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The British Journal of Psychiatry (2003) 183: 459
© 2003 The Royal College of Psychiatrists

Correspondence

A new dawn for the yellow journal?

C. Haw

St Andrew’s Hospital, Billing Road, Northampton NN1 5DG, UK

I welcome the new Editor’s plans to bring the Journal firmly into the 21st century by making it intellectually stimulating but also inviting and readable for all (Tyrer, 2003). The previous Editor may have done much to improve the Journal’s impact factor to the scientific community by increasing its citation rate but what has not been studied are the views of the core readership. Should not a survey of readers be carried out to see what people think of the Journal and who reads how much and of what? I suspect the answer may be not much of very little, and that for most of us the Journal has a fairly short ‘wrapper off to bookshelf time’.

The Journal’s core readers are many thousands of jobbing psychiatrists. We are looking for important new information that has bearing on our day-to-day clinical practice. Yes, we have the Psychiatric Bulletin, with its zippy and original offerings, but sometimes a subject needs a more academic and lengthy airing. Perhaps the readership could suggest subjects for editorials, and why not have each book review written by both an expert in the field and an ordinary reader, so as to capture different perspectives? I hope that the new Editor can increase the interaction between the Journal and all psychiatrists. Good luck.

EDITED BY STANLEY ZAMMIT

REFERENCES

  1. Tyrer, P. (2003) Entertaining eminence in the British Journal of Psychiatry. British Journal of Psychiatry, 183, 1 –2.
 

Editor’s response

Peter Tyrer, Editor

British Journal of Psychiatry, 17 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8PG, UK.

Correspondence: E-mail: bjp{at}rcpsych.ac.uk

EDITED BY STANLEY ZAMMIT

Dr Haw is probably right in her assertions that the jobbing psychiatrist is likely to become the bobbing psychiatrist when reading the Journal – jumping from one item to the next with little close examination of the content – and it is clear from a recent paper that the ability of good ghostwriting to make an arresting impact on the reader pays dividends (Healy & Cattell, 2003). We are taking notice of this by trying to improve and shorten the titles of papers submitted to the Journal; prospective authors please note. However, Dr Haw has stimulated me to go further; I have a hypothesis that readers of the Journal might help me in testing. It is a hypothesis that is best kept blind at this stage, and I am disclosing it only to the Associate Editors. For each of the main sections of the Journal (editorials, debates, original papers, review articles, book reviews and correspondence) I invite readers to score on a four-point scale (0=rarely or never read, 1=seldom read, 2=frequently read and 3=regularly or always read) in which ‘read’ is taken to be a reasonably full examination of the article (a good test of this is that you could summarise the main impact of the article to others). Could you send your responses to me at the address below by the end of January 2004, and I will report the results – and the hypothesis – shortly afterwards.

Meanwhile, I hope our readers are aware of a third journal published by the Royal College of Psychiatrists – Advances in Psychiatric Treatment (APT). Although not an organ for original research, APT publishes expert, in-depth reviews of topics of current clinical interest (http://apt.rcpsych.org/).

REFERENCES

  1. Healy, D. & Cattell, D. (2003) Interface between authorship, industry and science in the domain of therapeutics. British Journal of Psychiatry, 183, 22 –27.[Abstract/Free Full Text]



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