Cheers and a thank-you note from the founding chief-editor

Soon after having been appointed as chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Vienna (since 2005 Medical University of Vienna) in Austria I realised that research in psychiatry must reach daily practice for doctors treating patients to overcome the deep gap between Biomedical and Clinical Research and the patients who need their discoveries. Some authors also called this gap the death valley (e.g. Butler, 2008) which needs to be bridged by learned journals. Therefore, the aim and scope of the International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice was to provide an international forum for communication among health professionals with clinical, academic and research interests in psychiatry. Furthermore, the journal should give particular emphasis to papers that integrate the findings of academic research into realities of clinical practice with the focus on the practical aspects of managing and treating patients and furthermore should be an essential reading for the busy psychiatrist, trainee and interested physician.

Together with my good friend David Baldwin, Professor of Psychiatry at the University in Southampton in the UK we realised this situation and founded in 1996 the International Journal of Psychiatry in Clinical Practice (IJPCP) with the help of Martin Dunitz Publishers with the most valuable help of Mrs Dunitz and her husband. The journal was later transferred to Taylor & Francis in 2002. After 27 years of fruitful work, I will step down as Chief-Editor at the end of the year 2023, therefore, it is time for me to say thank you for all the opportunities and experiences of the last decades.

Already in the first years the IJPCP was well received in the psychiatric community and all four issues were soon filled with a lively balance of reviews, original research and clinically applicable shorter versions of treatment guidelines as developed by the World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP). Figure 1 depicts the most frequently used words in the headings of the publications since 2012 with top hits for patients followed by treatment and thereafter by diseases like depression, anxiety disorder and schizophrenia including treatment modalities.

Figure 1. Most frequently used words in article titles in IJPCP since 2012 to September 2023.

The journal has been listed in the Institute of Scientific Information database already at the beginning and received the first impact factor (IF) from Index Medicus/Medline in 2002 (0,142) and thereafter the articles were frequently read online and cited as can be seen in Table 1. The acceptance in Index Medicus/Medline was insofar important, since the IF obtained from ISI is defined as the ratio of the number of citations a journal receives in the latest two years to the number of publications of that journal in those two years. It is a tool to evaluate a journal’s importance and to be able to compare it to other journals within the same topic field. The journal enjoyed a steady upwards trend with an IF over the years and is now 3.0 (IF of 2022 received in 2023). The five-year IF of 2.9, which also reflects the journal’s popularity in the psychiatric field, ranging in the second quartile of journals ranking in a Scopus subject category (e.g. Q2 = 50% of journals with the highest CiteScores).

Table 1. The 10 top read and top cited papers published in the international journal of psychiatry in clinical practice, according to Scopus (as of September 2023).

Top 10 Read
Article title	Authors	Volume year	Views
Stress management and the role of Rhodiola rosea: a review	Anghelescu IG, Edwards D, Seifritz E, Kasper S	2018	44.408
Psychometric properties of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) in healthy participants aged 18-70	Bruijnen CJWH, Dijkstra BAG, Walvoort SJW, Budy MJJ, Beurmanjer H, De Jong CAJ, Kessels RPC	2020	10.171
World Federation of Societies of Biological Psychiatry (WFSBP) guidelines for biological treatment of schizophrenia - a short version for primary care	Hasan A, Falkai P, Wobrock T, Lieberman J, Glenthøj B, Gattaz WF, Thibaut F, Möller HJ and the WFSBP Task Force on Treatment Guidelines for Schizophrenia	2017	8.869
Guidelines for the pharmacological treatment of anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder in primary care	Bandelow B, Sher L, Bunevicius R, Hollander E, Kasper S, Zohar J, Möller HJ, WFSBP Task Force on Mental Disorders in Primary Care, WFSBP Task Force on Anxiety Disorders, OCD and PTSD	2012	8.614
Anxiety and depression and its correlates in patients with coronavirus disease 2019 in Wuhan	Nie XD, Wang Q, Wang MN, Zhao S, Liu L, Zhu YL, Chen H	2021	6.366
Post-traumatic stress disorder among Syrian refugees in Turkey: a cross-sectional study	Alpak G, Unal A, Bulbul F, Sagaltici E, Bez Y, Altindag A, Dalkilic A, Savas HA	2015	6.003
Neurocognitive findings in young adults with binge eating disorder	Grant JE, Chamberlain SR	2020	5.085
Adult ADHD: A new disease?	Zalsman G, Shilton T	2016	4.812
Prevalence and risk factors of hyperprolactinaemia among patients with various psychiatric diagnoses and medications	Alosaimi FD, Fallata EO, Abalhassan M, Alhabbad A, Alzain N, Alhaddad B, Alassiry MZ	2018	4.599
Switching medication products during the treatment of psychiatric illness	Blier P, Margolese HC, Wilson EA, Boucher M	2019	4.412
Top 10 Cited
Article title	Authors	Volume year	Citations
Guidelines for the pharmacological treatment of anxiety disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder and posttraumatic stress disorder in primary care	Bandelow B, Sher L, Bunevicius R, Hollander E, Kasper S, Zohar J, Möller HJ, WFSBP Task Force on Mental Disorders in Primary Care, WFSBP Task Force on Anxiety Disorders, OCD and PTSD	2012	282
Post-traumatic stress disorder among Syrian refugees in Turkey: a cross-sectional study	Alpak G, Unal A, Bulbul F, Sagaltici E, Bez Y, Altindag A, Dalkilic A, Savas HA	2015	208
An empirical operationalisation study of DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for premature ejaculation	Waldinger MD, Hengeveld MW, Zwinderman AH, Olivier B	1998	161
Suicide and the elderly	Shah A, De T	1998	133
Usage of benzodiazepines: A review	Donoghue J, Lader M	2010	113
Pharmacological treatment of unipolar depressive disorders: summary of WFSBP guidelines	Bauer M, Severus E, Möller HJ, Young AH; WFSBP Task Force on Unipolar Depressive Disorders	2017	86
Prevention of depression and suicide by education and medication: impact on male suicidality. An update from the Gotland study	Rutz W, Wålinder J, Von Knorring L, Rihmer Z, Pihlgren H	1997	83
Evidence-based pharmacotherapy of treatment-resistant unipolar depression	Dold M, Kasper S	2017	79
Psychometric characteristics of the Beck Depression Inventory-II with college students of diverse ethnicity	Carmody DP	2005	78
Administration of ketamine for unipolar and bipolar depression	Kraus C, Rabl U, Vanicek T, Carlberg L, Weidenauer A, Spies M, Bartova L, Gryglewski G, Papageorgiou K, Lanzenberger R, Willeit M, Winkler D, Rybakowski JK, Kasper S	2017	72

