Instructions for Authors — British Journal of Cancer

Source: https://www.nature.com/bjc/authors-and-referees

For Authors & Referees

Guide to Authors

All the key information you will require when preparing a manuscript for submission to the British Journal of Cancer including article type specifications and formatting guidelines. Please read this section before submitting.

Editorial Policies

Information about the policies applied by the Journal and details of how cases of potential misconduct are dealt with.

Editorial Process

This section explains how manuscripts are handled by our Editors between submission and acceptance for publication.

Author Services

Springer Nature offers an expanse of services to authors to help aid the publication process and to maximise dissemination of your research following acceptance.

For Referees

This section contains guidelines for refereeing for the *British Journal of Cancer *

Benefits of publishing with Springer Nature

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Editorial Policies

On this page: Authorship | Communication | Transparency & Ethics | Image Integrity and Standards | Permissions | Pre- and Post- Submissions | Misconduct

The BJC is committed to upholding the integrity of the scientific record. Researchers should conduct their research – from research proposal to publication – in line with best practices and codes of conduct of relevant professional bodies and/or national and international regulatory bodies.

**Authorship **

Requirements for all categories of articles should conform to the “Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals,” developed by the ICMJE (www.icmje.org).

Each author must have contributed sufficiently to the intellectual content of the submission. The corresponding author should list all authors and their contributions to the work. The corresponding author must confirm that he or she has had full access to the data in the study and final responsibility for the decision to submit for publication.

To qualify as a contributing author, each person must meet ALL the following criteria:

• Conceived and/or designed the work that led to the submission, acquired data, and/or played an important role in interpreting the results.
• Drafted or revised the manuscript.
• Approved the final version.
• Agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved

Contributions by individuals who made direct contributions to the work but do not meet all of the above criteria should be noted in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript. Medical writers and industry employees can be contributors. Their roles, affiliations, and potential conflicts of interest should be included in the author list or noted in the Acknowledgements and/or Authorship section.

The primary affiliation for each author should be the institution where the majority of their work was done. If an author has subsequently moved, the current address may also be stated.

Changes to Authorship

It is the corresponding author’s responsibility to ensure that the author list is correct at the point of first submission. Requests to change the authorship (such as to include or exclude an author, change an author's name or contribution) must be accompanied by a completed Authorship Change Form, which is available from the Editorial Office. New authors must also confirm that they fully comply with the journal's authorship requirements.

Requests for addition or removal of authors as a result of authorship disputes (after acceptance) are honoured after formal notification by the institute or independent body and/or when there is agreement between all authors. Changes to the authorship will not be allowed once the manuscript has been accepted for publication.

Communication

Correspondence with the Journal

The corresponding author is solely responsible for communicating with the journal and with managing communication between co-authors. It is this author's responsibility to inform all co-authors of any matters arising and to ensure such matters are dealt with promptly. Before submission, the corresponding author must ensure that all authors are included in the author list, its order agreed upon by all authors, and that all are aware that the manuscript was submitted.

After acceptance for publication, proofs are e-mailed to this corresponding author who should circulate the proof to all co-authors and coordinate corrections among them. The corresponding author is responsible for the accuracy of all content in the proof, in particular that names of co-authors are present and correctly spelt, and that addresses and affiliations are current.

Communication with the Media

Material submitted must not be discussed with the media. We reserve the right to halt the consideration or publication of a paper if this condition is broken. If a manuscript is particularly newsworthy, the press release will be sent to our list of journalists in advance of publication with an embargo that forbids any coverage of the manuscript, or the findings of the manuscript, until the time and date clearly stated. Authors whose papers are scheduled for publication may also arrange their own publicity (for instance through their institution’s press offices), but they must strictly adhere to our press embargo and are advised to coordinate their own publicity with our CRUK press office ([email protected]).

Communication between Scientists

We do not wish to hinder communication between scientists. We ask you to communicate with other researchers as much as you wish, whether on a recognised community preprint server, by discussion at scientific meetings or by online collaborative sites such as wikis, but we do not encourage premature publication by discussion with the press (beyond a formal presentation, if at a conference).

Transparency and Ethics

Competing interests

Competing interests are defined as those that, through their potential influence on behaviour or content, or from perception of such potential influences, could undermine the objectivity, integrity or perceived value of a publication. Whilst financial relationships are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest (and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and science itself) conflicts can occur for other reasons, such as personal relationships, academic competition, and intellectual passion.

In the interests of transparency and to help readers form their own judgments of potential bias, authors must declare whether or not there are any competing financial and non-financial interests in relation to the work described. This information must be included in both their cover letter and in the Additional Information section of the manuscript. In cases where the authors declare a competing interest, a statement to that effect is published as part of the article. If no such conflict exists, the statement will simply read that the authors have nothing to disclose. For the purposes of this statement, competing interests can include any of the following:

• Funding: Research support (including salaries, equipment, supplies, reimbursement for attending symposia, and other expenses) by organisations that may gain or lose financially through this publication. The role of the funding body in the design of the study, collection and analysis of data and decision to publish should be stated.
• Employment: Recent (while engaged in the research project), present or anticipated employment by any organisation that may gain or lose financially through this publication. This includes positions on an advisory board, board of directors, or other type of management relationship.
• Personal financial interests: Stocks or shares in companies that may gain or lose financially through publication; consultation fees or other forms of remuneration from organisations that may gain or lose financially; patents or patent applications whose value may be affected by publication.
• Patents: Holding, or currently applying for, patents relating to the content of a manuscript; receiving reimbursement, fees, funding, or salary from an organisation that holds or has applied for patents relating to the content of the manuscript. We do not consider diversified mutual funds or investment trusts to constitute a competing financial interest.
• A close relationship with, or a strong antipathy to, a person whose interests may be affected by publication of the article.
• An academic link or rivalry with someone whose interests may be affected by publication of the article.
• Membership in a political party or special interest group whose interests may be affected by publication of the article, or
• A deep personal or religious conviction that may have affected what the author wrote and that readers should be aware of when reading the article.

The competing interests statement must contain an explicit and unambiguous statement describing any potential conflict of interest, or lack thereof, for any of the authors as it relates to the subject of the report. Neither the precise amount received from each entity nor the aggregate income from these sources needs to be provided. Professional services include any activities for which the individual is, has been, or will be compensated with cash, royalties, fees, stock or stock options in exchange for work performed, advice or counsel provided, or for other services related to the author’s professional knowledge and skills. This would include, but not necessarily be limited to, the identification of organisations from which the author received contracts or in which he or she holds an equity stake if professional services were provided in conjunction with the transaction.

