The BMJ Requires a Patient and Public Involvement Statement in the Methods

The requirement is short and the placement is the part people get wrong. “All authors submitting research papers are required to include a” Patient and Public Involvement Statement “within the methods section of their paper at submission.”

Three things follow from that wording. It applies to research papers, not to every article type. It goes in the methods, not in a cover letter or a declarations block at the end. And it is due at submission, not on request during review.

What the statement has to say is how patients and the public were involved in the research — in setting the question, designing the study, choosing the outcomes, conducting it, or disseminating the results. BMJ also notes that it is revising how it asks the question in order to standardise the responses.

Patient co-authors. Where a patient is named as an author, they “must meet the same ICMJE criteria as a standard author”, and they may be required to provide consent for publication where the article includes information about their own health or conditions. Involvement and authorship are different thresholds, and conflating them does the patient no favours.

The statement exists because research funded to help patients has a long history of measuring things patients do not care about. A trial that chose its primary outcome without asking anybody who has the condition can be methodologically immaculate and clinically beside the point.

Requiring the statement rather than the practice is deliberate and worth understanding. BMJ is not insisting that every study involve patients; it is insisting that the reader be told. A paper that states plainly that there was no patient or public involvement has complied, and has also told a funder and a reader something true about how the question was chosen.

CONSORT 2025 added patient and public involvement as item 8 of its checklist in April 2025, which means a randomised trial now meets the same requirement twice — once from the journal and once from the reporting guideline. For trialists that convergence is the practical news.

How it reaches a specific journal. The policy is publisher-level across BMJ’s research journals. The page names no individual titles, stating simply that all authors submitting research papers are required to include the statement.

Beyond BMJ. Since CONSORT 2025 made patient and public involvement item 8 of the trial checklist, any journal that asks for a completed CONSORT checklist is now asking the same question of a randomised trial, whoever publishes it.