Abstract
With the final issue of volume 34 in your hands, I take the opportunity of thanking our authors, referees and the Editorial, Australasian and International Advisory Boards for contributing so helpfully in 2000. Our colleagues at Blackwell Science Asia (BSA) could not have been more efficient and congenial. As a result of this collective effort, 2000 has seen several achievements of which we can justifiably be proud.
I know that many authors have become concerned with the Impact Factor's (IF) growing deployment in job promotional and research funding exercises. These are unwelcome developments given that the IF was never designed for these purposes and has inherent limitations which even preclude its use as a measure of the impact of an individual article. Whatever our personal views on the IF's role in contemporary publishing, it remains, regrettably, the ‘only game in town’. We have lifted our game! The IF for 1999 is 1.2, an increase of 0.35 from the year before. This jump reflects the greater number of citations of some of the Journal's articles in recent years. This is not altogether surprising given the Editorial Board's decision to ‘raise the bar a fair bit’. The standard of our articles has, in the eyes of many readers, increased and is bound to do so further with the continuing submission of high quality manuscripts.
A few Australasian researchers have informed me of their wish to publish more frequently in the Journal provided the IF went up. Well, it has done so and will no doubt do so again if these very researchers place more trust in our potential to reach the level of comparable, generalist journals in the Northern Hemisphere.
Another concern of researchers is the accessibility of articles published in the Journal, given its geographical location. This issue is, in fact, a receding problem. I should remind both readers and authors that articles are readily accessible in every part of the world through the 30 abstracting and indexing services with which we have a relationship. The era of perusing journals on a library shelf will soon end and be supplanted by the browsing of tables of contents and abstracts in the comfort of one's own office and at any hour, day or night. Ordering the copy of an interesting article has also become a straightforward procedure.
In this context, Blackwell Science Asia has done us proud by developing an electronic version of the Journal. Synergy, BSA's full-text online journal service provides online access to a range of scientific, technical and medical journals (some 250 titles). The Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry is now available absolutely free to all trainees and Fellows, electronically over the Worldwide Web, in a user-friendly format through the service. Instructions on how to register are shown at the beginning of this issue, as are details of the service.
You can browse through tables of contents and abstracts at a time convenient to yourself. Every registered user has a personal home page on the system, which allows them to set up free email alerts of tables of contents from new issues, and to save specific search requirements. Articles are available via online document delivery with fully integrated credit processing. Links within articles allow intuitive navigation between text, references, figures, tables and associated files. The chain of links extends out to external bibliographical databases and other Web-based services including Index Medicus/MEDLINE, allowing users to read abstracts of articles referenced. Every full-text article in Synergy is accompanied by a PDF (portable document format) version, which enables the user to download and print the article, including all figures and tables, exactly as it appears in the printed journal.
Synergy is the future of scientific publishing and we are in the privileged position of participating from the beginning. Before long, we will all become familiar with the procedures; electronic access will be a routine feature of our professional lives. I do hope that you come to value this new service whether you are a clinician or researcher. I have no doubt this will be the case.
In the final analysis, our journal succeeds because of the quality of its published material. It is invidious to select outstanding articles in this volume but Sandy McFarlane is to be congratulated for an excellent guest-edited symposium on traumatic stress. Sandy, internationally renowned in this field, has recruited an eminent team to bring the very latest developments to our attention. We are indebted to him and his colleagues for their efforts.
Similarly, we owe Stan Catts a debt of gratitude for his remarkable job of bringing together key papers and commentaries on the prevention of schizophrenia which were originally delivered at a conference he organised in 1999 in Sydney. This scholarly collection is published as a supplement and should reach you soon. I am confident you will find the papers stimulating and illuminating. Thank you Stan for a splendid initiative.
It only remains for me to wish all our readers a new year of good health and contentment. I hope volume 35 will add to the latter.