BMC Medicine (ISSN 1741-7015) is an online journal publishing research articles after full peer review. All articles are published, without barriers to access, immediately upon acceptance. The journal is published by BioMed Central Ltd, Middlesex House, 34-42 Cleveland Street, London W1T 4LB, UK.

Scope

BMC Medicine publishes original research articles, technical advances and study protocols in any area of medical science or clinical practice. The fields covered include anesthesiology, cardiology, complementary medicine, critical care, dermatology, emergency medicine, endocrinology, ethics, gastroenterology, genetics, geriatrics, gynecology, health services research, hematology, imaging, immunology, infectious diseases, informatics, medical education, musculoskeletal disorders, nephrology, neurology, nuclear medicine, nursing, obstetrics, oncology, ophthalmology, oral health, otolaryngology, palliative care, pathology, pediatrics, pharmacology, physiology, primary care, psychiatry, public health, respirology, research methodology, surgery and urology.

Criteria for publication

To be appropriate for BMC Medicine, articles need to be of special importance and broad interest. This will be determined by peer review and by the advice of a member of the editorial board or somebody of equivalent standing. There are no restrictions on the length of an article, but authors should bear in mind that excessive length deters potential readers.

Articles that are sound research but only of importance to those with very closely related interests will not be considered for publication, but should this only become apparent after peer review, the authors may be offered publication in one of the subject-specific BMC journals (such as BMC Gastroenterology).

Speed of publication

BMC Medicine offers a very fast publication schedule while maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles will be published electronically in manuscript form immediately upon acceptance. A fully structured web version, and accompanying laid out PDF, will be published within a few weeks of acceptance.

Flexibility

As an electronic-only journal, BMC Medicine gives authors the opportunity to publish large data sets, large numbers of illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other papers).

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts must be submitted to BMC Medicine electronically using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

Indexing and archiving

Following publication in BMC Medicine, the full text of each article is immediately and permanently archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. BMC Medicine is indexed/tracked/covered by PubMed, MEDLINE, BIOSIS, CAS, Scopus, EMBASE and Google Scholar.

BMC Medicine is included in Thomson Scientific's Web of Science and other products.

Copyright

The authors are the copyright holders for all articles in BMC Medicine and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license rules.

Citing papers in the journal

Articles in BMC Medicine should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal, with one exception. Because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

BMC Med 2000, 1:2

refers to article 2 from volume 1 of the journal.

As an online journal, BMC Medicine does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

Contacting BMC Medicine

Queries about content, submissions, or the review process should be directed to editorial@biomedcentral.com. All other enquiries should be directed to info@biomedcentral.com.