aim to provide a great service to authors, offering speed, useful critique, and courtesy, and context setting if your work is published. And we need to shout a little more about our unique selling points for authors: our broad international readership in paper and online; our high standards of peer review and publication ethics; and our ability to give you as much space as you need on bmj.com while also providing a shorter, more readable, version of your work online and in print. In addition, uniquely among the five major general medical journals, we provide open access to all of our original research articles with free full text available online from the day of publication (although with the business models for scientific publishing in flux, we are keeping these policies under review). We also feed these articles straight to PubMed Central, the most prominent open access archive.

The new Research section pulls together all our original research. This brings an end to the separate Papers and Primary Care sections in the BMJ. The Primary Care section was originally launched in 1981 as “Practice observed” to raise the visibility of general practice and encourage practice based research. It has more than done its job, to the extent that many now find the division unhelpful. The research most relevant to today's health care has implications across settings. We remain committed to encouraging research in primary care as part of our mission to publish the very best practice based and health services research.

The other new section headings show our continued commitment to providing practical and pro-vocative material for readers and to leading the debate about the future of health care. The Clinical Review section remains, and will carry up to date, evidence based reviews on diagnosing and treating important conditions in primary and secondary care. These reviews will cover the 100 topics most frequently requested by users of bmj.com, and we will aim to revisit these every two to three years. A new section, Practice, will provide practical information to help doctors and researchers in their work and professional development. Finally, Analysis and Comment replaces Education and Debate. The name change was partly just that, but it also reflects a shift to more commissioned material and greater variety of article types.

Two occasional sections, Learning in Practice and Information in Practice, have disappeared. Again, this is not because we think these areas unimportant—they are clearly central to the future of health care. For this reason, the research and commentaries that used to appear in these sections will now appear in Research, Practice, or Analysis and Comment. Some sections have not been changed—Editorials, News, Reviews, Obituaries, and Minerva—because our readers tell us these are thriving. But all of these, and the new sections, will look different and carry new features as part of the redesign later this year. We will be consulting readers and authors as we go.