Examples of declarations are:

• Competing interests. The authors declare no competing interests.
• Competing interests. Dr Caron's work has been funded by the NIH. He has received compensation as a member of the scientific advisory board of Acadia Pharmaceutical and owns stock in the company. He also has consulted for Lundbeck and received compensation. Dr Rothman and Dr Jensen declare no potential competing interests.

Reviewers approached for assessment of submitted articles are also requested to declare conflicts of interest that may impede on their judgement of that article. This includes competing research in the same area that could be negatively affected by publication of the submitted article.

Studies involving humans and animals

Research involving human subjects, human material, or human data must have been performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki and must have been approved by an appropriate ethics committee. A statement detailing this, including the name of the ethics committee and the reference number where appropriate, must appear in all manuscripts reporting such research.

For experiments involving human subjects, authors must include with their submission a statement confirming that informed consent was obtained from all subjects.

For primary research manuscripts reporting experiments on live vertebrates and/or higher invertebrates, the corresponding author must confirm that all experiments were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations. The additional information section of the manuscript must include a statement identifying the institutional and/or licensing committee approving the experiments, including any relevant details regarding animal welfare, patient anonymity, drug side effects and informed consent. Sex and other characteristics of animals that may influence results must be described. Details of housing and husbandry must be included where they are likely to influence experimental results. The BJC recommends following the ARRIVE2.0 reporting guidelines when documenting animal studies.

Clinical Trials

As defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), a clinical trial is any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention and comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome. A medical intervention is any intervention used to modify a health outcome and includes, but is not limited to, drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, and process-of-care changes. A trial must have at least one prospectively assigned concurrent control or comparison group in order to trigger the requirement for registration. Non-randomised trials are not exempt from the registration requirement if they meet the above criteria.

All clinical trials must be registered in a public registry prior to submission and the trial registry number must be included in the manuscript and provided on submission. The BJC follows the trials registration policy of the ICMJE (www.icmje.org) and considers only trials that have been appropriately registered before submission, regardless of when the trial closed to enrolment. Acceptable registries must meet the following ICMJE requirements:

• Be publicly available, searchable, and open to all prospective registrants;
• Have a validation mechanism for registration data;
• Be managed by a not-for-profit organisation.

Examples of registries that meet these criteria include:

• ClinicalTrials.gov: the registry sponsored by the United States National Library of Medicine;
• ISCRTN registry(The International Standard Randomized Controlled Trial Number Registry);
• The Cochrane Renal Group Registry;
• The European Clinical Trials Database.

Randomised Controlled Trials (RCTs) must adhere to the CONSORT statement (CONsolidated Standards of Reporting Trials) and submissions must be accompanied by a completed CONSORT checklist (uploaded as a related Supplementary Information file).

Cell Line Authentication

If human cell lines are used, authors should include the following information in their manuscript:

• The source of the cell line, including when and from where it was obtained;
• whether the cell line has recently been authenticated and by what method; and
• whether the cell line has recently been tested for mycoplasma contamination.

Further information is available from the International Cell Line Authentication Committee (ICLAC). We recommend that authors check the NCBI database for misidentification and contamination of human cell lines.

Biosecurity Policy

The Editor may seek advice about submitted papers not only from technical reviewers, but also on any aspect of a paper that raises concerns. These may include, for example, ethical issues or issues of data or materials access. Occasionally, concerns may also relate to the implications to society of publishing a paper, including threats to security. In such circumstances, advice will usually be sought simultaneously with the technical peer review process. As in all publishing decisions, the ultimate decision whether to publish is the responsibility of the Editor.

Research Data Policy

BJC adheres to Springer Nature’s Data Policy Type 3. This means that a submission to the Journal implies that the materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality. It also means that a Data Availability Statement (see here for more details) is required by the journal.

Sequences, Structures and “Omics”

Papers reporting protein or DNA sequences and molecular structures will not be accepted without an accession number to Genbank/EMBL/DDBJ, SWISS-PROT, Protein Databank, or other publicly available database in general use in the appropriate field, that gives free access to researchers from the date of publication.

Authors of papers describing structures of biological macromolecules must provide experimental data upon the request of the Editor if they are not already freely accessible in a publicly available database such as ProteinDataBank, Biological Magnetic Resonance Databank, or Nucleic Acid Database.

Image Integrity and Standards

Images submitted with a manuscript for review should be minimally processed (for instance, to add arrows to a micrograph). Authors should retain their unprocessed data and metadata files, as editors may request them to aid in manuscript evaluation. If unprocessed data is unavailable, manuscript evaluation may be stalled until the issue is resolved.

A certain degree of image processing is acceptable for publication, but the final image must correctly represent the original data and conform to community standards. The guidelines below will aid in accurate data presentation at the image processing level:

• Authors should document all image acquisition tools, key image-gathering settings, image processing software packages and processing manipulations in the Methods section.
• Images gathered at different times or from different locations should not be combined into a single image, unless it is stated that the resultant image is a product of time-averaged data or a time-lapse sequence. If juxtaposing images is essential, the borders should be clearly demarcated in the figure and described in the legend.
• Touch-up tools, such as cloning and healing tools in Photoshop, or any feature that deliberately obscures manipulations, is to be avoided.
• Processing (such as changing brightness and contrast) is appropriate only when it is applied equally across the entire image and is applied equally to controls. Contrast should not be adjusted such that data disappears. Excessive manipulations, such as processing to emphasise one region in the image at the expense of others (for example, through the use of a biased choice of threshold settings), is inappropriate, as is emphasising experimental data relative to the control.

For gels and blots, positive and negative controls, as well as molecular size markers, should be included on each gel and blot – either in the main figure or an expanded data supplementary figure. The display of cropped gels and blots in the main paper is allowed if it improves the clarity and conciseness of the presentation. In such cases, the cropping must be mentioned in the figure legend.

• Vertically sliced gels that juxtapose lanes that were not contiguous in the experiment must have a clear separation or a black line delineating the boundary between the gels.
• Cropped gels in the paper must retain important bands.
• Cropped blots in the body of the paper should retain at least six band widths above and below the band.
• High-contrast gels and blots are discouraged, as overexposure may mask additional bands. Authors should strive for exposures with grey backgrounds. Immunoblots should be surrounded by a black line to indicate the borders of the blot, if the background is faint.
• For quantitative comparisons, appropriate reagents, controls and imaging methods with linear signal ranges should be used.

