BMJ Evidence-Based Medicine in 2018

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. …