JAMA Psychiatry—The Year in Review, 2018

At the beginning of 2018, Stephan Heckers, MD, passed me the role of Editor in Chief of JAMA Psychiatry. Although there is now a new team at the journal, there is also a good deal of continuity; Martin Paulus, MD, our current Deputy Editor, and I had the privilege of working with Dr Heckers during his tenure. We have added some new individuals to the team, including Helen Blair Simpson, MD, PhD, Columbia University, as Associate Editor and John Torous, MD, MBI, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, as Web Editor. We are ably assisted by Sara DiBari, MFA, the journal’s Editorial Manager.

The journal continues to receive increasing numbers of submissions, reaching 1539 major manuscripts in 2018, an all-time high (Table). We continue to handle all manuscripts in a timely and responsive manner despite this larger volume. We reject more than two-thirds of submitted manuscripts without peer review to provide authors of papers that are unlikely to be accepted for publication in the journal with timely decisions. For this process, the median turnaround time to initial decision without peer review was 1 day in 2018. This allowed authors to submit rejected manuscripts elsewhere as quickly as possible. We maintain a fast pace for manuscripts that are sent out for peer review as well, allowing us to make timely editorial decisions and rapidly publish accepted manuscripts.

Table.  JAMA Psychiatry Statistics for 2018

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We thank all our authors for choosing to submit their work to JAMA Psychiatry and all the experts across the globe who review for the journal.¹JAMA Psychiatry is known for scholarly peer reviews and we remain committed to this tradition. Peer review is laborious and complex but its benefits are worthwhile, foremost for improving the quality of the papers we publish. I believe that the process of rigorous peer review is the key ingredient for the ongoing success of our journal.

JAMA Psychiatry’s impact factor rose to 16.6 in 2018, continuing its favorable trajectory. Our digital presence also continues to expand and in 2018 our number of Twitter and Facebook social media followers rose to 46 000. As in previous years, JAMA Psychiatry publishes all articles online first every Wednesday. More than 4.7 million articles were viewed and downloaded from our journal website last year. One summary index we follow to gauge influence in news and social media is the Altmetric score. The 3 JAMA Psychiatry articles from 2018 with the highest Altmetric score, the most views and downloads, and the most citations are listed in the Table.^2-9

In 2018, JAMA Psychiatry continued to expand its clinically relevant content. This included a larger number of reports of clinical trials and a series of combined Clinical Challenge and Review articles explaining the relevant neuroscience for specific disease categories. In 2019 we will add a series of JAMA Network Insights articles that aim to provide a brief overview of the management of common challenges in psychiatry written by leading experts for a general clinical audience. Our vision is to publish a journal that disseminates the best new original research in psychiatry while also providing useful clinical updates for a general psychiatry audience.

There is much work to do to alleviate the adversity that patients and their families experience. I am proud that our journal remains a leader in this effort and thankful for the privilege of serving as its Editor in Chief.

Corresponding Author: Dost Öngür, MD, PhD, McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Admissions Building, Room 320, 115 Mill St, Belmont, MA 02478 (dongur@partners.org).

Published Online: March 20, 2019. doi:10.1001/jamapsychiatry.2019.0216

Conflict of Interest Disclosures: Dr Öngür reports receiving personal fees as a member of the scientific advisory board of Neurocrine Inc in 2016 before becoming editor in chief of the journal.