Microscopy adjustments should be applied to the entire image. Threshold manipulation, expansion or contraction of signal ranges and the altering of high signals should be avoided. If ‘pseudo-colouring’ and nonlinear adjustment (for example ‘gamma changes’) are used, this must be disclosed. Adjustments of individual colour channels are sometimes necessary on ‘merged’ images, but this should be noted in the figure legend. We encourage inclusion of the following with the final revised version of the manuscript for publication:

• In the Methods section, specify the type of equipment (microscopes/objective lenses, cameras, detectors, filter model and batch number) and acquisition software used. Although we appreciate that there is some variation between instruments, equipment settings for critical measurements should also be listed.
• The display lookup table (LUT) and the quantitative map between the LUT and the bitmap should be provided, especially when rainbow pseudo-colour is used. It should be stated if the LUT is linear and covers the full range of the data.
• Processing software should be named and manipulations indicated (such as type of deconvolution, three-dimensional reconstructions, surface and volume rendering, 'gamma changes', filtering, thresholding and projection).
• Authors should state the measured resolution at which an image was acquired and any downstream processing or averaging that enhances the resolution of the image.

Permissions

If a table or figure has been previously published, the authors must obtain written permission to reproduce the material in both print and electronic formats from the copyright owner, and submit the permission clearance documentation with the manuscript. This follows for illustrations and other materials taken from previously published works not in the public domain. The original source should be cited in the figure caption or table footnote. Permission to reproduce material can usually be obtained through the Copyright Clearance Center.

Pre- and Post-Submissions

Preprints

Preprint posting is not considered as prior publication and will not jeopardise consideration at the BJC. Preprints will not be considered when determining the conceptual advance provided by a study under consideration at BJC.

The original submitted version of the manuscript (the version that has not undergone peer review) may be posted at any time. Authors should disclose details of preprint posting, including the DOI, upon submission of the manuscript to the journal, and appropriately reference the preprint within the text of the main manuscript or alternatively in the Acknowledgements section.

Preprints should be cited in the reference list as below:

Cheng, D.K., Oni, R.E., Park, Y., Thalappillil, J.S., Ting, H.-c., Prasad, N. et al. Oncogenic KRAS engages an RSK1/NF1 complex in pancreatic cancer. bioRxiv, Preprint posted online 14 September 2020, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.14.295394 (2020).

Upon acceptance in the BJC, if you have posted a preprint on any preprint server, please ensure that the preprint details are updated with a publication reference, including the DOI and a URL to the published version of the article on the journal website.

Conference Abstracts

Conference abstracts presented at, or published as part of, scientific meetings do not preclude consideration for peer review of a full manuscript, but should be declared within the Acknowledgement section detailing the name of the authors, title and meeting date and location. Published abstract should also be cited in the reference list as below:

Collinson, M., Mason, E., Farrin, A., Ashley, L., Richards, S., Brunt, G. et al. Cancer Together with other Chronic Health conditions (CATCH): understanding population characteristics and healthcare resource use in general practice. Br. J Cancer 121 (Suppl 1): S1 (abstract 87) (2019)

Post-Publication – self-archiving

For Open Access content published under a Creative Commons licence, authors can replace the submitted version with the final published version at publication as long as a publication reference and URL to the published version on the journal website are provided.

For articles published under a standard licence, the Author’s Accepted Manuscript (authors’ accepted version of the manuscript) may only be posted 6 months after the paper is published, consistent with our self-archiving embargo. Please note that the Author’s Accepted Manuscript may not be released under a Creative Commons licence. For our Terms of Reuse of archived manuscripts please click here.

Misconduct

The BJC and Springer Nature takes seriously all allegations of potential misconduct. As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), the BJC abides by COPE’s principles on how to deal with potential acts of misconduct, which includes formal investigation of all perceived transgressions. As part of the investigation, the journal may opt to do one or more of the following:

• Suspend review or publication of a paper until the issue has been investigated and resolved;
• Request additional information from the author, including original data or images, or ethics committee or IRB approval;
• Make inquiries of other titles believed to be affected;
• Forward concerns to the author’s employer or person responsible for research governance at the author’s institution;
• Refer the matter to other authorities or regulatory bodies (for example, the Office of Research Integrity in the US or the General Medical Council in the UK); or
• Submit the case to COPE in an anonymised form for additional guidance on resolution.

Please note that, in keeping with the journal’s policy of the confidentiality of peer review, if sharing of information with third parties is necessary, disclosure will be made to only those Editors who the Editor believes may have information that is pertinent to the case, and the amount of information will be limited to the minimum required.

Duplicate Publication

Papers submitted to the BJC must be original and not published or submitted for publication elsewhere. This rule also applies to non-English language publications.

Springer Nature is a member of Similarity Check (formerly CrossCheck), a multi-publisher initiative used to screen published and submitted content for originality. The BJC uses Similarity Check to detect instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Any suspected cases of covert duplicate manuscript submission/publication will be handled as outlined in the COPE guidelines and the Editor may contact the authors’ institution.

Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the practice of an author attempting to pass off someone else's work as his or her own. Whereas duplicate publication, sometimes called self-plagiarism, occurs when an author reuses substantial parts of his or her own published work without providing the appropriate references. If a case of plagiarism comes to light after a paper is published, the Journal will conduct a preliminary investigation, utilising the guidelines of the COPE. If plagiarism is proven, the Journal will contact the author's institute and funding agencies as appropriate. The paper containing the plagiarism may also be formally retracted or subject to correction.

In general, the manuscript should not already have been formally published in any journal or in any other citable form. However, the BJC allows and encourages prior publication on recognised community preprint servers for review by other scientists before formal submission to a journal. The details of the preprint server and/or any accession numbers should be included in the cover letter accompanying manuscript submission and should be appropriately referenced within the main manuscript. Data and analyses of previously published as part of a doctoral thesis under an Open Access licence can be included with appropriate referencing.

Data Falsification and Fabrication

Falsification is the practice of altering research data with the intention of giving a false impression. This includes, but is not limited to, manipulating images, removing outliers or “inconvenient” results, or changing, adding or omitting data points. Fabrication is the practice of inventing data or results and recording and/or reporting them in the research record. Data falsification and fabrication call into question the integrity and credibility of data and the data record, and as such, they are among the most serious issues in scientific ethics.

Some minor manipulation of images is permitted to improve them for readability. Proper technical manipulation includes adjusting the contrast and/or brightness or colour balance if it is applied to the complete digital image (not parts of the image). The author should notify the Editor in the cover letter of any technical manipulation. Improper technical manipulation refers to obscuring, enhancing, deleting and/or introducing new elements into an image. See Image Integrity & Standards above for more details.

