Human Psychopharmacology: the first twenty–five years

1984–1993—INCEPTION AND THE FIRST 10 YEARS

In the early 1980s, John Wiley & Sons carried out a survey of eminent researchers in psychopharmacology to seek their views on the need for a new journal in this field. The results clearly showed that there was such a need, and in 1984 one of us (J. G. E.) was invited to become the founder editor of what was to become Human Psychopharmacology: Clinical and Experimental. The first issue of the journal appeared in July 1986. This editorial, written by the former editors in chief, commemorates the 25th year of publication of the journal.

At the time of the invitation, J. G. E. was working in Southampton (UK) as a full-time National Health Service consultant psychiatrist, so he considered it impractical to take on the assignment single handed. He did so, however, on the condition that he could invite a team of internationally known researchers to join him as fellow editors. Eighteen months later, after the preparatory work for the journal had been completed and a team of editors and international editorial advisors (one of them a future Nobel Prize winner) had been assembled, the journal was launched.

The editors who were first appointed comprised Dr (later to become Professor) Phillip Cowen, Professor Ian Hindmarch, Professor Brian Leonard, Dr (later Professor) Michael Trimble and Professor Peter Tyrer (who was later appointed as editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry). After making significant contributions during the early formative years of the journal, Peter Tyrer and later Phil Cowen had to stand down as editors because of changes in their other professional commitments. They were succeeded by Professor Donald Eccleston and later Dr (later Professor) Guy Goodwin. Dr Thomas Roth joined the team as North American editor in 1991 and Dr Mark Ansseau as European editor the following year. It is to the expertise, dedication and hard work of these editors and the many other colleagues who offered advice and submitted papers to the journal that much of the success of Human Psychopharmacology during its early life should be attributed.

At the launch of the journal, eminent researchers from 14 different countries had agreed to be members of the Editorial Advisory Board. Five years later, changes were made in the board so that new members (including younger researchers) could be appointed, although some of the original group were retained to aid continuity. In constituting the board, the aim was to have representatives not only from different countries but also from within the different disciplines of psychopharmacology—basic neuroscientists and clinical psychopharmacologists. These advisors, together with the Journals Production Department of John Wiley & Sons (especially Suzanne Richardson), played a major part in helping the editorial team deal with the frustrating teething problems that all journals have during their early formative years.

Human Psychopharmacology must have been established during one of the most difficult times in the history of medical journalism. The budgets of educational establishments were being drastically cut, and libraries worldwide were suffering the effects of a declining economy. Other journals, such as Psychopharmacology, already published papers in our discipline, and International Clinical Psychopharmacology was launched just prior to ours. The Journal of Psychopharmacology, the official journal of the British Association for Psychopharmacology, was established the following year and was soon to be followed by the Japanese Journal of Psychopharmacology.

In spite of these difficulties, during the first eight years we had submissions—original articles, reviews, comments, letters to editors and book reviews—from 29 different countries, including Eastern Europe, Africa, the Far East and North America (Edwards, 1993). Most of them were on the pharmacology and use of anti-anxiety, antidepressant and antipsychotic drugs, but we also published papers on psychopharmacological aspects of sleep, appetite, sex and pain relief, as well as papers on the broader issues of drug treatment and substance misuse and dependence—historical, ethical, medico-legal, epidemiological and economic. The publication of papers reporting the results of animal experiments helped bridge the gap between basic pharmacology and drug treatment in humans. In addition to the above, we published supplements on a wide range of psychopharmacological topics, abstracts of the British Sleep Association's annual meetings and sections on Current Awareness.

Our overall rejection rate during these early years was approximately 25%. The proportion of papers rejected following the initial submission was substantially higher than that, but wherever we saw potential in a manuscript we provisionally accepted it subject to the modifications advised by referees and editors. We regarded this as an important service, especially to younger, less experienced researchers.

