Abstract
This paper considers the extent to which Australasian psychiatrists are currently publishing in high impact international and regional psychiatric journals. A decade ago [1], the first author reported a regional audit of publications in the four so-called [2] ‘dominant’ psychiatric journals – the Archives of General Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, the British Journal of Psychiatry, and Psychological Medicine – over a fouryear period (1986–1989). Australian authors appeared comparatively successful, having the sixth highest number in the Archives, and the third highest in each of the other three journals, to take out an overall third ranking across the contrasted regions. Further, the total number of publications by Australian authors was double that for authors from Scandinavian countries and marginally higher than the totals generated by the whole of Western Europe and by Canadian authors. The current audit allows that regional ranking to be reviewed a decade later.
For the present report, data have also been collected from New Zealand authors to provide overall Australasian data. A complete audit was not undertaken as there are more than 80 specialist psychiatry journals in addition to many thousands of general journals. The audit was therefore constrained to generate data from leading regional, specialist and generalist psychiatry journals.
Methods
Science Citation Index (SCI) publishes impact factors for journals, a measure quantifying the number of times journal articles are cited in defined years, after correcting for journals that publish more articles and/or more frequently. The impact factor was initially conceptualized as ‘an expression of the importance of the material’ [3], allowing journals to be comparatively ranked – although it is frequently criticized in terms of its validity [4].
We selected journals from the 2000 SCI listings of psychiatry journals, proceeding from the highest ranking ones until we had the five highest journals from each of three domains (i.e. generalist, specialist and regional). The five selected generalist journals (and with impact rankings in parenthesis) were the Archives of General Psychiatry (1), Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (8), Psychological Medicine (11), Journal of Psychiatric Research (22) and Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease (38). The five specialist journals were Molecular Psychiatry (2), Schizophrenia Bulletin (4), Journal of Clinical Psychopharmacology (5), Neuropsychopharmacology (7) and Biological Psychiatry (9). The five regional journals were the American Journal of Psychiatry (3), British Journal of Psychiatry (6), Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica (35), Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (39) and Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (50). Thus, this process captured all nine top ranking (i.e. by impact factor) psychiatry journals.
Publications over a two-year period (1999–2000) were included, without limitation to author discipline. We aggregated papers according to regions (based on the address of the first author) and report on six regions (Australasia, USA, Europe, UK, Canada and Scandinavia) in our principal analyses.
Results
A total of 4573 papers were published in the 15 selected journals, 29.1% in the generalist journals, 32.1% in the specialist journals and 38.8% in the regional journals. Table 1 data indicate domination by US authors (49.6% of all papers) and, apart from regional journals, low penetration by Australasian authors in the generalist and specialist journals. Of the 339 Australasian papers, 47 (13.9%) were in generalist, 23 (6.8%) in specialist, and 269 (79.3%) in regional journals. When comparison is made against all six regions, Australasian authors occupied the fourth rank for generalist journals (behind US, European and UK authors) and the sixth rank for the specialist journals – being behind all other listed regions.
Numbers of audited papers in categorized journals, by region
Generalist journals
Of the 1332 total papers published in the generalist journals, 47 (3.5%) had Australasian authors. Table 2 shows that two-thirds of these (i.e. 31 or 66%) were published in Psychological Medicine and onefifth in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, while few were published in the Archives (n = 4) or Journal of Clinical Psychiatry (n = 3), and none in the Journal of Psychiatric Research. The profile of Australasian authors across these journals (particularly in the weighting to Psychological Medicine) is very similar to the UK author pattern.
Numbers of audited papers in generalist journals, by region
Specialist journals
Of the 1470 papers published in the specialist journals, 23 (1.6%) had Australasian authors, with Table 3 data showing the strongest presence in Molecular Psychiatry and Biological Psychiatry – but without any Australasian publication in Schizophrenia Bulletin.
Numbers of audited papers in specialist journals, by region
Regional journals
Of the 1771 total papers published in the regional journals, 269 (15.2%) were by Australasian authors. As detailed in Table 4, the great majority of Australasian-authored ‘regional’ papers (228 or 84.7%) were published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry.
Numbers of audited papers in regional journals, by region
Fourteen papers were published by regional authors in both the American and the British – and 12 in the Canadian – journals of psychiatry.
The ‘regional alliance’ between contributor region and the relevant regional journal was examined by calculating the percentage of papers from each region published in the respective regional journal. The highest alliance was for Australasian authors – who had 67.3% of the total papers examined published in the Australasian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry – followed by UK authors (46.8% in the British Journal of Psychiatry), Canadian (42.4% in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry), Scandinavian (37.7% in the Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica) and US (21.2% in the American Journal of Psychiatry) authors.
Representation in the ‘top nine’ ranked journals
The next set of analyses limited consideration to the ‘top nine’ journals (as ranked by impact factor). US authors accounted for 61.5% of the papers published in this journal set. In all bar two of the publications, US authors generated the majority (ranging from 57% to 80%) of each journal's publications. The two exceptions were Molecular Psychiatry and the British Journal of Psychiatry, where US authors had minority representations (32% and 9%, respectively).
In these analyses we widened the regions examined beyond the six considered in the previous analytic sets to consider all world regions. Regional contributions to the ‘top nine’ regions were (in descending order): the US (61.5%), the UK (11.7%), Europe (11.5%), Canada (4.4%), Scandinavia (3.3%), Asia (3.2%), Middle East (1.9%), Australasia (1.8%), South Africa (0.4%) and Africa (0.2%), identifying Australasian representation as comparatively poor.
