About Annals of General Psychiatry

What is Annals of General Psychiatry?

Annals of General Psychiatry is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal covering the wider field of Psychiatry, Neurosciences and Psychological Medicine.

Annals of General Psychiatry is aimed at publishing articles on all aspects of psychiatry. Primary research articles will be our priority. Both basic and clinical neuroscience contributions are encouraged. The journal strongly supports and follows the principles of evidence-based medicine.

This Open Access, online journal emphasizes a biopsychosocial approach to illness and health, and where possible a wider dialogue will be opened on specific articles thereby placing the research into a wider framework. Online publication and Open Access are powerful tools to achieve these goals.

Content overview

Annals of General Psychiatry considers the following types of articles:

• Research: reports of original research data; these articles should follow the principles of evidence-based medicine.
• Review articles: these articles deal with an important question by systematically reviewing the literature. The electronic nature of the journal makes the publication of such large articles easier, although the authors should keep the length reasonable. Review articles should describe the review method in detail including databases searched, key words, evaluation method etc.
• Case reports: reports of clinical cases that can be educational, describe a diagnostic or therapeutic dilemma, suggest an association, or present an important adverse reaction.
• Database articles: describe a new database or a substantial improvement of an existing database.
• Software articles: describe the source code for software applications, tools or algorithm implementations. Typically, an archive of the source code of the current version of the software should be included with the submitted manuscript as a supplementary file.
• Case studies: describe a major health care intervention, usually from a public health perspective. Case study articles that include a rigorous assessment of the processes and impact of the intervention as well as recommendations for future interventions will be considered favourably. Note that Case study articles should not describe an individual patient - authors should use the case report format for such descriptions.

Peer review policies

Peer review in Annals of General Psychiatry is designed to ensure that the research published is 'good science'. Peer reviewers are asked to indicate which articles they consider to be especially interesting or significant. These articles will be given greater prominence within AAnnals of General Psychiatry and greater external publicity. Submitted manuscripts will generally be reviewed by two external experts; who will have four possible options: 1) accept without revision, 2) accept after revision, without expecting to check those revisions, 3) neither accept nor reject until author(s) make revisions and resubmit, 4) reject because scientifically unsound.

Edited by George St. Kaprinis, Annals of General Psychiatry is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Annals of General Psychiatry

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central and Embase.

Articles in Annals of General Psychiatry should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Ann Gen Psychiatry 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Annals of General Psychiatry does not have issue numbers. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Annals of General Psychiatry, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Annals of General Psychiatry using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Annals of General Psychiatry is published  by BioMed Central, an STM (Science, Technology and Medicine) publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Annals of General Psychiatry however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Annals of General Psychiatry's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Thomson Reuters (ISI) to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Annals of General Psychiatry will be available.

Annals of General Psychiatry is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.