Correction and Retraction Process

Content published as Advance Online Publication (AOP) is final and cannot be amended. The online and print versions are both part of the published record hence the original version must be preserved and changes to the paper should be made as a formal correction. If an error is noticed in an AOP article, a correction should accompany the article when it publishes in print. An HTML (or full-text) version of the correction will also be created and linked to the original article. If the error is found in an article after print publication the correction will be published online and in the next available print issue.

Corrections to published articles should be requested by completing this form and submitting it to the Editorial Office. All requests for corrections will be assessed by our Editors to see if they qualify based on the following two criteria:

• if the error impacts the indexing of the article; and
• if the error impacts the scientific integrity of the article.

Decisions about corrections are made by the Editor (sometimes with peer-reviewers' advice) and this sometimes involves author consultation. Requests to make corrections that do not affect the paper in a significant way or impair the reader's understanding of the contribution (a spelling mistake or grammatical error, for example) are not considered. Updates to the original article are only allowed in exceptional cases.

Corrections will appear as a new article (with its own DOI) and will bi-directionally linked to the original article. Please note the following categories of corrections online versions of peer reviewed content:

• Correction. Notification of an important error made by the author or journal that affects the publication record or the scientific integrity of the paper, together with the correct information.
• Retraction. Notification of invalid results. Where a paper is retracted, a statement will be published that includes a full justification for the retraction. The original article will be marked as retracted, but remain available to readers.
• Editorial Note of Concern: Where significant issues have been raised, but the outcome of an official investigation is delayed, the editors may publish a note of concern to alert readers. In cases where co-authors disagree about a correction/retraction, the editors will take advice from independent peer-reviewers and impose the appropriate correction, noting the dissenting author(s) in the text of the published version.

If there is suspicion of misconduct, the journal will carry out an investigation following COPE guidelines. Following an investigation, if the allegation raises valid concerns, the author will be contacted and given an opportunity to address the issue. If misconduct is established beyond reasonable doubt, this may result in the Editor implementing one of the following measures:

• If the article is still under consideration, it may be rejected and returned to the author.
• If the article has already been published online, depending on the nature and severity of the infraction, either a correction will be published alongside the article or, in severe cases, complete retraction of the article will occur. The reason for the correction or retraction must be given.

In either case, the author’s institution or funding agency may be informed.

In cases where co-authors disagree about a correction or retraction, the Editors will take advice from independent peer reviewers and impose the appropriate measure, noting the dissenting author(s) in the text of the published version.

Data Availability and Policy

British Journal of Cancer adheres to Springer Nature’s Data Policy Type 3. This means that a submission to British Journal of Cancer implies that materials described in the manuscript, including all relevant raw data, will be freely available to any researcher wishing to use them for non-commercial purposes, without breaching participant confidentiality. It also means that a Data Availability Statement (see below for more details) is required by the journal.

Data Policy Details

The journal strongly encourages that all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely should be available to readers. We encourage authors to ensure that their datasets are either deposited in publicly available repositories (where available and appropriate) or presented in the main manuscript or additional supporting files whenever possible. Please see Springer Nature’s information on recommended repositories.

General repositories – for all types of research data – such as figshare and Dryad may be used where appropriate.

Where a widely established research community expectation for data archiving in public repositories exists, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory*.

Persistent identifiers (such as DOIs and accession numbers) for relevant datasets must be provided in the paper.

*For the following types of data set, submission to a community-endorsed, public repository is mandatory:

Data Availability Statement

As part of the British Journal of Cancer Data Availability Policies, all original articles must include a Data Availability Statement. Data availability statements should include information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. By data we mean the minimal dataset that would be necessary to interpret, replicate and build upon the findings reported in the article. We recognise it is not always possible to share research data publicly, for instance when individual privacy could be compromised, and in such instances data availability should still be stated in the manuscript along with any conditions for access.

Data Availability statements can take one of the following forms (or a combination of more than one if required for multiple datasets):

• The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the [NAME] repository, [PERSISTENT WEB LINK TO DATASETS].
• The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due [REASON WHY DATA ARE NOT PUBLIC] but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
• Data sharing not applicable to this article as no datasets were generated or analysed during the current study.
• All data generated or analysed during this study are included in this published article [and its supplementary information files].
• The data that support the findings of this study are available from [third party name] but restrictions apply to the availability of these data, which were used under license for the current study, and so are not publicly available. Data are however available from the authors upon reasonable request and with permission of [third party name].

The Nature Portfolio journals' editorial policies for primary scientific research can be found on the pages listed below. The Nature Portfolio includes all journals with Nature in their name, the Communications journals, the npj series, Scientific Reports and Scientific Data. A list of these journals and a description of the relationship between them can be found here. In August 2015, the Nature Portfolio journals became members of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE). We will be guided by COPE guidelines, however the Nature Portfolio journals will continue to make independent decisions based on our existing policies and principles.

For details on the editorial policies of other any non-Nature-Portfolio journal on nature.com, please visit their website.

Communicate with respect

Only through relationships based upon mutual respect can we build trust and deliver quality publishing products and services to the communities we serve.

Authorship

The Nature Portfolio journals' authorship policy (including Authorship: inclusion & ethics in global research).

Competing interests

Nature Portfolio journals' competing interests policies.

Ethics and Biosecurity

Nature Portfolio journals' editorial policies on publishing primary research reporting experiments on living organisms; and on biosecurity and bioethics.

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Nature Portfolio journals' policies on the use of artificial intelligence.

Reporting standards and availability of data, materials, code and protocols

Nature Portfolio journals' policy on availability of materials and data, and reporting requirements for life sciences research articles.

Image integrity and standards

Nature Portfolio journals' policies and guidelines on digital images and their manipulation.

Plagiarism and duplicate publication

The Nature Portfolio journals' policies on plagiarism and on providing due credit for published and unpublished data.

Corrections, Retractions and Matters Arising

Nature Portfolio journals' policy on corrections, retractions and other amendments to published material.

Peer Review

Nature Portfolio journals' advice for peer-reviewers, and policies relevant to the peer-review process.

Confidentiality

The Nature Portfolio journals' policies on confidentiality.

Acknowledgements 

The Nature Portfolio journals’ acknowledgements policies.

Appeals & Complaints 

The Nature Portfolio journals’ appeals and complaints policies.

Preprints & Conference Proceedings

Nature Portfolio journals' policy on preprints and conference proceedings.

Press and embargo policies

Nature Portfolio journals' policy on authors' communication with the media and at scientific meetings.

