Education and debate

Education and debate articles aim to stimulate discussion, raise debate, and air controversies. These can cover any aspects of medicine and health, which are relevant to an international general medical audience including sociological and ethical aspects of medicine; polemical pieces; and educational articles. These articles (whether single pieces or short series of articles) are mostly commissioned, but we also welcome submissions.

They should include:

• 1500-1800 words set out under informative subheadings. Please include a 100-150 word introduction spelling out what the paper is about and emphasising its importance.
• no more than 20 references in Vancouver style, presenting the evidence on which the key statements in the paper are made. If necessary you can provide more references for publication only on bmj.com in a separate list numbered w1,w2,w3 etc and marked as such in the main text of the article
• up to three tables, boxes, or illustrations (clinical photographs, imaging, line drawings, figures - we welcome colour)
• a summary box with up to five short single sentences highlighting the main points
• web extras: we may be able to publish some additional boxes, figures, and references on bmj.com
• a statement of sources and selection criteria: as well as the standard statements of funding, competing interests and contributorship please provide at the end of the paper a short paragraph explaining the article’s provenance. This should describe briefly the relevant experience and expertise of the authors and the sources of information used to prepare the paper.

We do prefer authors to provide images to accompany their Education and Debate articles, but if authors have difficulty in providing images or ideas for them, then we will source one or more relevant images - usually photographs but occasionally commissioned illustrations. All our research shows that readers are more likely to read an article that has images in it, so our editorial policy is not to print articles with no images or tables. If you cannot supply one or more images we reserve, therefore, the right to source one or more ourselves. We try to let authors know when we commission images, but this is not always possible because of time constraints when we are putting pages together.