| Present: | Sandy Goldbeck-Wood |
| Teifion Davies | |
| John Rees | |
| Gordon Murray |
Paper:Job loss, job insecurity and health post privatisation in white collar workers
Decision: Accept the paper with revision
Nature of decision: Split down the middle
(The final decision to publish was taken by Richard Smith, who wasn't at the meeting but read the paper subsequently.)
| 1 | The committee thinks that the paper must be written in a form that will make it more accessible to the general readers of the BMJ. At the moment, the paper is rather heavy on jargon and difficult to follow. |
| 2 | The committee is convinced that this is a study that ought to be published in a shorter version in the paper journal with an article of something like the present length available on the web. We would like the shorter article to be not more than 1500 words long. If you don't want to accept publication in this form, then it would be most sensible for you to go elsewhere. The BMJ is very much committed to a future publishing shorter articles in the paper version of the journal with longer versions on the web. We think that in this way we can save the age old dilemma of trying simultaneously to please general readers, who want short crisp articles, and researchers, who need access to as much information and data as possible. |
| 3 | We were concerned about the baseline differences between the two groups, and we would like you to critically discuss the importance of these differences. |
| 4 | The committee was worried that the results may not be widely generalisable. We would like you to critically discuss this point. |
| 5 | The word significant is used ambiguously in several places in the paper. We at the BMJ try to reserve the word significant for meaning statistically significant. |
| 6 | The statistician was generally happy with the statistical aspects of the paper, but we will have the paper checked by a statistician when it is returned. |
| 7 | The reviewers made some useful points on the paper, which the authors will no doubt want to take into account in revising their paper. |
| 8 | Please include the design of the study in the title of the paper. |
| 9 | We need information on who will act as a guarantor of the study. |
| 10 | The abstract currently doesn't include any numbers, and we think that it would be useful if it did. |
| 11 | Can you reassure us that ethics committee approval was gained for this study. A statement to this effect should be included in the paper. |
| 12 | Can you provide a paragraph for This week in the BMJ and a box explaining what this paper adds. I enclose information which explains what I mean by this. |
| 13 | Can you also include our competing interests forms. 1 enclose a copy of one of these. |