Leading medical publisher
BMJ Group publishes some of the world’s most cited and widely read journals. Our flagship journal, The BMJ, was first published in 1840, making it one of the world’s oldest general medical journals.
Today, The BMJ is ranked number 3 across the Medicine, General and Internal category, and number 5 across all 21,848 journals in Clarivate’s Journal Citation Reports (JCR) database. It has an official impact factor (IF) of 93.6, and sits in the 99th percentile.
British Journal of Sports Medicine (IF 11.6) is ranked first in its Sports Science category. The Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery (IF 4.5), Journal of Medical Ethics (IF 3.3) and Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases (IF 20.3) are all ranked second in their categories.
Retaining impressive rankings
BMJ Group publishes 6o journals, many of which are the most influential titles in their field.
Our continuous innovation ensures that our journals and events remain relevant to rapidly changing global audiences and market conditions.
British Journal of Sports Medicine
Number 1 out of 127
in Sports Sciences
11.6 JIF | 27.1 CiteScore
Journal of NeuroInterventional Surgery
Number 2 out of 15
in Neuroimaging
4.5 JIF | 9.5 CiteScore
Journal of Medical Ethics
Number 2 out of 23
in Medical Ethics
3.3 JIF | 7.8 CiteScore
Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases
Number 2 out of 57
in Rheumatology
20.3 JIF | 35 CiteScore
The BMJ
Number 3 out of 325
in Medicine, General & Internal
93.6 JIF | 19.9 CiteScore
BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health
Number 4 out of 66
in Family Studies
3.4 JIF | 5.1 CiteScore
GUT
Number 5 out of 143
in Gastroenterology & Hepatology
23 JIF | 45.7 CiteScore
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry
Number 5 out of 290
in Surgery
8.7 JIF | 15.7 CiteScore
Regional Anesthesia & Pain Medicine
Number 5 out of 64
in Anesthesiology
5.1 JIF | 8.5 CiteScore
Thorax
Number 7 out of 100
in Respiratory System
9 JIF | 16.1 CiteScore
Family Medicine and Community Health
Number 7 out of 30
in Primary Health Care
2.6 JIF | 9.7 CiteScore
BMJ Quality & Safety
Number 10 out of 174
in Health Care Sciences & Services
5.6 JIF | 9.8 CiteScore
Why partner with BMJ Group?
By partnering with royal colleges and leading scholarly and professional medical organisations, we ensure the publication of the latest and most relevant research. This collaboration benefits health professionals everywhere by providing access to cutting-edge medical knowledge and evidence-based practices.
As a wholly owned subsidiary of the British Medical Association (BMA), we understand the challenges faced by membership organisations.
High impact
9th most cited publisher in Clinical Medicine, 12th in Public Health, and 8th in Health Services Research *
Extensive reach
10.5 million users worldwide rely on the best evidence we provide on our websites
Proven experience
Trusted partner to over 11,000 healthcare and academic institutions, funders, and governmental organisations worldwide
Inspiring real change through global brand reach and recognition
Typically, research takes five to 15 years to impact clinical guidelines. Our brand recognition and global reach have the ability to accelerate this process, thereby improving clinical practice worldwide.
In October 2020, an observational study comparing outcomes after treatment with autologous haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (AHSCT) and alemtuzumab (ALZ) in patients with relapsing–remitting multiple sclerosis, was published in our high-impact, open access Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry.1
In less than four years, the research paper demonstrated real-world impact. It received 27 academic citations and was cited in clinical guidelines in three countries: Canada, Germany, and The Netherlands, with references from four different sources. It also helped lower-income countries (LMICs) provide affordable care for people living with multiple sclerosis, offering clear treatment outcomes that shaped guideline amendments and impacted care practices globally.
Supporting significant research output in lower-middle income countries
Since 2002, BMJ Group has actively participated in the the World Health Organization‘s Research4Life Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI) programme, allowing developing countries to access over 8500 journals and 7000 e-books. This initiative benefits thousands of health workers and researchers in more than 100 countries, improving global health.
Fostering transparency and quality in systematic reviews
The joint BMJ Group and Maastricht University PhD programme recruits PhD students to contribute to vital research in the field of the responsible conduct of publishing scientific research. It now proudly supports three students tackling diverse topics such as systematic review search strategies, librarian involvement in peer review, communication of retraction notices, and the use of AI in peer review.
This programme reflects our dedication to advancing the quality and transparency of research. Unlike other publishers, we uniquely open our doors to collaborate with external researchers, cementing our position as the leading publisher doing research on research.
