Second dose of measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine: questionnaire survey of health professionals -- Data Supplement

Report from the BMJ’s full editorial committee meeting
29 June 2000

Members of the committee were:	Nicky Britten
	Trish Groves
	Duncan Keely
	Julie Morris

Health professionals and the second MMR vaccine

Thank you for sending us this paper. We are pleased to say that we would like to publish it in the BMJ if you are willing to revise it as we suggest.

1	The paper is very long as it stands, and is almost twice our usual limit of 2,000 words. We debated whether we could publish the paper as a short report, but decided that restricting you to only one table or figure would not be helpful. We would, however, like you to try to reduce the main text of the paper (excluding the abstract and reference list) to 1,000 words. You could do most of this shortening by ensuring that most of the results are tabulated, giving only the main results in the text of the results section. In addition, the comments made by some of the survey respondents on pages 8 and 11 could be moved to a single box. Finally, the discussion of the paper is very long, and we would like you to try and cut this by at least a half. We very much hope that you can shorten the paper in this way, and we would like you to provide a word count for the main body of the revised text.
2	Your results would also be much clearer if you combined tables 1 and 2, omitting the last column (total) and all the rows entitled "percentage for column".
3	Please add a box summarising the current UK vaccine schedules. This will help readers in the UK who are not routinely involved with immunisation, and will also make your message clearer for readers outside the UK.
4	Although most of our comments relate to making the paper shorter and clearer, we also need you to clarify and amend some of the methodological details in the paper:
	Please describe briefly how you selected a random 50% sample of GPs.
	We were not convinced that you could really attribute practice uptake rates for immunisation to particular individuals within the primary health care team. For instance a health visitor might encourage or discourage patients when discussing MMR immunisation, yet the actual injections might be given by the practice nurse or GP. In addition, in real life attitudes to and rates of immunisation uptake tend to depend on the culture of the whole practice; this is hard to discern from your findings. For these reasons, we think that you should remove from the paper all the data on MMR uptake.
	Our statistician thought that you did not need to present your results as odds ratios, and thought that you should give simple percentages instead.
5	The independent reviewer who saw your paper (please see enclosed report) also thought that the paper needed considerable shortening and clarifying. We did not agree that you needed to produce a longer version for bmj.com and a shorter one for the printed journal, but we did agree with the other points raised by the reviewer. Please ensure that you respond to these in revising your paper.
6	The last points relate to our processes:
	The BMJ aims to include the design of each study in the title; please amend your title so that it reads "second measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine: a questionnaire survey of primary care professionals".
	Please respond to any checklists and guidelines which are enclosed with this paper.
	We are now processing all manuscripts electronically, so please could you provide us with a copy of your article on disk as well as in hard copy. Please see the enclosed guidance about our preferred formats. If you cannot provide one of these please send a disk anyway with a note of the software used.
	It would help us greatly if you would send with your revised paper a covering letter explaining how you have responded to all the points raised in this report.