Self archiving and license to publish

Nature Portfolio license to publish policy, and conditions of re-use, for authors.

Collections and Special Issues

Clinical Research

Nature Portfolio journals' policy on clinical research.

Act with integrity

Nature portfolio journals' policy on Act with integrity.

Guide to Authors

On this page: Article types | Preparing your manuscript | Licence type | Open Access | Colour charges | Author tutorials | Journal cover images

Please also see the Editorial policies and Editorial process pages

The BJC and Springer Nature are participating in a pilot of NISO/STM's Working Group on Peer Review Terminology.

The National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and STM, the International Association of Scientific, Technology and Medical Publishers have recognized a need to identify and standardize definitions and terminology in peer review practices in order to help align nomenclature as more publishers use open peer review models.

A peer review terminology that is used across publishers will help make the peer review process for articles and journals more transparent, and will enable the community to better assess and compare peer review practices between different journals.

The following summary describes the peer review process for this journal:

• Identity transparency:Single anonymized
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The full terminology is detailed here.

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Article Types

| Article Type | Abstract | Word limit | Tables/Figures | References | | Research articles describing novel findings that are of broad interest to cancer researchers and/or oncologists. Systematic Reviews, Meta-analyses and Clinical Trials are classified as Articles. All articles are peer reviewed. | Structured abstract; max 200 words | 5,000 words (excluding abstract, references and figure legends) | Max of 6 | Typically max 60 | | Reviews are focused articles on topics of interest to a broad audience. Submissions are typically invited by the Editor, but authors may submit directly to the journal. | Unstructured abstract; max 200 words | 5,000 words (excluding abstract, references and figure legends) | Max of 4 | Typically max 100 | | Perspective articles are focused articles on topics of interest to a broad audience, but are written from a personal viewpoint. They are intended to provide a forum to be more speculative than Reviews, but should remain balanced and are intended to cover timely and relevant topics in oncology. These articles are peer reviewed. | Unstructured abstract; max 200 words | 1,500-3,000 words (excluding abstract, references and figure legends) | Max of 4 | Typically max 60 | | Guidelines and Consensus Statements on clinical or laboratory practice that are of international significance. Please contact the main editorial office with a presubmission query at  | Unstructured abstract; max 200 words | Typically 5,000 words (excluding abstract, references and figure legends) | Max of 4 | Typically max 100 | | Editorials are invited by editors to accompany the publication of key articles. These articles are not usually peer reviewed. | Unstructured abstract; max 50 words | 1000 words (excluding references and figure legend) | Max of 1 | Max of 10 | | Comments are invited by editors to highlight recent advances not published in | Unstructured abstract; max 50 words | 1000 words (excluding references and figure legend) | Max of 1 | Max of 10 | | Correspondence should relate to articles recently published in | No abstract | 750 words (excluding references and figure legend) | Max of 1 | Max of 10 |

Preparing your manuscript

Article formatting

The information below details the sections that you should include in your manuscript and what information should be within each section.

Cover Letter: Authors should provide a cover letter that briefly discuss the importance of the work and explains why it is considered appropriate for the diverse readership of the journal. The cover letter must also include the following:

• A statement stating that submission is to BJC, the material is original research, has not been previously published (except as a preprint; seeEditorial Policiesfor more details) and has not been submitted for publication elsewhere while under consideration.
• The affiliation and contact information for the corresponding author.
• A competing interests statement, see Editorial Policiesfor more details

Title Page: The title page should contain:

• Title of the paper – titles should be informative, should be 150 characters or less and should not make a statement or conclusion
• Full names of all the authors and their affiliations, together with e-mail address of the corresponding author.
• The corresponding author should also provide an ORCID identifier. For more information about ORCID click here
• If authors regard it as essential to indicate that two or more co-authors are equal in status, they may be identified by an asterisk symbol with the caption ‘These authors contributed equally to this work’ immediately under the address list.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, do not currently satisfy our authorship criteria. Notably an attribution of authorship carries with it accountability for the work, which cannot be effectively applied to LLMs. Use of an LLM should be properly documented in the Methods section (and if a Methods section is not available, in a suitable alternative part) of the manuscript.

Abstract:  Research Articles must be prepared with a structured abstract designed to summarise the essential features of the paper in a logical and concise sequence under the following mandatory headings: Background, Methods, Results, Conclusions, Clinical Trial Registration (if appropriate).

All other article types use unstructured abstracts, please check the relevant article type for details on abstract length.

**Background: ** This section should provide a brief introduction to the topics discussed including the context and purpose of the study.

Methods:  This section should contain sufficient detail so that all experimental procedures can be reproduced. Methods that have been published in detail elsewhere do not need to be described in detail.

Authors should provide the name of the manufacturer and their location for any specifically named medical equipment and instruments, and all drugs should be identified by their pharmaceutical names, and by their trade name if relevant.

Results:  The Results section should briefly present the experimental data in text, tables or figures. Tables and figures should not be described extensively in the text.

Discussion:  The Discussion should focus on the interpretation and the significance of the findings with concise objective comments that describe their relation to other work in the area. It should not repeat information in the results. The final paragraph should highlight the main conclusion(s) and should provide some indication of the direction future research should take.

Additional Information

All manuscripts must contain the following sections in this order under the heading Additional Information:

• Acknowledgements
• Authors' contributions
• Ethics approval and consent to participate
• Consent for publication
• Data availability
• Competing interests
• Funding information

Please see below for details on the information to be included in these sections.

Acknowledgements: These should be brief, and should include sources of material (e.g. novel drugs) not available commercially. Preprints on recognised servers, published conference abstracts and numbered patents should be included here and cited in the reference list (unless cited within the main text of your manuscript).

Authors' contributions: The authorship section is mandatory. The individual contributions of authors to the manuscript should be specified in this section (for example, ‘JS designed experiments and helped write the manuscript’). Guidance and criteria for authorship can be found in the Editorial Policies page

Ethics approval and consent to participate: Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must include all of the following:

• A statement on ethics approval and consent from the participants (even where the need for approval was waived).
• The name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee’s reference number if appropriate.
• A statement that the study was performed in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki.

Studies involving animals must provide a completed ARRIVE2.0 checklist (i.e. both the Essential 10 and Recommended Set) checklist and should include a statement on ethics approval. See Editorial Policies for more information.

Consent for publication: If your manuscript contains any individual person’s data in any form (including individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. If the participant is deceased, consent must be sought from the next of kin of the participant. In all such instances, all reasonable measures must be taken to protect patient anonymity.

