In 2016, in response to an apparent decision by the British Medical Journal (BMJ) to deprioritise qualitative research papers for publication, 76 senior academics from countries across the world signed an open letter setting out their objections to that decision.1 In response, the journal’s editors responded with a number of statements about why qualitative research was no longer a priority for them.2 These statements embodied a number of claims, which are set out in Box 1.
Box 1 BMJ editor statements2
All of these propositions can, of course, be challenged. However, it is not my purpose here to point out the many and various ways in which the BMJ editors were wrong. My concern is with our collective obligation to make our qualitative research as good as we possibly can, and to reflect upon how the BJGP can support researchers and authors in this endeavour. With this in mind, I think we need to ask ourselves what it is about the work that we do that fails to convince our colleagues as to its value.
Lisa Morriss, an editor of the journal Qualitative Social Work, set out her concerns about the quality of some qualitative papers submitted to the journal in an editorial, making the point that ‘themes do not ‘emerge from the data’, a sentence we often see in articles submitted to our journal. Instead, the researcher actively constructs each of the themes through their engagement with the material.3 This reflects my own experience as a reviewer, with a distressingly large number of …
