Advice for authors is premature

In their recent article Patel & Sumathipala (2001) lament the low level of international representation in high-impact psychiatry journals and argue that such a phenomenon is curtailing the development of the psychiatric discipline in both developed and developing countries. Although I agree with the basic argument put forward, some of the advice given to prospective authors is, at best, premature. To be more specific, they explicitly advise authors from countries outside the ‘Euro-American’ group (Western Europe, North America and Australia/New Zealand) to submit their manuscripts to the three high-impact European psychiatric journals (British Journal of Psychiatry, Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica and Psychological Medicine), rather than to the three high-impact American psychiatric journals (American Journal of Psychiatry, Archives of General Psychiatry andSchizophrenia Bulletin), because the former publish a higher proportion of articles from ‘rest-of-the-world’ (RoW) authors. While this may be so, and indeed their data suggest that it is, it does not necessarily follow that such authors will improve their chances of publication by submitting to the three European journals in preference to the three American ones. Such authors should be concerned with differential acceptance rates rather than with the proportion of published papers by RoW authors. Although no acceptance rate data were provided by the three American journals, data on the three European journals indicated a much lower acceptance rate for RoW authors than for Euro-American ones (the fact that the three American journals refused to provide acceptance rate data should not be assumed to indicate that they show an even greater bias). Given these data, it would seem wrong to suggest that RoW authors should favour the three European journals when submitting manuscripts for publication. Such advice should perhaps be reserved until the data are more conclusive.