Data availability: All manuscripts must include a ‘Data availability’ statement. Data availability statements should provide information on where data supporting the results reported in the article can be found including, where applicable, hyperlinks to publicly archived datasets analysed or generated during the study. We strongly encourage authors to make all datasets on which the conclusions of the paper rely available to readers. Please see the BJC guidelines on Research Data policy here.

Competing Interests: Authors must declare any competing financial and/or non-financial interests in relation to the work described This information must be included at the submission stage and will be published as part of the paper. If the authors do not have any conflict of interest, then please write “The authors declare no conflict of interest”. See our Editorial policies for more information.

Funding information: Authors must declare sources of study funding including sponsorship (e.g. university, charity, commercial organization). If you did not receive any funding for this study, please state “The author(s) received no specific funding for this work.”

Reporting guidelines

Where applicable, authors should write their manuscripts in accordance with the relevant reporting guideline(s), as outlined on the EQUATOR network.

In addition, completed checklists should also be provided as supplementary information alongside the manuscript where applicable. For example:

• Randomised controlled trials (CONSORT)
• Systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA)
• Pre-clinical animal studies (ARRIVE)
• Tumour marker prognostic studies (REMARK)
• Observational studies (STROBE)

Authors of systematic reviews are encouraged to prospectively register their systematic reviews in a suitable registry (for example PROSPERO); in such cases, the registration number should be included as the last line of the abstract of the manuscript.

References

References should follow the Vancouver format and should be numbered sequentially throughout the text. All authors should be listed for papers with up to six authors; for papers with more than six authors, the first six only should be listed, followed by et al. (see examples below).

References that appear only in tables, figure legends or boxes should be included at the end of the reference list. When cited in the text, reference numbers should be placed in square brackets e.g. [1].

Only articles that have been published, or accepted by a named publication, should be in the reference list; papers in preparation and personal communications should be mentioned in the text with a list of authors as unpublished work (or initials if any of the authors are co-authors of the present contribution).

Preprints uploaded on to recognised servers (for example, medRxiv, bioRxiv etc), published conference abstracts, numbered patents and research datasets that have been assigned a digital object identifier should be included in reference lists.

Abbreviations for titles of medical periodicals should conform to those used in the latest edition of Index Medicus. The first and last page numbers for each reference should be provided. Abstracts and letters must be identified as such. Papers in press may be included in the list of references.

Examples:

Journal article: McAndrew, N.P., Dickson, M.A., Clark, A.S., Troxel, A.B., O’Hara, M.H., Colameco, C. et al. Early treatment-related neutropenia predicts response to palbociclib. Br. J. Cancer 123, 912–918 (2020).

Journal article, e-pub ahead of print: Shimura, T., Dayde, D., Wang, H., Okuda, Y., Iwasaki, H., Edi, M. et al. Novel urinary protein biomarker panel for early diagnosis of gastric cancer. Br J Cancer (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41416-020-01063-5

Journal article, in press: Gallardo, R.L., Juneja, H.S., Gardner, F.H. Normal human marrow stromal cells induce clonal growth of human malignant T-lymphoblasts. Int. J. Cell Cloning (in press).

Preprint: Cheng, D.K., Oni, R.E., Park, Y., Thalappillil, J.S., Ting, H.-c., Prasad, N. et al. Oncogenic KRAS engages an RSK1/NF1 complex in pancreatic cancer. bioRxiv, Preprint posted online 14 September 2020, https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.14.295394 (2020).

Meeting Abstract: Collinson, M., Mason, E., Farrin, A., Ashley, L., Richards, S., Brunt, G. et al. Cancer Together with other Chronic Health conditions (CATCH): understanding population characteristics and healthcare resource use in general practice. Br. J Cancer 121 (Suppl 1): S1 (abstract 87) (2019)

Correspondence: Milano, G., Gal, J. Comment on: “Exploring the best treatment options for BRAF-mutant metastatic colon cancer”. Br J Cancer 122, 1724–1725 (2020)

Complete book: Atkinson, K., Champlin, R., Ritz, J., Fibbe, W., Ljungman, P., Brenner, M.K. (eds). Clinical Bone Marrow and Blood Stem Cell Transplantation, 3rd edn. (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, UK, 2004).

Chapter in book: Coccia, P.F. Hematopoietic cell transplantation for osteopetrosis. In: Blume KG, Forman SJ, Appelbaum FR (eds). Thomas' Hematopoietic Cell Transplantation, 3rd edn. (Blackwell Publishing Ltd: Malden, MA, USA, 2004) pp 1443–1454.

Websites: References to websites should provide authors, if known, title of cited page, URL in full, date of access, and year of posting in parentheses.

Tables and figures

Figure Legends:  These should be brief, specific, and appear on a separate manuscript page after the References section.

Tables: Tables should only be used to present essential data; they should not duplicate what is written in the text. It is imperative that any tables used are editable.  Each table must be uploaded separately with a title or caption. Please make sure each table is cited within the text and in the correct order, e.g. (Table 1, Table 2 etc.).

Figures:  Figures and images should be labelled sequentially and cited in the text. Figures should not be embedded within the text but rather uploaded as separate files. The use of three-dimensional histograms is strongly discouraged unless the addition of the third dimension is important for conveying the results. All parts of a figure should be grouped together.  Where possible large figures and tables should be included as supplementary material.

Detailed guidelines for submitting artwork can be found by downloading the artwork guidelines. Using the guidelines, please submit production quality artwork with your initial online submission. If you have followed the guidelines, we will not require the artwork to be resubmitted following the peer-review process, if your paper is accepted for publication.

Graphs, Histograms and Statistics

• Plotting individual data points is preferred to just showing means, especially where n<10
• If error bars are shown, they must be described in the figure legend
• Axes on graphs should extend to zero, except for log axes
• Statistical analyses (including error bars and Pvalues) should only be shown for independently repeated experiments, and must not be shown for replicates of a single experiment
• The number of times an experiment was repeated (n) must be stated in the legend

Graphical Abstracts

BJC encourages authors to provide a graphical abstract (GA) with their submission. A GA is a single-image, concise, visual summary that captures the content of the article at a single glance and serves to enhance the impact and engagement of the article.

Submitted GAs will be peer reviewed along with the article and can be provided at any point prior to the end of the peer review process. If accepted, the GA will appear alongside the published article in the online version.

GAs should be submitted in colour and be in one of the following file types: .tiff, .eps, .jpg, .bmp, .doc, or .pdf. It should be 8 cm (3.15 inches) wide x 4 cm (1.57 inches) high when printed at full scale (100%), and should have high quality image and text. Please ensure that the illustration maintains this aspect ratio and is still informative upon reduction.

