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27 Mar 2026
Getting published: ask editor Helen Surana
- What was your journey to becoming co-editor-in-chief of BMJ Innovations?
I’m a classic portfolio doctor, and have spent a lot of my career at BMJ Group. I’ve worked on BMJ Learning, BMJ Best Practice, and more recently building the Future Health event and content. During the pandemic, I became involved with BMJ Innovations as a deputy editor, running a series of webinars on healthcare innovation for the journal in China, and launching a podcast. I’ve been co-editor-in-chief with Ashley McKimm for the last year or so.
- What makes you say yes to a paper in the first ten minutes?
Fortunately, my job is more like knowing when to say "maybe". Very few papers come to us fully formed. After a "maybe," we depend on our peer reviewers to advise authors and editors on whether it could become a yes. BMJ Innovations is such a diverse journal, with submissions from a huge range of specialties and beyond, that finding the right peer reviewers can take some work.
- What should a first-time author do differently from what they think they should do?
Read the journal's information for authors about format and scope. Ninety per cent of getting to peer review is about submitting in the right format to the right journal. The other thing is that if you are publishing something as an afterthought, it is really obvious. The best manuscripts are the ones that have been thought about from the beginning of the research or piece of thinking.
- My pet peeve
Is people who have done an interesting thing or had an interesting meeting and then thought about writing it up. Much better to think about the reporting of the activity before you start.
- What's one paper you edited that changed how you think about innovation?
We get a number of really interesting proposals for discussion pieces. One of them was this article by Naughton et al on stigmatisation for digital health innovators (BMJ Innovations 2024). Implementation is a huge issue for innovation, and understanding professional roles and boundaries in the health service is an important part of that. Alongside all the exciting new ideas we get to report on, this sort of deep thinking is really fascinating to me.