During the past triennium, the official journal of the World Psychiatric Association, World Psychiatry, has increased its impact factor (a measure of the citations received by the articles published in the journal) from 26.561 to 40.595 (see Table 1). It ranks no. 1 among psychiatric journals (see Table 2), no. 1 among all the journals in the Social Science Citation Index (see Table 3), and no. 5 among all the journals in the Clinical Medicine category (see Table 4).
The number of psychiatrists worldwide regularly receiving the journal has increased from about 50,000 to more than 60,000. All back issues of the journal can be freely downloaded from the the WPA website and the PubMed system.
Issues or articles of the journal are available on the WPA website in ten languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, French, Arabic, Turkish, Japanese, Romanian and Polish.
The journal has four key aims:
to reach as many psychiatrists as possible worldwide and inform them on recent clinical, service and research developments;
to focus on issues that are relevant to the professional growth and everyday clinical practice of those psychiatrists,
to use language that can be easily understood by most of readers, and
to make an attempt to reach those psychiatrists who are not able to read English.
In 2020, the number of submissions to the journal will reach more than 2,000. More than 300 COVID-related papers have been received, and only those which can really make a difference have been accepted. We recently published the first study documenting that persons with mental disorders have a significantly higher risk for COVID infection and COVID-related hospitalization and mortality than the rest of the population. This study has been conducted on electronic health records in a sample corresponding to 20% of the US adult population (https://doi.org/10.1002/wps.20806).
All WPA Member Societies and Scientific Sections are welcome to provide to the Office of the Editor a list of their members who wish to receive regularly free-of-charge the electronic version of the journal.
Author: Professor Mario Maj, Editor, World Psychiatry