International Psychogeriatrics

INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOGERIATRICS ACQUIRES IMPACT FACTOR AND CHANGES PUBLISHER
BY DAVID AMES

New publisher

The International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA)’s peer reviewed journal International Psychogeriatrics has experienced some important developments since the start of 2003. Following the retirement of Robin Eastwood, our Editor Emeritus who did so much to raise the profile and status of the journal during his seven years in charge, I took over as Editor in Chief on January 3. The following month the chair of IPA’s publications committee, Edmond Chiu AM, Fern Finkel who is both executive director of IPA and executive editor of International Psychogeriatrics and I travelled to London to interview prospective publishers. Some months earlier four bidders had responded to IPA’s invitation to submit proposals to publish the journal for the triennium 2004-2006 and after an exhaustive analysis two publishers were selected to proceed to the final interview stage. In Britain we spent the better part of two whole days interviewing representatives of both companies and after further discussion and debate the IPA Board of directors voted in April to accept the bid put forward by Cambridge University Press (CUP). 

CUP is a famous academic publishing house (mentioned in Samuel Pepys’ diaries!) and International Psychogeriatrics will be joining a stable of 170 journals including the prestigious psychiatric journal Psychological Medicine. CUP was a pioneer of electronic publishing and as well as providing IPA members and other subscribers with hard copies of the journal, will also make available electronic copy through a link from the IPA to the CUP website. Accepted papers will be displayed on the journal website once they have been edited, well in advance of the hard copy publication date. Because IPA owns the copyright for the back numbers of International Psychogeriatrics CUP will scan and digitise the previous issues of the journal so that during 2004 the entire corpus of back issues will become available to members and subscribers via the web.

The shape and size of the journal will be virtually unchanged, but there will be some changes to the appearance and layout. The new cover will retain the IPA’s blue, black and white color scheme, but I think readers will find the revised design bolder and more distinctive than the current version. The complete contents of each issue will be listed on the back cover. The internal layout is not yet determined, but there will be changes to font and typeface, though it is unlikely that we will move to a two column format as suggested by some of my colleagues, because of an unacceptably high rate of word breaks required in such a format in a journal of our size. 

The design for our new cover, revised author instructions and additional information about the journal can now be found at our CUP website: www.journals.cambridge.org/jid_IPG

Impact factor

Although International Psychogeriatrics was listed in Index Medicus from an early date it was slow to be allocated a citation “impact factor” rating by the Institute of Scientific Information, but we were delighted to learn in June that for the year 2002 the journal was allocated an impact factor of 1.118 and was ranked 62nd of 88 psychiatric journals and 19th of 27 geriatrics and gerontology journals in ISI’s Science Citation Index; 8th of 24 gerontology journals and 37th of 83 psychology journals in the Social Science Citation Index. While this is lower than we would like, it is a lot better than not having any ranking at all and we look forward to boosting the impact factor and relative standing of the journal as the quality of submissions rises further and accessibility to the journal’s articles (a major factor in citation indices) improves.

Speed of processing

One important issue for those submitting papers to a journal is the turnaround time from submission to the date on which a decision to accept, reject or invite revision of a paper is communicated. A second issue is the delay from acceptance to actual publication. Our reviewers have been most supportive in assisting us to speed up our editorial process and I am delighted to report that for papers received between March and early August 2003 the median time from receipt to a response to authors was 29 days (mean 33 days). 

Personnel

Following Robin Eastwood’s retirement his Cambridge based editorial assistant Judith Sylph assisted my personal assistant Marilyn Cain with the transition from an editorial office on one side of the globe to a new one in the antipodes. Marilyn is now in full control of the day to day running of the journal’s editorial processes as editorial assistant under my direct supervision. John O’Brien, a leading old age psychiatrist from Newcastle upon Tyne, England has agreed to be my deputy and I am already working him hard in the role. We have appointed a panel of associate editors to reflect the geographical, professional and research diversity of psychogeriatrics in general and IPA in particular and we held our first meeting at the recent IPA Congress in Chicago. Many helpful and sensible suggestions were made at that meeting and we hope to implement some of them over the next few months. In appointing the associate editors I have tried to blend youthful enthusiasm with venerable eminence in about equal measure and think that I have succeeded. I particularly want to thank those associate editors whose terms ended with Robin Eastwood’s for their enormous contributions to the journal and to put on record that many of those who left the editorial panel had asked to be relieved of that responsibility because of the pressure of other commitments. Fern Finkel continues to bring her immense experience to her role as managing editor and the eminent late life schizophrenia expert Michael Davidson from Israel has taken over the important role of Chair of IPA’s publications committee from Ed Chiu upon the expiry of Ed’s term of office.

Submitting to International Psychogeriatrics

Editors may come and go but IPA is permanently headquartered in Chicago so it makes sense for submissions to go through the Chicago office. We very much prefer papers to be submitted in electronic form by email to journal@ipa-online.org but we can cope with most computer discs mailed to the IPA head office (see www.ipa-online.org for that postal address). Both Marilyn Cain and I can be contacted at the email address ipaj-ed@unimelb.edu.au and by fax at + 61 3 9342 8954. The mailing address is David Ames, Editor International Psychogeriatrics, Department of Psychiatry, Royal Melbourne Hospital, Parkville, Victoria, 3050, Australia and if you get really excited you can telephone us on + 61 3 8344 5598! Although we will contact you direct from Melbourne with reviews and matters pertaining to papers received, the system works best if new submissions are sent first to Chicago and not direct to Melbourne. We have a policy of rapid acknowledgement of correspondence, so if you have heard no response three weeks after submitting a paper do please contact us to check that it was received. We aim to return reviews to authors within 90 days of receipt of a submitted manuscript so again, contact us if you wait more than 90 days for a review (though we will let you know if the occasional unavoidable delay does occur). It is my aim to make International Psychogeriatrics the premier journal in the field and with the help of the IPA membership and their colleagues we hope to achieve just that.

DAVID AMES
EDITOR IN CHIEF INTERNATIONAL PSYCHOGERIATRICS
EMAIL ipaj-ed@unimelb.edu.au