Student BMJ

Student BMJ (StudentBMJ, sBMJ) is a monthly, international medical journal for medical students and junior doctors. It comes from the BMJ Group, which publishes the highly prestigious BMJ and more than 25 other sub-speciality journals. It was launched in 1992 with the express aim of publishing articles for the medical students, and is compiled by a full time student editor, who takes a year out from medical school. The current editor is Jessie Colquhoun. The current senior editor is Giselle Jones, also the editorials editor of the main BMJ.

Articles in the journal

Student BMJ is organised into the following sections: Letters and blog extracts; News; Editorials; Life (anything in medicine and medical student life that students want to write about); Careers; People (interviews); Education; Paper + (where an expert explains a recently published BMJ research paper); Frontiers (overview of the month in research); Views and Reviews; Eyespy (short, quirky medical stories). Most of the articles are written by medical students and most are submitted rather than commissioned. The exceptions are the ‘editorials’ and ‘paper +’ section which is always written by an expert, the ‘education’ section where articles are co-written with an expert. The journal does not publish any original research article, even from students. Around 10% of the journal is taken from the BMJ. The journal is also published online. Where you can send a ‘rapid response to an article (the best ones are published as letters in the print issue), see blogs in full and comment on them. The ‘international experience’ section is also exclusive to the web. Here you can read about an elective or research exchange.

How the journal functions

Although it is a student journal, it functions as professionally as any other medical journal. Articles are peer reviewed by students from a huge international advisory board. These student advisors help the student editor decide if the articles are internationally relevant and say if they believe an article is suitable for publication or not. They also suggest how articles might be improved. The journal receives approximately 50 submissions each month. A decision is made to accept it or not within eight weeks (on average). Only a handful of the submissions are finally accepted.

Impact and awards

The student BMJ is perhaps the most widely read medical publication for students, and offers all its contents entirely free online. The internet is the major portal of access for medical students from around the world, the print version mainly benefitting the UK readers. The journal has won the Guardian Student Media Awards twice.

External links

• StudentBMJ