About

Acceptance rate:
36%
Time to first decision with review (median):
105 days*
Impact Factor (JCR):
2.9
Impact Factor rank:
77/167
Total content views:
6.83 million

Aims and scope

BMJ Open is a medical journal. We consider papers addressing research questions in clinical medicine, public health and epidemiology. We also welcome studies in health services research, health economics, surgery, qualitative research, research methods, medical education, medical publishing and any other field that directly addresses patient outcomes or the practice and delivery of healthcare. Our focus is on research that is relevant to patients and clinicians. We do not publish studies conducted in animals, laboratory studies not linked to patient outcomes, papers reporting solely physiological or biomechanical results from healthy participants, anatomy, cell biology or non-clinical psychology. All research study types are considered, from study protocols through phase I trials to meta-analyses. This includes specialist studies and studies reporting negative results.  Case reports should be submitted to BMJ Case Reports.
Our aim is to provide a home for all properly conducted medical research to be fully reported, after a rigorous and transparent peer review process. See our Resources for authors for more information on what we look for in a research study and how to maximise your chances of publication. Publishing procedures are built around fully open peer review and continuous publication, publishing research online as soon as the article is ready. BMJ Open aims to promote transparency in the publication process by publishing reviewer reports and previous versions of manuscripts as prepublication histories. Authors are asked to pay article-publishing charges on acceptance; the ability to pay does not influence editorial decisions.

Editorial board

For information about Editor in Chief Adrian Aldcroft and his editorial team, please refer to the Editorial Board page.

Ownership

Wholly-owned by the BMJ Publishing Group

Journal information

Publication Model
Open access
Frequency
Continuous
Launch date
2011
Digital Archives
Indexed by
Web of Science Core Collection: Science Citation Index Expanded, MEDLINE (Index Medicus), PubMed Central, Scopus, Embase (Excerpta Medica), DOAJ, Google Scholar
Peer Review Model
Open peer review; reviewer and author are known to each other. Reviews are published online.
Online ISSN
2044-6055

Journal Statistics 2023

Acceptance rate: 36%
Speed Time to first decision without review: 4 days (median) Time to first decision with review: 105 days (median) Time from acceptance to publication: 21 days (median)
Impact Impact Factor category: Medicine, General & Internal Impact Factor (JCR): 2.9 Impact Factor rank: 77/167 5 Year Impact Factor: 3.3 Journal Citation Indicator (JCI): 0.72 Eigenfactor: 0.15678 Citescore: 4.4 Citescore rank: 186/830 Scimago Journal Rank (SJR): 1.059
Reach Total content views: 6.83 million Total Altmetric mentions: 24,708
SFDORA logo
The impact that academic research has cannot be defined by one single metric. In 2013, BMJ signed the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA). We did this to show our support for using multiple measures and metrics to portray journals’ impact; moving away from the Impact Factor as a single measure. How we get these metrics

Contact information

For all contact information please refer to the contact us page.

For authors

Please refer to the instructions for authors

For reviewers

Please refer to the instructions for reviewers

Affiliations

DRYAD logo
Dryad is an international repository of data underlying peer-reviewed articles in the basic and applied biosciences. Dryad enables scientists to validate published findings, explore new analysis methodologies, repurpose data for research questions unanticipated by the original authors, and perform synthetic studies. BMJ has been working with Dryad since 2010.
COPE logo
The BMJ Publishing Group is a founding member of COPE (the Committee on Publication Ethics), which provides a forum for publishers and Editors of scientific journals to discuss issues relating to the integrity of the work submitted to or published in their journals.
Equator logo
The EQUATOR Network is an international initiative that seeks to improve the value of medical research literature by promoting accurate, transparent reporting of research studies. The BMJ Publishing Group is a sponsor of its activities.
CASPA logo
The mission of OASPA is to support and represent the interests of open access journal publishers globally in all scientific, technical, and scholarly disciplines. The BMJ Publishing Group has been a member since 2009.
Creative Commons logo
All BMJ Open articles are licensed using either Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) or Attribution Non-Commercial (CC BY-NC) licence. These licenses let others distribute, remix, tweak and build upon your work. See our open access page for more details.
AllTrials logo
BMJ is a founding organisation of the AllTrials initiative, which calls for all past and present clinical trials to be registered and their results reported.