Report from the BMJ's full editorial committee meeting
10 August 2000
 
 

Members of the committee:

Trish Groves
Azeem Majeed
Liam Smeeth
Chris van Weel

Thank you for sending us these papers. We are pleased to say that we would like to publish paper 3518 in the BMJ, provided that you are willing to revise it as we suggest. We do not, however, think that paper 3519 is substantial enough to publish. This is what we would like you to do to paper 3518:

• The independent reviewer who saw your paper (please see enclosed report) made several comments that we would like you to respond to in revising this paper.
• Please describe clearly in the method section the membership of the two committees, explaining how many lay and expert members there were.
• We thought that you went too far in your conclusions. You have done an interesting and original study, but we do not think that the findings from this small qualitative piece of work can be used to develop a generalisable framework for the work of other such committees and groups. Qualitative research is great for stimulating debate and providing insights into people’s thoughts, beliefs, and motivations. It can’t really be used to produce anything formal that can be transferred reliably to a different setting and different group of people, particularly when a small and very specific sample is used. We hope, therefore, that you will be willing to make revisions throughout the paper, including the abstract and the "what this paper adds" box, to be less emphatic and to explain that the aim of the study was to explore the committee members’ views and beliefs.
• Moving on to paper 3519, both the reviewer and the committee had problems with this part of the work. We thought that this paper was much less clearly written and, moreover, we were worried that the aim of this part of the study was not particularly clear. Although you gave a definition of fairness in the introduction to the paper, we did not think that the rest of the paper handled the idea of fairness in a particularly clear way. At some times you seem to be referring to whether or not the committees worked in a democratic way and gave each member sufficient voice, and at other times you seem to be considering whether or not the rationing decisions of the committees were fair to the general public. If you are able to clarify this point about the definition of fairness, we would be happy for you to incorporate the data from this part of the study into the revised version of paper 3518. We recognise that doing this might result in a paper that is well over our limit of 2000 words. We could deal with this by publishing a longer version (of around 3000) on our website bmj.com with a shorter version in the paper journal. The enclosed information sheet will tell you more about this ELPS (electronic long, paper short) process.
• If you do not wish to send us a revised paper that combines both 3518 and 3519, please ensure that the revised version 3518 does not exceed 2000 words with up 24 references. Whatever you decide to do, please include with your revised paper a word count.

(a) Please respond to any checklists and guidelines which are enclosed with this paper.

(b) 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.

(c) 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 by the committee and the referees.