Current challenges for mental health journals in developing countries

An important process in scientific research is the publication of research studies and publications are important for the advancement of psychiatry. Scientific publications are key indicators of research productivity as well as promoters of the expansion of new knowledge. There is an enormous gap between the burden of mental disorders and mental health resources in India. Public mental health in India can be improved by facilitating the generation and flow of information. Research-generated information is perceived as essential to determine needs, propose new cost-effective interventions, monitor the process of their implementation, evaluate the changes required, and explore the obstacles that prevent recommended cost-effective action to be carried out.[1] Research-generated information will help us to better utilize the meager mental health resources. The difference between the research information that is needed to plan the best possible services in a given setting and what is currently available can be called the research gap. All available indications point toward the fact that the research gap is particularly large in India. Doing more research alone does not suffice: research must be relevant to the needs of the country. Relevant research will help in reducing the burden of common and disabling mental disorders through evidence-based and feasible interventions. Currently, the mental health effort in the developing world is based primarily on evidence from high-income countries. This approach has a serious disadvantage, in that the majority of the available information is collected from vastly different cultural and socio-economic contexts. Culturally, relevant research should inform mental health policy and service development, treatment decision-making, and anti-stigma and discrimination programs. To advance mental health research, it is first of all necessary to set a priority agenda viable to the country's needs, characteristics, and resources. Preferably, the research policy for a country should be developed in harmony with all other components of the national mental health policy and strategies. Scientific journals have to play a considerably greater role in decreasing the research gap. A coordinated priority-driven program is required for mental health research dissemination and to facilitate the transfer of results of mental health research into policy and practice, as is evidenced by the current state of affairs. Developing countries contribute only about 6% of articles to leading psychiatric journals.[2,3] Even more worrying is the fact that, in biomedical publications, the gap between countries with low and high levels of publications is widening.[4] The causes for this could be many, including less mental health research being done in developing countries due to low priority for research, lesser resources, or limitations in a research capacity, and difficulties in reporting research due to language. However, it is likely that limited appreciation of the research needs of developing countries at the level of reviewers and editorial boards of international journals could also play apart. The trend toward increased publication of resource-intensive biological research in indexed journals (to maintain/increase the impact factor) may be another reason for the low rate of publications from developing countries. Of the 20 journals in the mental health field with the highest impact factor, 10 publish articles exclusively on biological psychiatry and/or psychopharmacology topics and others, such as Archives of General Psychiatry, American Journal of Psychiatry, and Schizophrenia Bulletin. Research focusing on mental health services is not less important than biological research and may be more relevant to answering the mental health needs of developing countries. Such research does not need to be complicated and expensive and can certainly be carried out in these countries. As a result of these difficulties, the bulk of research from developing countries gets published in journals that are not easily accessible locally or internationally. They face a multitude of problems, including those of resources for publication and dissemination (financial, managerial, and marketing), editorial skills and review process, author pool and language, and perhaps biases in indexing systems.[5] An overwhelming majority of biomedical journals indexed in international databases are from the developed world.[6] The lack of visibility affects their dissemination opportunities - e.g., libraries in developing countries subscribe mainly to influential journals from Western countries - and thereby the possibility of application of research results contained in them. Developing countries also have problems in accessing scientific materials because of their cost. In the last couple of decades, the subscription costs of many scholarly journals have escalated at a rate far exceeding the rate of inflation.[7] Steps should be taken by different journals and organizations in the last few years to decrease the disproportion between the research needs of populations and available publications. There should be increased participation of researchers from developing countries in editorial boards and peer review panels of internationally accessible mental health journals. There should be an increase in the number of internationally accessible mental health journals with a multilingual approach to publication. There should be an increase in the proportion of published work from developing countries in indexed internationally accessible mental health journals. Collaboration between editors of mental health journals from developing countries and developed countries should be more. There should be an increase in the number of mental health journals giving free access to their contents.