Embarking on a PhD programme is a transformative journey marked by rigorous research, academic growth, and specialised expertise development. It offers scholars like Melissa Rethlefsen, a platform to delve deeply into their chosen field, contribute to cutting-edge research, and shape the future of their discipline. With a background in improving systematic review reporting and quality, Melissa saw this as an opportunity to formalise her work and contribute significantly to the field.
Melissa’s research focuses on a randomised control trial involving librarians and information specialists in peer review and improving the reproducibility and transparency of systematic review search strategies. Through the PhD programme, she has leveraged her research to conduct webinars and workshops for medical librarians and researchers worldwide, promoting best practices in systematic review reporting. It has significantly influenced Melissa’s career, providing her with mentorship from leading experts in the field.
Our mission and values
BMJ Group is a global healthcare knowledge provider with a vision of a healthier world. We share knowledge and expertise to improve patient outcomes.
Our values and vision of a healthier world define our actions and behaviours. We publish, convene and collaborate in a way which is ethical, sustainable, efficient, and equitable.
Our values
Our values give us the focus and direction to bring about our vision for a healthier world by sharing knowledge and expertise to help health professionals improve healthcare outcomes.
Making patient and public partnerships an ethical imperative
The BMJ is the first ever medical journal to receive the ‘Patients Included’ award for its strategy to encourage doctors and patients to work together as partners to improve healthcare. This important initiative has rippled across the business, with 75% of BMJ Events advisory committees including at least one patient, and 90% of all BMJ Best Practice leaflets have been reviewed by a patient panel.
Holding politicians accountable
In 2022, The BMJ’s UK Covid Inquiry Series highlighted how the political response to the covid-19 pandemic often failed to properly consider science. The articles raised important questions about the transparency and accountability of political decision making during the pandemic. They question the government’s resistance to scrutiny, lack of transparency, and failure to correct mistakes as knowledge and experience accumulated.
Delivering responsible metrics
The impact of academic research cannot be defined by any single metric. As a DORA signatory, BMJ Group believes that the journal impact factor (JIF) is best shared alongside other metrics that can help an author decide where to publish.
These include Citescore, Total Altmetric mentions, and time to first decision, amongst others. They are made available on all our individual journal sites and demonstrate how BMJ Group is meeting researchers’ needs for timely publication, reach and influence.
Everything we do is evidence-based. We carefully create and curate the evidence we share to drive better patient care within the spirit of openness and transparency.
Anca Babor
Director Customers and Markets, Publishing & Events
Ensuring users can trust the integrity of all the content we publish
The content we publish is always of the highest standards, ensuring its reliability to influence care. Our dedicated Content Integrity team focuses on upholding the highest standards of research integrity and publishing ethics. Their role is pivotal in maintaining robust editorial practices. By preventing, detecting, investigating, and advising on integrity breaches, they always prioritise the safety of patients and the public. This relentless commitment to content integrity reassures authors, readers, funders, and institutions of the reliability of our publications.
Our Content Integrity team’s key responsibilities include:
We contribute regularly to guidelines and discussion documents created by the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). As co-authors of official COPE guidance, we address issues such as manipulation of the publication process and recently collaborated on developing disclaimers and guidance for dealing with historically offensive content.
By continually advancing our practices and policies, we ensure that institutions can trust us to uphold the highest standards of integrity in research publications.
Safeguarding the integrity of science
Our collaboration with over 15 leading publishers as an official participating member of the STM Integrity Hub, a powerful platform being built to detect integrity issues in manuscripts submitted for publication to scholarly journals. Representatives from BMJ Group are part of the collaboration group looking at Image Manipulation Detection, and play a key role on the Governance board for the project. Through this hub, publishers can effectively and efficiently respond to the increasing and alarming volume of materials entering scholarly communications that violate accepted research integrity.
Strengthening ethics within the publishing community
BMJ Group’s content integrity team developed guidance and a visual summary illustrating the cycle of injustice. It complements the guide for editors, which gives practical strategies to advance equity, diversity and inclusion. It was consequently adopted as a formal part of the American Chemical Society (ACS) Publications e-learning course curriculum and supplementary guide for ACS journal editors on practical strategies to advance equity, diversity and inclusion.
“I am reaching out because we have continuously come back to your page on ‘Five things you should do as a journal editor to support social justice’ – particularly the graphic on the cycle of injustice. This visual is quite impactful and will aid in our efforts for editors to understand how their journal strategies and decisions affect the broader research ecosystem.”
