At BMJ Group, we set the benchmark for publishing integrity, shaping best practices across the industry and supporting the research community to publish responsibly.

Content integrity underpins everything we publish. Our dedicated team works to prevent, identify and address significant errors and instances of scientific misconduct or malpractice in the content published across all our journals.

For authors and organisations, this means a fair, transparent publishing process, reputation protection, and greater confidence that their research will be respected, cited, and used to drive real world change.

Why does integrity matter so much? Because every clinical decision depends on trustworthy evidence. In this video, we explain how we prevent bias, protect the scholarly record, and act when concerns arise.

From robust policies to transparent corrections and retractions, we show what integrity looks like in practice, and why it underpins better care.

Some integrity issues are straightforward. Others aren’t. Here, we walk through how we handle tough cases, questionable images, duplicate submissions, undisclosed relationships, and legal concerns.

You’ll see how we assess evidence, consult experts, communicate with authors, and document decisions, always aligning with COPE guidance and our policies.

Since its launch in 2000, BMJ Group’s Ethics Committee has guided editors through some of the most difficult dilemmas in medical publishing. Its remit covers patient confidentiality, our journals’ wider duty of care, and suspected research misconduct.

Examples include:

• Patient confidentiality: revising our guidelines to clarify when it may be appropriate to publish information without patient consent (eg. historical cases such as an Egyptian mummy).
• Duty of care: advising editors to raise concerns with medical authorities when a submitted paper implied unsafe clinical practice, ensuring patient safety was prioritised.
• Whistleblowing: handling a report from junior doctors about cheating in final exams, balancing the need to inform the medical school while protecting the authors’ identities.
• Research misconduct: deliberating on long running cases of suspected malpractice that involved international authorities and legal threats, and recommending early warnings to other journals to prevent potentially fraudulent research from spreading.

The importance of strong editorial safeguards was underlined by the Andrew Wakefield MMR vaccine case. Initially published in The Lancet in 1998, the paper falsely claimed a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. Years later, The BMJ exposed the research as fraudulent through a landmark investigation by journalist Brian Deer. His reporting revealed serious data misrepresentation and undisclosed conflicts of interest, leading to the paper’s retraction and Wakefield being struck off the medical register.

This case is a powerful reminder of the consequences of weak integrity systems. It helped develop our current ethics and content integrity structures, including the Ethics Committee, to ensure potential misconduct is identified, investigated, and addressed with rigour and transparency.

The BMJ Group Content Integrity team supports journal editors, production, systems, legal, and technical teams through training and specialised advice, ensuring consistent, high quality research publication. Integrity is a collective responsibility, with publicly accessible policies and author guidance available on the BMJ Author Hub.

Investigations into potential issues are thorough, involving pre- and post-publication scrutiny, collaboration with editors, and input from technical experts, ensuring careful and timely corrections or retractions when necessary. The BMJ’s mandatory data and code sharing policy: making improvements in research integrity and quality

Integrity at BMJ Group runs through everything we do. It is not limited to research but is embedded across all teams and processes.

Clinical study data includes all information collected during a study and analysed using computer code to generate results. Open access to this data and code helps others verify findings, build on existing work, and make clinical decisions based on complete evidence.

Since 2013, The BMJ has required authors of drug and device trials to share relevant trial data on request. In 2015, this was extended to all clinical trials. But compliance remained low.

From May 2024, BMJ introduced a formal policy requiring authors of all submitted trials to post relevant data in a public, enduring repository before publication. This strengthens research credibility, supports independent review, and improves patient care.

Our wider commitment to integrity also includes:

• Responsible use of artificial intelligence
• Clear correction and retraction processes
• Patient consent policies
• Rigorous research ethics oversight
• Management of scientific misconduct
• A strict tobacco funding policy

All BMJ journals require a Data Availability Statement for any submitted research articles. The requirements for data sharing are dependent on the policy the journal adopts.

Whilst we will consider content where AI technologies are used, our approach is one of transparency. Where AI technology has been used, this should be clearly described.

The content integrity team works closely with BMJ Group’s content development team to conduct additional checks that ensure the highest quality of topic collections. These checks help prevent low quality work from entering our journals and uphold our rigorous publishing standards. The topic collection handling process includes enhanced editorial oversight and use of advanced screening tools to identify papers that require enhanced scrutiny.

Retractions play a vital role in maintaining the integrity of academic publishing and ensuring research credibility. While they are often viewed negatively due to concerns about reputational damage and career impact, BMJ sees them as crucial to scientific progress, reinforcing trust, refining evidence, and improving patient care.

A recent example is The BMJ’s retraction of an article and subsequent publication of a new, revised article on unexpected weight loss as a potential cancer warning sign. After identifying a methodological error, Dr Brian Nicholson and his team at the University of Oxford worked closely with the journal to retract and publish the new version of the study. This collaboration ensured the research findings were accurately represented, reinforcing trust in the evidence used to guide clinical decision making.

In recognition of the harmful impact of the tobacco industry, a subset of BMJ Journals has excluded tobacco sponsored research from their publications for over a decade. In 2024, the content integrity team extended this policy to cover all BMJ journals and all content types, and to exclude authors with personal financial interests in tobacco companies, tobacco related subsidiary companies or organisations. These measures strengthen our journals’ editorial integrity by supporting research independence from commercial interests and the publication of independent, trusted research that contributes to a healthier world.

Integrity underpins everything we publish. Through rigorous editorial standards, transparent policies, and active collaboration across the global publishing community, BMJ Group strengthens trust in medical research.

Our content integrity team ensures every article meets the highest ethical and scientific standards, so clinicians, researchers, and policymakers can act on our content with confidence.

BMJ Group sets the benchmark for publishing integrity, shaping best practice across the industry and supporting the research community to publish responsibly.