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Information is material directly relevant to the conclusion of an article that cannot be included in the printed version owing to space or format constraints. The article must be complete and self-explanatory without the Supplementary Information, which is posted on the journal's website and linked to the article. Supplementary Information may consist of data files, graphics, movies or extensive tables. Please see the artwork guidelines for information on accepted file types.

Authors should submit Supplementary Information files in the final format as they are not edited, typeset or changed, and will appear online exactly as submitted. When submitting Supplementary Information, authors are required to:

• Include a text summary (no more than 50 words) to describe the contents of each file.
• Identify the types of files (file formats) submitted.

Where possible, all of the supplementary files should be combined into a one file.

Please note: We do not allow the resupplying of Supplementary Information files for style reasons after a paper has been exported to production, unless there is a serious error that affects the science and, if by not replacing, it would lead to a formal correction once the paper has been published. In these cases, we would make an exception and replace the file; however, there are very few instances where a Supplementary Information file would be corrected post-publication.

House Style

Authors should adhere to the following formatting guidelines

• All pages and lines are to be numbered.
• Lines should be 1.5 spaced
• Colour should be distinct when being used as an identifying tool.
• At first mention of a manufacturer, the town (and state if USA) and country should be provided.
• Units:Use metric units (SI units) as fully as possible.
• Abbreviations: On first using an abbreviation place it in parentheses after the full item. Very common abbreviations such as FFA, RNA, need not be defined. Note these abbreviations: gram g; litre l; milligram mg; kilogram kg; kilojoule kJ; megajoule MJ; weight wt; seconds s; minutes min; hours h. Do not add ‘s’ for plural units. Terms used less than four times should not be abbreviated.

Licence type

Manuscripts are published with a standard licence unless authors choose to pay an article processing charge to make their paper Open Access and freely available upon publication.

Manuscripts published under the standard method of publication will be behind a paywall. Readers will be able to access manuscripts through their institutional or personal subscriptions or on a pay-per-view basis. Authors that opt for a standard licence may be eligible to pay for colour figure charges. For more information, please see the next section on ‘Colour Charges’.

If your paper is recommended for acceptance, you will be requested to complete an appropriate licence following typesetting.

| Open Access (CC-BY 4.0) licence | £3060 | $4480 | €3580 | | Open Access (CC-BY 4.0) licence for comments and correspondences | £3050 | $4110 | €3315 | | Standard licence to publish | FREE | FREE | FREE |

For further information on open access publication see our Author Services page.

Colour Charges

There is a charge if authors choose to publish their figures in colour in the print publication (which includes the online PDF). Colour charges will not apply to authors who choose to pay an article processing charge to make their paper Open Access.

| Number of Colour Illustrations | 1 | 2 | 3 | 3+ | | Rest of World | £330 | £495 | £700 | £700 maximum fee, no further charge for additional figures | | USA | $515 | $775 | $1,030 | $1,030 maximum fee, no further charge for additional figures | | Open Access | FREE | FREE | FREE | FREE |

For all charges, VAT or local taxes will be added where applicable.

Author Tutorials

The BJC and Springer Nature are pleased to share detailed online Author Tutorials - including interactive quizzes - which cover the following topics:

• Writing a journal manuscript
• Submitting a journal and peer review
• Writing in English
• Open Access

You can also watch a brief video giving an overview of the tutorials here.

Journal Cover Images

Interesting cancer-related images may be supplied for consideration for the journal’s front cover. These should be either sent to the Editorial Office at [email protected] or supplied as part of a manuscript submission as ‘Cover Art’.

Each image must be supplied with a title and ownership details (name and institution) and conform to the following formatting requirements:

• Colour mode = CMYK (not RGB)
• File format = .tif, .eps, or .jpg

Minimum resolution = 300 dpi at 21 cm wide by 12 cm high

Author Services

Open Access & Self Archiving

Self-archiving (green open access)

Authors of original research articles are encouraged to submit the author's version of the accepted paper (the unedited manuscript) to a repository for public release six months after publication.

Learn more about self-archiving.

Open access publication (gold open access)

Authors of research articles can opt to pay an article processing charge (APC) for their accepted articles to be open access online immediately upon publication. Open access articles are published under Creative Commons licenses, which allow authors to retain copyright to their work while making it open to readers.

To facilitate self-archiving we deposit open access articles in PubMed Central and Europe PubMed Central on publication if the article meets the PMC deposition guidelines; full details of our deposition policies are found under the “Self-archiving, manuscript deposition, and digital preservation” information here. Authors are also permitted to post the final, published PDF of their article on a website, institutional repository or other free public server immediately on publication.

Visit our open research site for detailed information about publishing open access in the  British Journal of Cancer:

• About Creative Commons licensing
• Creative Commons license options and article processing charges (APCs) for- British Journal of Cancer
• APC payment FAQs
• Help in identifying funding for APCs
• Site license price adjustments for hybrid journals
• Editorial process for OA publication in hybrid journals
• Self-archiving and deposition

Find out more about open access publishing:

• What is open access?
• Open access at Springer Nature
• Journals offering an open access publishing option

Compliance with open access mandates

Our open access journals allow authors to comply with all funders' open access policies worldwide. Authors may need to take specific actions to achieve compliance with funder and institutional open access mandates.

Learn more about open access compliance.

SharedIt

Springer Nature wants researchers to share content easily and legally. Our Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative means that links to view-only, full-text subscription research articles can be posted anywhere - including on social media platforms, author websites and in institutional repositories - so researchers can share research with colleagues and general audiences.

How it works:

• Springer Nature provides its authors and readers with shareable links to view-only versions of peer-reviewed research papers. Reasonable sharing is encouraged for non-commercial, personal use.
• SharedIt is available for the whole of Springer Nature’s owned journal portfolio, along with 1,000 co-owned and partner-owned journals.
• The shareable links can be posted anywhere, including via social channels and on other highly-used sites, institutional repositories and authors’ own websites, as well as on scholarly collaborative networks
• The initiative also enables more than 200 media outlets and blogs to link to a read-only version of full-text subscription articles.
• For subscription articles, subscribers will be able to download, print and save an enhanced PDF, or to view the full-text HTML version.
• For open-access articles, all readers will be able to download, print and save an enhanced PDF, or to view the full-text HTML version

Extend the reach of your paper

Aside from making use of SharedIt, we encourage you to take some immediate and simple steps that can help extend the reach and impact of your paper. Learn how you can disseminate your research to your inner circles through the use of social media and online communities by visiting our Author Tips page.