Discussion
Current data can only provide an impression of regional publishing in leading international and regional psychiatric journals, as not all psychiatric journals have been considered and we have not included publications in leading non-psychiatric journals (e.g. British Medical Journal, JAMA, Lancet) and where Australasian authors clearly do publish. Nevertheless, the current data do allow a profile and some interpretations.
In 1989, Lloyd and Fletcher [2] suggested that the ‘four dominant’ journals were the Archives, the American and British journals of psychiatry and Psychological Medicine. Earlier, we noted a previous audit of those four journals for a four-year period of 1986–1989 [1]. Over that period, Australian authors had the third highest publication rate (following US and UK authors), being marginally more successful than authors from Canada and from the whole of Western Europe, and having twice the number of publications compared to Scandinavian authors. If we examine current study data for those four journals, Australasians (now with New Zealand authors included) occupied fourth position (63 publications), behind US (744), UK (391) and European (136) authors, and ahead of Scandinavian (41), Canadian (39), Asian (34), Middle East (22), South African (5) and US authors (3). If we exclude New Zealand-authored papers, the Australian papers (n = 51) still occupied fourth position. The suggestion that the current fourth ranking might reflect a decline could be erroneous as we examined ‘Europe’ in this analysis and ‘Western Europe’ in the earlier audit.
In another publication [5] the first author examined publications over an earlier seven-year period (1978– 1984). Australian authors averaged 9 papers/year in the ‘four dominant’ journals over that period, while the rate for Australasian authors in the current audit was 32/year (two/year in the Archives, seven/year in both the American and the British journals of psychiatry, and 16/year in Psychological Medicine) – or 25/year for Australian authors only. Thus, Australasian penetration of the ‘four dominant’ journals has increased (albeit unevenly across the four) in the last two decades, with subanalyses showing that the increase did not merely reflect the current inclusion of New Zealand-authored publications. The distinct increase over the period appears largely due to many more Australasian publications in the American Journal of Psychiatry and in Psychological Medicine – with only a marginal increase in the publication rates in the British Journal of Psychiatry and the Archives.
There would be many who would dispute the ‘four dominant’ cachet awarded by Lloyd and Fisher [2]. Thus, there is some wisdom in examining regional performance in the impact factor-defined ‘top nine’ journals. Here the Australasian performance appeared far less impressive in comparative terms, being the worst of the six regions examined in our principal analyses and, when we widened the regions examined, the Australasian penetration was also below that of Asia and the Middle East – only exceeding the two remaining regions examined (South America and Africa). As all five specialist journals were included in the ‘top nine’, and there were only 23 papers published in those specialist journals by Australasian authors, this suggests that – at least in this somewhat limited audit – our limited penetration reflects poor representation in top ranking specialist journals, a conclusion underlined by there being no paper published in Schizophrenia Bulletin (the psychiatric journal with the fourth highest impact factor) and only six papers in the two leading psychopharmacology journals over the two-year audit period.
Of the 339 papers published in the audited journals by Australasian psychiatrists, 228 (67%) were published by the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry. Secondly, we established that 86% of publications in that journal were by authors from its region – somewhat higher than the percentage of US authors in the American Journal of Psychiatry (79%), the Canadian representation in the Canadian Journal of Psychiatry (77%) and the UK author representation in the British Journal of Psychiatry (75%), and distinctly higher than the Scandinavian representation in the Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica (28%), suggesting home team advantages for all bar the rather unusual representation in Acta [6]. However, there was a more important regional analysis. Analysis of our whole data set (comprising journals ranging in impact factors), established that two-thirds of all audited Australasian regional papers were published in our regional journal – a distinctly higher percentage than observed for authors from the five other regions.
It would be unwise to make too much of the data as the field was limited. Again, editorial policies must be suspected as influential – illustrated by the low rate of US publications in the British Journal of Psychiatry. In comparison to previous audits, the data suggest that Australasian authors are increasingly successful in having papers published in several high-ranking psychiatric journals – but that such penetration is limited to certain journals – and that publication rates in many high-ranking journals are low.
The academic community has expanded disproportionately in the last two decades (compared, say, to clinician numbers) and Australasian research and theorizing has contributed to an international profile. However, Australasian authors may rely excessively on publication in the regional journal. This has advantages for both the reading membership and for regional authors (in capturing regional theorizing and research activity) and is not to be criticized. However, if Australasian psychiatry is to make a greater mark internationally, the publication rate in top international journals must increase.
Such a conclusion risks accusations of triviality – in suggesting there is worth in an international presence. James [7] has referred to the ‘nagging, never-ending doubt about whether Australia has yet taken its rightful place as a Mature Nation’ – and it is not unreasonable to suggest that any focus on publishing in top-ranking international journals is no more than a reflection of that insecurity. A contrary view argues that advances in research benefit from avoidance of hegemony and of intellectual incest, and are more likely to occur when heterogeneity of views require reconciling. If Australasian psychiatry is derivative, then there is no advantage to it seeking the international stage but, if it does have a non-derivative voice, there is a valid argument for its international expression.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
The help of Kerrie Eyers is acknowledged.