Abstract

Chinese authors are the third most frequent submitters to the JME. However, as will be apparent from the content published in the journal, relatively fewer papers from China are accepted. That is not due to a lack of important scholarship in China. We recently contributed to a highly successful conference with Professor Xiaomei Zhai at Peking Union Medical College, Beijing and were impressed by the increasing awareness, analysis and progress of medical ethics in China, including in the area of organ transplantation. However, few of these presentations make it into print. It is therefore important to make the criteria that inform editorial judgements as transparent as possible. There are several reasons why the acceptance rates for the JME are higher in some countries than others. Some of them are related to different views about what constitutes medical ethics or research. In some contexts, articles are not recognised as research unless they are empirical and the bulk of papers submitted from some countries have no ethical argument. Philosophical traditions vary across countries and papers that are primarily exegetical, in the sense that they describe what a famous philosopher would say about an issue, usually do not make it into the JME. There are other journals that accommodate different views about what counts as research or ethics, so authors should match their papers to the content that a journal publishes. However, academic journals can be opaque about how authors should pitch their papers so as to maximise their chances of publication. …