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We started the year with a rebrand of our name and the look of the journal and instigated some new policies: mandating ORCID ID for all submitting authors, a data sharing policy, and offering language editing and translation services. We also introduced tiered open-access fees and student discount while adding new Editorial Board Members and Spanish-translated versions.
In 2018, we accepted 126 articles with significant increases (more than double) in our original research, analysis, and opinion and debate articles. The median time to first decision was 20 days, slightly longer than in 2017, reflecting our increased research submissions, which took an average 45 days to make a first decision to accept or not. Our top viewed article in 2018 was ‘The Cochrane HPV vaccine review was incomplete and ignored important evidence of bias’,1 with over 115 000 abstract views and 70 000 full-text views. We asked our editors for their highlights (see box 1) which included the HPV analysis, redefining the E in EBM, overdiagnosis, systemic reviews and the ‘depletion of susceptibles’.
In 2018, we also launched our BMJ EBM spotlight blog2: posting 53 blogs, we attracted over 58 000 views, with Maryanne Demasi’s views on ‘Cochrane—a sinking ship’ being the most popular. …
Footnotes
Contributors I am the sole author. Associate Editors contributed to the highlights of the year.
Funding The authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interests CH participated in the ICIJ investigation but received no payments. CH is Director of the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine at the University of Oxford, and Editor in Chief of BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine. He has received expenses and fees for his media work. He holds grant funding from the NIHR, the NIHR School of Primary Care Research, The NIHR Oxford BRC and WHO. He has also received income from the publication of a series of toolkit books. CEBM jointly runs the EvidenceLive Conference with the BMJ and the Overdiagnosis Conference with some international partners which are based on a non-profit model.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; internally peer reviewed.
Patient consent for publication Not required.