Guidelines for evaluating papers on educational interventions

Education is an important part of the work of most doctors, and the BMJ is interested to publish original studies that will be useful to doctors in their educational role. Unfortunately many of the accounts we receive of educational interventions comprise a thin description of the innovation and an evaluation that says little more than that the students liked the innovation. This is not good enough. The standard of papers evaluating educational interventions should be as high as that of any other original papers that we publish. We recognise, however, that many of the methodologies that are best for evaluating educational innovations are different from the methods with which BMJ readers are familiar—for instance, methods for evaluating new drugs. We thus set up a group of advisers, consisting of people expert in medical education, to produce guidelines that we could use when reviewing original papers that describe educational innovations. This is a first version of those guidelines. The guidelines are intended for authors, editors, reviewers, and readers. We have no doubt that they can be improved, and it might be that we should evolve different guidelines for those different groups. We are doing three things with these guidelines: ### Summary points