The Journal’s increased Impact Factor due to the increased citation volume had a positive impact on its relative ranking with other journals within the same subject category but there is still a room for further improvement. As some journals have high numbers of self-cites, which in turn also affects the IF, it is worth mentioning that our journal is in the lower range of about 2% self-cites, which went into the IF calculation in recent years. Another scoring system is the altrimetic score which summarises all clicks in social media. For this measurement the Top Altmetric Scoring Article were in 2022 the evidence based reviews on herbal medicine to treat anxiety disorders and for stress management (Anghelescu et al., 2018; Kasper, 2013), indicating that these article were specifically interesting for the non-scientific community.

It has to be mentioned that Journal metrics can be a useful tool for readers, as well as for authors who are deciding where to submit their next manuscript for publication. However, any one metric only tells a part of the story of a journal’s quality and impact. Each metric has its limitations which means that it should never be considered in isolation, and metrics should be used to support and not replace qualitative review.

In 2003 Taylor & Francis was already one of twenty-four international publishers involved in the World Health Organization’s HINARI project which allows institutions in countries with a GDP of less than USD 1000 per capita (66 countries at his time) to apply for free or very low cost online access to research published in over 2000 medical journals. IJPCP was also included in this scheme.

The journal now has on average about 300 submitted manuscripts per year and the acceptance rate is currently 15%. In the year 2022, 50% of the submitted manuscripts were from Europe, 35% from Asia, 4% from North America, 4% from South America, 4% from Africa and 1% from Australasia. Within Europe the highest number of accepted articles in 2023 were from Italy followed by Germany. Since publications need to be processed timely, the average days from submission to first decision is currently 19 days and in average 63 days from submission to first post-review decision.

The IJPCP follows a hybrid model with regard to open access, e.g. the authors can submit manuscripts with or without open access, which from my point-of-view is important to maintain, since not all authors have the monetary background to finance their publications, for which they usually have to pay between €2.000 and €3.500 per manuscript in learned journals. Currently the figure for papers without open access is about 90% of the published articles in the IJPCP.

The development of the past two and a half decades indicates that with the IJPCP we are on a good way to a better understanding and treatment of our patients and I am convinced that the journal under its new leadership will encourage the acceleration of clinical knowledge based on sound research.

It was a great joy and reward editing the journal as its Founding Chief-Editor and to collaborate with world-leading scientists and clinicians in the field. I specifically would like to thank David Baldwin who was the joint Founding Chief-Editor from 1996 until 2010, thereafter he stepped down from this position to take over the Chief-Editor position of Human Psychopharmacology. The journal benefitted also from the outstanding dedication and scientific knowledge of Assistant Editors: starting with Shigeto Yamawaki from Japan, Robert Hirschfeld from USA and later Naomi Fineberg from UK and Eric Hollander from USA and then followed by Eva Meisenzahl from Germany, Pia Baldinger from Austria and Michael van Ameringen from Canada. All of them contributed with their outstanding skills to the growth of the journal during my Chief-Editorship. We appreciated our field editor meetings together with the editorial board meetings which usually took place during the European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) congresses where most of the colleagues were available with scientific presentations.

I always appreciated the support the journal received from the publisher Informa Healthcare (Taylor & Francis), the Editorial Board members, the broad community of reviewers and last but not least, most importantly, the authors who submitted manuscripts to the journal. All of us are dedicated to reduce the burden of neuropsychiatric disorders through a sound scientific knowledge and to understand and treat our patients more efficiently. The 27 years of the journal were exciting and outstanding, and I wish the IJPCP a further or even better development for the next decades to come.

Acknowledgements

All activities of the IJPCP have been advised and received feedback from our editorial assistants, Elisabeth Hills, Irene Schinnerl, Andrew Mayers, Magdalena Hlava, Andrea King, Berenike Oppermann, Helen Sigurdadottir, Teresa Haider and Merita Hrustanovic. The Associate editors, Shigeto Yamawaki, Robert Hirschfeld, Naomi Feinberg, Eric Hollander, Eva Meisenzahl, Pia Baldinger and Michael van Ameringen devoted their scientific knowledge and time and I am grateful I was able to work with this outstanding exceptional group of people.

Disclosure statement

In the past 3 years Dr Kasper served as a consultant or on advisory boards for Angelini, Biogen, Boehringer, Esai, Janssen, IQVIA, Mylan, MSD, Recordati, Rovi, Sage and Schwabe; and he has served on speakers bureaus for Angelini, Aspen Farmaceutica S.A., Biogen, Janssen, Recordati, Schwabe, Servier, Sothema, and Sun Pharma.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.