Report from the BMJ's full editorial committee meeting
Members of the committee:
Trish Groves
Azeem Majeed
Liam Smeeth
Chris van Weel Paper: Is exercise an effective intervention for the management of depression

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 independent clinical reviewer and statistical reviewer who saw your paper both liked it and made only minor suggestions for revision. We would like you to respond to the points in both of their reports, which are enclosed here.
  2. The committee made the following points that we would also like you to respond to:

    3.  
        a Please explain briefly how you allowed for the fact that different cut offs were used for the Beck Depression Inventory, and how this is reflected in the effect sizes.

        b We weren’t sure why you had included all of the studies in figure 2, given that you had already shown that pooling them was not really valid.

        c On a very minor note, we wondered whether the paper you cite as reference 5 described a randomised controlled trial of expressive writing. If the study was not an RCT, can you really state that creative writing helps to reduce depressive symptoms?
         

  3. We do not think that all of our general readers need to see a detailed account of your methodology. Therefore, we would like to publish your paper in two forms – a full version on our website bmj.com and a much shorter version in the printed BMJ. We are beginning to use this dual publication process for increasing numbers of BMJ papers, and the enclosed sheet gives you more information about this ELPS (electronic long, paper short) system. As you will see, we only need from you a revised version of the full paper; we will go ahead and produce the two versions for publication.
  4. The last points relate to our processes:
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 in this report.