Journal of Medical Ethics Forum Post Instructions

Thank you for writing a forum post on your paper. Doing this will enable those without a subscription to the journal to learn from and engage with your work, and medical ethics.

We also accept submission of posts that are not related to newly published Journal of Medical Ethics articles. These might be posts related to current events, topical issues, or other matters of interest that fall within the scope of the Journal of Medical Ethics.

Examples post of this type are below:

• Euthanasia please, we are Portuguese. By Vera Lúcia Raposo
• Who cares for the ‘low-skilled’ care worker? The flawed new Brexit immigration policy. By David Shaw

If you would like to submit a post of this type, please email the editor of the forum with your idea or draft post for consideration. Please follow the instructions below, with adaptation as necessary (i.e. no paper title), as shown in the above posts.

Instructions for Authors

JME Forum follows the BMJ forum guidelines. Please note that the JME Forum won’t post anything that could be viewed as libellous and the BMJ requirements for patient confidentiality apply.

• Style: write clearly, succinctly, avoid jargon, avoid long paragraphs. The aim is for posts that are interesting and accessible for a wide lay audience.
• Title: choose a succinct title that is likely to arouse interest in the topic. This title will be used in social media publicising your post.
• Length of post: the average post is around 800 words. Word counts beyond this may limit reader completion of the post and engagement. There is nothing wrong with shorter posts -they may create more engagement and interest in reading the JME paper.
• Choose a clear aim for the post: Summarising your paper, focusing on one element of your paper (argument, claim, objection, issue, etc) for summary, illustration, more or different analysis, to explain its importance, it’s relevance to other matters, etc. Approaching or presenting the paper from a different angle – explaining where the idea for it came from or the motivation to write it; a problem encountered in the research; happy accidents in the research, next steps, etc.
• Any images will need license for public use. Please link to or attach image and provide copyright information.
• Competing interests: please declare any actual or potential competing interests you have of relevance for the post, as prompted in the template. This can be copied from the disclosure in your article.
• Social media accounts of author(s): these may be included in social media from the JME account to share the post. There is no obligation to provide these, but it can improve social media impact if they are provided.
• Do not use formal references and in-text citations. Instead embed hyperlinks, ideally to popular sources (newspapers etc), and academic articles where necessary (open access versions preferred).
• Format using Microsoft word, or saved to a Word-compatible file format.