Included among the authors who had their papers turned down were three of our editors! However, they were in good company. Bernard (1990) collated details on the rejection by publishers of many great works of literature, whereas nearer to the heart of psychopharmacologists the late Professor Max Hamilton (a former member of our advisory board) had much difficulty in getting his paper on a rating scale for depression published. At first it was met with a ‘tremendous wave of apathy’, but following its publication by the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry on two occasions it reached the top of the International Citation Index for medical publications (Barraclough, 1983; Edwards, 1989).

Those unfamiliar with the development of a journal like Human Psychopharmacology might imagine that it was managed by a large team of editors and supportive staff who had plenty of time to undertake the work. This was not the case with our journal (as with many others); all of the editors had to give priority to their main work as clinicians and/or academics. Yet, they (like the editors of many other academic journals) managed to meet their editorial commitments without financial reward and often having to work at unsocial hours and/or do things ‘on the hoof’—a reminder that if you want to get a job done, you should ask a busy man to do it!

Attempts were made from a relatively early stage of development of the journal to make it widely abstracted and indexed, but as in the case of other new scientific journals we were caught in a bind. Most of the best papers in psychopharmacology were being submitted to the longer established journals that were already indexed, and that in turn meant a long haul before we were regularly publishing a sufficiently large number of higher quality papers to meet the strict criteria for acceptance by the major citation/indexing databases. However, Human Psychopharmacology was eventually included in the Thomson ISI citation databases in 1991, and it received its first impact factor in 1993.

1994–2011—THE LATER YEARS

The introductory editorial in the first issue of Human Psychopharmacology was written by the late Professor Sir Martin Roth. In it he wrote: ‘In the light of the experience gained during the past 50 years that discoveries in the field of mental disorder often stem from apparently unpromising sources, the editorial policy of Guy Edwards and his colleagues will maintain an element of flexibility and provide scope for the presentation of fresh ideas and novel hypotheses in an attempt to identify those that contain authentic inspirations’ (Roth, 1986). With similar thoughts in mind, one of the priorities of B. E. L., who succeeded J. G. E. as editor in chief and who is an academic pharmacologist, stated in his introductory editorial that he would aim at publishing more papers on basic psychopharmacology so that ‘Experimental’ in the subtitle of the journal received more prominence (Leonard, 1993).

B. E. L. achieved this aim by encouraging the submission by psychopharmacologists of manuscripts of a ‘translational’ nature, at the same time encouraging the submission of more papers from North America and other countries. During his term as editor in chief from 1994 to 1999, like others on the Editorial Board, he had serious concerns over the way in which the impact factor of a journal could be manipulated and misused for professional and commercial reasons, this issue being still unresolved as indicated by a recent publication by Marder et al. (2010). The end of his five years as editor in chief coincided with his retirement as professor and head of the Department of Pharmacology at the National University of Ireland in Galway. He was succeeded by I. H., former professor of psychopharmacology in the University of Surrey, Guildford, who was editor in chief from 1999 to 2005. I. H. was later succeeded by S. C., professor of old age psychiatry, University of Huddersfield, UK, and L. D., professor of psychiatry and behavioural sciences, Charleston, USA, working in collaboration as UK/US joint editors in chief from 2006 to 2010.

Throughout each of the aforementioned periods, the editors in chief and their editorial advisory teams continued to build on the foundations laid down during the early life of Human Psychopharmacology and the subsequent work of their predecessors; submissions were encouraged from increasing numbers of countries; papers were published on an increasingly wide range of topics relevant to psychopharmacology (for example, development of psychotropic drugs at all stages, experimental methods, study designs and statistics and behavioural toxicity); the journal was included in increasing numbers of abstracting/indexing databases (including Index Medicus/MEDLINE/PubMed (NLM) in 2002), and its impact factor slowly rose—with an increase also in the rejection rate of papers submitted for publication.

We have given a brief history of the development of Human Psychopharmacology. With the ever increasing recognition of the importance of clinical and experimental psychopharmacology (Harrison et al., 2011) and the hope that it will one day lead to even more effective treatments for our patients than we have at present, we hope that the journal has made a significant contribution to this area during the first 25 years of its life. We are confident that any such contribution will continue to be made under the able leadership of Professor David Baldwin, who took over the leadership as editor in chief last year.