Shaina Lange
Manager, Publishing Integrity Office Global Editorial Operations, Journals Publishing Group, American Chemical Society
Advancing scientific discovery through open access
We support the transition of publicly-funded research to open access and are increasing the reach and utility of what we publish, actively reshaping how medical research is conducted and disseminated.
The BMJ ‘s research has always been free to read, and in 2011 we launched our first and largest open access medical journal, BMJ Open.
Today, a third of our journals are fully open access, and we also make academic research freely accessible and discoverable with hybrid publication models.
We offer different types of open access agreements to help your researchers publish their work in leading scientific journals at a reduced cost while complying with open access mandates.
Improving the openness and accessibility of scientific findings
We know that early access to research results accelerates the pace of medical discovery. That’s why we want to reshape the way medical research is conducted and disseminated; by making preprints mainstream. BMJ Group is a part of initiatives like Initiative for Open Citations (I4OC) and Initiative for Open Abstracts (I4OA), making it easier for articles to be found, read and cited.
In 2019, BMJ Group co-launched the preprint server for Health Sciences, medRxiv, with Yale University and Cold Spring Harbour Laboratory. It is the first health sciences preprint server and it allows fast sharing of preliminary research findings to the widest possible audience.
MedRxiv encourages our authors to post their research as preprints. We have also invested in integrating medRxiv with our journals platform to make the submission process easier for authors and to further speed up routes to the publication of peer-reviewed evidence.
Advancing equity in open access publishing
At BMJ Group, we support authors from LMICs in publishing their research open access in their journal of choice.
All our journals offer waivers for the full Article Processing Charge (APC) with a 100% discount for authors in LMICs. We will always consider discount requests from countries not currently covered by that policy on a case-by-case basis.
“Science is accelerating patient care and it is essential to share the outcome of research worldwide. Our multi-year agreement for open access publishing in BMJ Group’s hybrid and Gold OA journals is one of the keystones in the Amsterdam UMC Open Science policy.”
Lieuwe Kool
Director of the Medical Library, Amsterdam University Medical Centre
Better evidence
Staying at the forefront of scientific advances
14K
BMJ Group articles were cited in 6K policy and clinical guidance documents published in 2022*
770K
media mentions of articles published in 2022**
Over 60%
of our journals are in the top quartile of their category, with 15% ranked in the top five for their categories
56
of our 65 strong journal portfolio have a Journal Impact Factor (JIF)
11th
most cited publisher in Clinical Medicine, 8th in Public Health, and 8th in Health Services Research ***
17
of our journals received their first JIF in 2023****
34.5K
news mentions of documents published in 2022, a 34% increase year on year
87%
of BMJ journals indexed in Scopus saw an increase in their CiteScore in 2023
Advancing real-world impact assessment
Research that improves patients’ lives matters deeply to the funders, institutions and researchers who dedicate their resources to medical and health research. But evaluating the impact of this research on policy and guidelines is traditionally measured by standard scholarly metrics in the absence of more targeted analysis that relates explicitly to health improvement.
BMJ Group and the pioneering technology start-up, Overton, set out to address this challenge by collaborating to develop BMJ Impact Analytics, the first research impact tool focused on health and social care. It was launched in January 2023, and, by that following June, won the prestigious Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers (ALPSP) Award for Innovation in Publishing 2023.
“We chose to partner with BMJ Group because of their expertise and reach in the medical research community. Their existing relationships and global presence made the organisation a valuable partner. Additionally, BMJ Group ’s mission-driven approach aligned with our values at Overton.”
Euan Adie
Founder and Director Overton
“The opportunities that BMJ Group presents through the events they lead are far reaching. They have the potential to change perceptions and mindsets of both healthcare professionals and the regulators of the healthcare systems within which they operate.”
Ian Leistikow
Inspector at Dutch Health and Youth Care Inspectorate and Professor at Erasmus University
Bringing together experts in diverse fields
Our privileged networks include close relationships with corporations, foundations, multilateral organisations, non-governmental organisations, and governments.
Our collaboration with these industry experts help us to look beyond healthcare to address issues such as sustainability, poverty reduction, gender and health inequalities, and the changing shape of academic research.
We can then share and compare knowledge through large and small-scale events, webinars and roundtables, while also contributing to the editorial BMJ Collection series.
Connecting communities
Events
From conferences to masterclasses, webinars to roundtables, our events are high-profile networking opportunities where health professionals can convene to exchange insights, share best practices, unveil cutting-edge research, and collectively address patient safety threats.
BMJ Research Forum
BMA House Tavistock Square, London, United Kingdomtest