Language Editing

British Journal of Cancer is read by scientists from diverse backgrounds and many are not native English speakers. In addition, the readership of British Journal of Cancer is multidisciplinary; therefore authors need to ensure their findings are clearly communicated. Language and concepts that are well known in one subfield may not be well known in another. Thus, technical jargon should be avoided as far as possible and clearly explained where its use is unavoidable. Abbreviations, particularly those that are not standard, should also be kept to a minimum. The background, rationale and main conclusions of the study should be clearly explained and understandable by all working in the field. Titles and abstracts in particular should be written in language that will be readily understood by all readers.

Authors who are not native speakers of English sometimes receive negative comments from referees or editors about the language and grammar usage in their manuscripts, which can contribute to a paper being rejected. To reduce the possibility of such problems, we strongly encourage such authors to take at least one of the following steps.

• Have your manuscript reviewed for clarity by a colleague whose native language is English.
• Visiting the English language tutorialwhich covers the common mistakes when writing in English.
• Using a professional language editing service where editors will improve the English to ensure that your meaning is clear and identify problems that require your review. Two such services are provided by our affiliates Nature Research Editing ServiceandAmerican Journal Experts.

Please note that the use of a language editing service is at the author's own expense and does not guarantee that the article will be selected for peer review or accepted.

Nature Masterclasses

Nature Masterclasses provide training in scientific writing and publishing. The training is delivered by Nature Research journal editors and aims to help institutions and laboratories support their researchers in writing research papers.

Nature Masterclasses began in 2011 as face-to-face workshops and then, in 2015, launched  online training and webinars.

To find out more about how Nature Masterclasses may be able to help you, visit the website.

Subject Ontology

Choosing the most relevant and specific subject terms from our subject ontology upon submission will ensure that your article will be more discoverable and will appear on appropriate subject specific pages on nature.com, in addition to the journal’s own pages.  Your article should be indexed with at least one, and up to four unique subject terms that describe the key subjects and concepts in your manuscript.  Click here for help with this.

Journal Information

On this page: Aims & Scope |  Subject Categories | Journal metrics | Indexing | Newsfeeds | Journal details | Submissions video

Aims and Scope

The British Journal of Cancer (BJC) is one of the most cited general cancer journals, it is committed to publishing cutting edge discovery, translational and clinical cancer research. The BJC aims to provide a global platform to disseminate important research within the broad spectrum of oncology. The journal welcomes research across all cancer types and has a focus on: metastasis, microenvironment, immunology and immunotherapy, targeted and next-generation therapeutics, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, mechanisms of resistance, clinical trials, genomics, epigenomics and precision medicine, epidemiology, metabolism and state-of-the art diagnostic approaches.

The BJC is published in association with Cancer Research UK, the world’s leading independent cancer charity dedicated to saving lives through research.

Submit your next manuscript to BJC and benefit from:

• International and highly respectededitorial team
• Rapid decisionand publication times
• High exposureand article visibility via nature.com
• Funder-compliantopen access options available
• Engaged and growingTwitter following at @BrJCancer
• Share your articlethrough SharedIt: Springer Nature’s content-sharing initiative allowing authors and subscribers to share links to view-only, full-text articles from this journal

Subject Categories

BJC publishes across the following six subject categories:

• Clinical Studies
• Translational Therapeutics
• Molecular Diagnostics
• Genetics and Genomics
• Cellular and Molecular Biology
• Epidemiology

Translational Therapeutics

Translational Therapeutics is dedicated to scientific work that has possible direct applicability in clinical uses or opens new avenues for treatments. The type of manuscript ranges from basic research to early informative clinical trials with extensive concomitant biomaterial analyses. Translational concepts include new computational or wet lab Technologies as well.

Molecular Diagnostics

The Molecular Diagnostic subject category considers studies that examine genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, and proteomic biomarkers in the context of cancer diagnosis, staging, prognosis, therapeutic prediction, and radiographic and pathologic characteristics. We are particularly interested in papers that explore novel or evolving biomarkers with direct clinical applicability in cancer care.

Genetics and Genomics

This subject category covers the use of genetic epidemiology and bioinformatics, together with molecular and cell biology, to identify and characterise the genetic and epigenetic factors underlying tumour development and progression. We are interested in papers which focus on the mechanistic consequences of genetic variance, and adequately powered studies of how genetic and epigenetic variation impacts patient risk and outcome phenotypes, in particular where these point to new clinical approaches. Wherever possible, bioinformatics analyses should be supported by experimental results.

Cellular and Molecular Biology

The Cellular and Molecular Biology subject category considers studies that provide novel insight into basic cellular and molecular mechanisms of cancer, but are not biomarker, methodology, or pathology focused. Studies considered for this category will generally go beyond in vitro and/or in silico evaluation of basic cellular and molecular mechanisms of cancer, and usually include the use of appropriate in vivo model systems. Findings of studies considered for this category should be clinically and/or therapeutically applicable.

Epidemiology

The Epidemiology subject category focuses on prevention, early detection, and factors that influence the risk and prognosis of cancer.

To explore the type of articles that the BJC publishes, please browse our subject pages.

Journal Metrics

Article metrics such as number of downloads, citations and online attention are available from each article page, and provide an overview of the attention received by a paper.

Citation Impact

• Journal Impact Factor: 7.8 (2025)
• 5-year Journal Impact Factor: 8.9 (2025)
• Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP): 1.806 (2025)
• SCImago Journal Rank (SJR): 2.803 (2025)

Speed

• Submission to first editorial decision (median days): 8
• Submission to acceptance (median days): 181

Usage 2025

• Downloads: 16,594,988
• Altmetric mentions: 4,569

Indexing

All articles published in the BJC are included in:

EBSCO Discovery Service

Google Scholar

Medline

Science Citation Index

Science Citation Index Expanded (SciSearch)

Current Contents / Clinical Medicine

Current Contents / Life Sciences

BIOSIS

OCLC

Summon by ProQuest

SCOPUS

EBSCO Academic Search

PubMed Central

EBSCO Advanced Placement Source

EBSCO Biomedical Reference Collection

EBSCO CINAHL

EBSCO STM Source

EBSCO TOC Premier

INIS Atomindex

Newsfeeds

The BJC now provides its latest table of contents as an RSS web feed. This allows users with an RSS reader to receive automatic updates whenever new content is added to these pages.

Receive the BJC's current issue table of contents.

Follow us on Twitter @BrJCancer

Journal details

ISSN and eISSN

ISSN: 0007-0920

eISSN:1532-1827.