Quality of psychiatry journals published from India: Insights for readers, researchers, and publishers

Dear Sir, Research work needs publication in high-standing scientific journals to increase visibility, improve the academic credentials of researchers, and benefit society. Journalology is the scholarly study of all aspects of the academic publishing process. Such studies help researchers, peer reviewers, journal editors, and journal publishers identify problems in the publishing process and rectify them. Previous studies in this field relevant to psychiatry include those that assessed whether the instructions to authors mentioned reporting guidelines, trial registration, and International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) requirements[1]; common statistical and design problems in submitted manuscripts[2]; and research contributions from low- and middle-income countries in leading journals.[3] Several journal indices allow us to identify high-quality journals; indexing and impact factor (IF) are the most important ones. Besides these, the regularity of issues, transparency, article processing charges, and appropriateness of scope are important variables from the perspective of both global indexing bodies and researchers with manuscripts to submit. Though studies have assessed the quality of scientific journals in Africa[4] and medical journals in Indonesia[5] and Brazil,[6] no previous study has assessed the quality of psychiatry journals from India. However, such a study would potentially help the clinicians in the country identify sources they can look up for quality Indian evidence, help the researchers choose the best journal for their works, and help the journal publishers and editors identify areas for improvement. Hence, we aimed to generate a list of all Indian journals on psychiatry and assess their quality on predetermined criteria. METHODS Inclusion/exclusion criteria: We included journals owned or managed by any psychiatric organization or institution or psychiatrist in India. Journals that have stopped publishing were also included because we wanted to provide this information to prospective authors. We excluded journals run by other mental health professionals such as clinical psychologists, psychiatric social workers, and psychiatric nurses. Search strategy: We browsed through the websites of all known psychiatric associations from India to find their affiliated journals. Some journals were identified from our own memory and through personal queries to fellow psychiatrists and researchers. To assess journal quality, we collected relevant information from their respective websites, the National Library of Medicine (NLM) catalog, the Clarivate Analytics website, and a list of journals with IF, as well as PubMed, Scopus, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) websites. Data extraction: For each journal, we extracted the journal name; the name of the organization, institution, or department that owns the journal; the number of issues published annually; whether that many issues have been actually and regularly published in the past five years; website address; whether the journal requires article processing charges; whether the journal is open access; whether it publishes articles online ahead of print; and the name of the publisher or the manuscript management system used. We considered indexing/inclusion in the agencies approved by National Medical Council (NMC) for promotion purposes—MEDLINE, PubMed Central, Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Scopus, and DOAJ as a quality metric. Indexing in MEDLINE or Scopus was given special importance,[7] as most universities accept them. From Scopus, the quartile (Q) for each indexed journal was obtained, which reflects its credibility under each subject category. Q1 denotes the top 25% of the journals, Q2 includes journals in 25 to 50%, Q3 and Q4 include 50 to 75% and 75 to 100%, respectively. Q1 and Q2 journals are considered better in each subject category. Any disparity between what the journal website claims and what was found in the indexing agency website was also noted. IF is calculated for a journal based on the mean number of citations received in a year for the articles it published in the previous two years. For other aspects, we considered the past five years as the reference period. For transparency, we examined whether the manuscripts are peer-reviewed and whether such information is available on the website or not. The relevant journal websites were examined in March–May 2022 by two authors. Ethics committee approval was not necessary, as the study involved no direct assessment of human participants. RESULTS We found 30 relevant journals [Table 1]. NIMHANS Journal, an official publication from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences, Bengaluru, has been discontinued since 1997. The majority of the journals are affiliated with psychiatric associations. Two journals are bimonthly and five have quarterly issues. No journal is indexed in MEDLINE. Only one journal (Indian Journal of Psychiatry, IJP) is in SCIE and has an IF (1.759). Five are indexed in Scopus—Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine (IJPM) is in Q2, IJP is in Q3, two journals (Journal of Indian Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health and Archives of Mental Health) in Q4, and one has been discontinued. Eleven journals