Up until now BMC Research Notes has accepted, as direct submissions, short reports, technical notes, data notes, project notes, hypotheses and correspondence articles. Research articles, with their widely-accepted I(B)MRaD (Introduction (Background), Methods, Results and Discussion) format, were not considered unless they were received as a post-peer-review transfer from another journal. The objective of this policy was to avoid restricting authors who felt their article could not fit easily within the I(B)MRaD template. However, in response to feedback from authors and editors and the continued growth of the journal, BMC Research Notes has now also opened the submission system to standard research articles prepared in a more traditional format.

A major aim of BMC Research Notes is to complete the scientific record by publishing scientifically sound research, hypotheses and data sets – in particular, negative results, incremental and small scale research. We aim to give authors of these, usually, shorter reports more flexibility and facilitate innovation in biomedical publishing. As such, there continues to be no restrictions on article length, number of references, tables or figures and the journal continues to welcome articles prepared in a non-traditional format. Additionally, the journal will continue to consider research articles as transfers from any other BioMed Central journal, and strongly encourages this activity to increase the speed and efficiency of the peer-review process.

We will continue to listen to our authors and Editorial Board to ensure we do all we can to prevent publication barriers and help reduce wasteful duplication of research and reporting bias.

If you would like to submit your manuscript, be it a research article, data note or short report, you can do so through our easy-to-use online submission system.