EDITORIAL
2006-2007 administration: the challenge of growth
This is the first issue of a new Editorial Board.
The growth and qualification that the Journal of Psychiatry of Rio Grande do Sul (Rev Psiquiatr RS) has reached is our great challenge. By taking over as editors, along with the new Board of the Sociedade de Psiquiatria do Rio Grande do Sul (SPRS), in a ceremony held in January, we named our administration as the "challenge of growth."
The Rev Psiquiatr RS needs to follow its path leading to growth. Such growth is no longer merely a desire of SPRS members. After it has been established as a journal with a national-wide distribution concerning the psychiatric knowledge, our journal acknowledges its commitment and its great responsibility in maintaining the quality it has achieved. Based on this status, the issue we have to confront is: how to grow without jeopardizing quality?
Our journal has grown 115% over the last three administrations with regard to the number of articles received. Over the past two years, we have received 170 articles and published around 60. The Brazilian psychiatric scientific production has increased, and several areas of psychiatry have demanded more qualification and more referees. Therefore, we intend to face this challenge of growth in received articles through increasingly more judicious selection criteria. We need to define an editorial line giving priority to original articles, case reports and reviews of pertinent themes and with acknowledged quality (especially through invitation). We intend to accelerate the review of articles, without jeopardizing this correction in view of our journal criteria and the demands of international scientific indexes. With regard to this aspect, we have implemented an online submission and review system. We stress that our aim is to keep increasing the space for original articles produced in our country. We have witnessed a great development of investigations and researches in Brazil and we wish to see the results of these investments published in our journal. On the other hand, quality and invited review articles will also be published. The accurate review of relevant themes in our specialty will have a space for publication.
Besides the growth of our journal, we know that we live a moment of plural knowledge in psychiatry. Therefore, the psychiatrist must have grounded, up-to-date as well as evidence-based information available about the several areas in order to reach their final goal: benefit for the patient. At this time of great increase in psychiatric knowledge, it is an ethical responsibility of the psychiatrist to provide the most specific and indicated care to each situation and to reach a precise diagnosis.
It is worth emphasizing that we intend to keep a commitment that does not belong to this administration, but to the history of Rev Psiquiatr RS, as well as to the field of psychiatry in Rio Grande do Sul: the acknowledgement of the plural aspect of psychiatric knowledge and of a good and fertile dialogue between different areas. The dialogue observed in the state of Rio Grande do Sul probably occurs in only a few parts around the world. Such assertion is not only theoretical, but also practical: the relation of clinical psychiatry with several areas of psychotherapy. Our journal wants to maintain this editorial line: providing space for all areas, publishing researches, theoretical reflections and clinical studies developed in Rio Grande do Sul, in Brazil as a whole and occasionally in other countries. The contact between colleagues may thus be expanded to allow the discussion of controversies and questions in order to make our science evolve.
We perceive the need for increasing the Editorial Board, and thus we count on the participation of several new colleagues from different areas of psychiatry, so that together we can do all the work and take on the responsibility given to us.
We present a journal that has on its cover an old photograph of Hospital Psiquiátrico São Pedro de Porto Alegre, with the aim of making a historical rescue of our origins, and also as an acknowledgement to the colleagues who came before us. In the next issues, we intend to keep doing this historical rescue of several psychiatric institutions in our state.
We would like to remind our readers that we welcome letters to the editors both commenting articles and providing suggestions and criticism.
Moreover, we thank our colleagues from the previous team for the excellence of the work they did, which we intend to continue.
We wish everyone a good reading of this new issue of our journal.
Carmem E. Keidann and Flávio Shansis
Editors
Publication Dates
-
Publication in this collection
09 Nov 2006 -
Date of issue
Apr 2006