are in DOAJ. Back issues are available in PubMed Central for three journals, i.e., IJP, IJPM, and Industrial Psychiatry Journal; for three other journals, only a few articles or back issues are available in PubMed. Overall, 13 journals, i.e., less than half of the listed ones, met the NMC criteria for promotion (excluding one that has stopped publishing).Table 1: Characteristics of psychiatry journals from IndiaMost journals are regular, open access, transparent, and do not levy article processing charges. Only a few of the journals do not have an active website. The websites of Orissa Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Mental Health Education, and Delhi Psychiatry Journal did not have download links for individual articles. Five journals had limited information about the peer-review system on their websites. DISCUSSION Most Indian psychiatry journals functioned regularly and transparently and had an active website. Five journals were found to have poor transparency about the peer review process. Readers are suggested to avoid such journals, as the content may not be scientifically valid. As no journal is in MEDLINE and only one journal has IF, we do not have any solid recommendations for prospective authors. IJP, IJPM, Journal of Indian Association for Child and Adolescent Mental Health, and Archives of Mental Health are currently indexed in Scopus, and the first one has an IF of 2.983. Hence, these could be considered somewhat superior to other journals. All of these are open access and none of them demands article processing charges, too. It is encouraging that several other upcoming journals maintain transparency, are published regularly, and are in DOAJ. There are limitations to relying on IF only, as all research published in low-impact journals or those without IF need not, necessarily, be of “low quality.”[8-10] In fact, the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment (DORA, https://sfdora.org/) states that the IF must not be used “as a surrogate measure of the quality of individual research articles, to assess an individual scientist’s contributions, or in hiring, promotion, or funding decisions.” Also, IF can be manipulated based on the types of articles published (e.g., increasing the number of review papers, which are cited more often, not publishing case reports or correspondences that are less frequently cited) and encouraging self-citations (including previous publications in the same journal). It is good to notice many journals use the Open Journal Systems (OJS, https://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/), which helps small organizations publish journals without paying a hefty sum to professional publishers. However, some journals published directly by the parent organization, despite having a website, are not using OJS, depriving the submitters of benefits provided by a manuscript management system. Examples include Orissa Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Mental Health Education, Indian Journal of Mental Health, and Open Journal of Psychiatry & Allied Sciences. If publishing in a journal does not fulfill one’s eligibility for promotion, such journals are less likely to get good submissions. To fulfill the NMC criteria for promotions, the easiest database for a journal to enter is DOAJ. Their requirements, such as publishing at least five research papers in a year, having a dedicated home page address, and making each article available for individual download, are not difficult to meet. However, many journals in our list that are published open access, despite meeting these criteria, are not included in DOAJ. Such journals should prioritize inclusion in DOAJ. Rather than posting the entire issue as a single PDF file, journals such as the Orissa Journal of Psychiatry, Journal of Mental Health Education, and Delhi Psychiatry Journal should start publishing each article on a separate page. This will help them meet the DOAJ criterion and improve the discoverability of the articles through search engines, too. India has the second-largest population in the world. As per the National Mental Health Survey 2016, the overall weighted prevalence is 13.67% for any mental morbidity and 10.56% for current mental morbidity.[11] In this context, our finding of a limited number of quality psychiatry journals from India is unfortunate. Professional organizations and editors should pay immediate attention to improving the quality of their journals, augmenting transparency, maintaining journal websites, and getting it into major indexing agencies. Some steps for this include establishing a rigorous peer review system, training workshops for peer reviewers,[12] editors remaining abreast of the latest developments in academic publishing and the ever-evolving requirements of the major indexing agencies, and forming a National Editors’ Consortium.[13] We did not assess the quality of the methods, statistical analysis, or reporting of the studies the journals published. Structured assessment of transparency or assessment of predatory nature of the journals were not done, too. Future research should try to overcome these limitations of the present study. Financial support and sponsorship Nil. Conflicts of interest SA is the Editor-in-Chief of the Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine. SKP, SA and VM serve on the editorial boards of several Indian psychiatry journals.