Injury Prevention Submission Guide

Lead with the prevention problem and what the paper enables. Methods should establish who was represented, how injury and exposure were measured, how confounding or selection was addressed, and why the comparison supports the proposed action. Results should report absolute as well as relative effects when possible. Discussion should connect evidence to implementation while preserving uncertainty.

The journal's current formatting guidance asks authors to identify global context, including the study location in the title and abstract where relevant. Do not bolt on a generic international-relevance sentence. Explain which mechanism is portable and which infrastructure, law, culture, or exposure pattern is not.

• Use the design-matched reporting guideline and reconcile its checklist with the manuscript.
• Include the required ethics statement for human research and explain consent or waiver where applicable.
• Define acronyms sparingly and write for an interdisciplinary injury-prevention audience.
• Describe inequities, exposure differences, and missing populations when they affect use.
• Make tables and figures answer a prevention decision rather than repeat the results text.

Build the first-page logic

The title should name the population or setting when it affects interpretation. The abstract should state the prevention problem, design, represented exposure, main result with uncertainty, and action boundary. In the introduction, move quickly from burden to the exact decision the study can improve. A long global burden paragraph cannot compensate for an unclear intervention or mechanism.

In results, show denominators and absolute scale. If exposure changes over time, report the relevant population or activity denominator rather than event counts alone. For natural experiments, make pre-trend, concurrent changes, lag choices, and robustness analyses easy to inspect. For qualitative work, show how sampling, reflexivity, coding, and divergent accounts support the implementation inference.

Design a decision-bearing artifact

Create one table that connects finding to action without collapsing uncertainty. Useful columns include population, injury mechanism, modifiable condition, policy option, evidence strength, implementation dependency, equity consequence, and unresolved question. This is more useful than a generic implications list because readers can see which recommendation depends on which evidence.

Reconcile the reporting checklist, ethics statement, trial or protocol record, data availability, funding, competing interests, author contributions, and portal. Confirm that dates, jurisdictions, policy names, and programme components are precise. Why this guide exists: official BMJ instructions define the contract, but they cannot decide whether a descriptive study has become a prevention contribution. At Manusights, we use counterfactual and transfer tests to expose that difference.

1. Intake: article type, structure, files, declarations, reporting material, and ethics are checked.
2. Editorial assessment: editors test prevention relevance, design fitness, public-health importance, and international usefulness.
3. Review: reviewers examine methods, causal restraint, intervention logic, implementation context, and reporting.
4. Revision: every response must remain consistent with the abstract, tables, figures, data statements, and conclusion.

Burden without prevention. Add the modifiable mechanism and decision, or choose a venue that owns descriptive epidemiology.

Causal language outruns the design. Distinguish association, prediction, natural experiment, and intervention evidence.

The global-context sentence is decorative. State what transfers, what depends on place, and which population remains unrepresented.

We use a counterfactual test for injury-prevention fit: if the paper's recommended action were implemented, which injury mechanism should change, for whom, and through which causal path? If the manuscript cannot answer, the recommendation is probably an aspiration rather than a result. This test also exposes when an outcome is too far downstream from the measured exposure.

The most useful papers separate three levels of consequence. The observed result reports what happened in the represented population and period. The prevention interpretation explains which mechanism the result supports. The implementation recommendation adds assumptions about feasibility, enforcement, cost, acceptability, or equity. Keeping those levels distinct makes the article more useful and less vulnerable to overclaiming.

Example: road-safety policy

A before-and-after decline following a policy does not establish effect by timing alone. Explain comparison areas or trends, concurrent interventions, enforcement, exposure volume, outcome ascertainment, and sensitivity analyses. Report whether the policy changes crashes, injuries, severity, or reporting. Then state which road system, legal authority, and enforcement conditions limit transfer.

Example: violence or self-harm prevention

Define the population, intervention reach, measurement window, and competing explanations. Separate reductions in reported events from reductions in underlying harm when ascertainment may change. If the intervention could affect access differently across groups, report the equity consequence rather than treating an average effect as universal.