Welcome to the third issue in 2010 of The Journal of Psychiatry and Neurological Sciences. We would like to extend our thanks to everyone who contributed their time and effort to this issue.

Since taking on my role at the journal, I have become more aware of the passage of time. Now the months of March, June, September, and December have a different meaning for me and the editorial board. We also know that time is important when it comes to our journal and are thus working hard to make each issue accessible online and bring it to readers quickly after printing. As I stated in the introduction to this year’s first issue, the English version of all articles in the first two issues of 2010 are now available on the journal’s web site at www.dusunenadamdergisi.org. The English version of this issue will also be available on our site shortly. When we launched our site, we introduced an online article submission and tracking system, tested the system, and made corrections.

We have also expanded the archive section and made all articles printed in our journal, from 2000 to the present, available in PDF format. We have made it easier for authors to access the articles they are looking for by using key words in our search tool. The more authors writing articles about psychiatry and neurological sciences make use of the search tool, the more our journal will be cited. One of the editorial board’s targets is to boost the journal’s impact, and this is directly proportional to citations made in other journals included in scientific indexes.

Writing a scientific article requires intensive work up to the last phase. We have thus been focused on the review period to minimize the waiting time for authors who submit articles to our journal for publication, and the support we have received from reviewers in this process has made our work easier. We subject all articles submitted to a pre-review and authors are informed if corrections are required before the peer review. Comments and suggestions from at least two reviewers for each article are relayed to the relevant authors in a short period of time. I know from my own experience how educational this process can be.

Some articles, however, are not accepted for publication, and many of these are review articles. Nearly all psychiatry journals in Turkey seem to experience this problem. A colleague working as a reviewer for our journal noted that “Actually, an author or authors must review the literature properly.” He defines the basic problem of the review article as follows: “For an author or authors to write a review article, one of two conditions must be met. First, the person must conduct a study in that field and contribute to the consideration and interpretation of the literature in the field in which he/she has specialized. Second, he/she must propose a new synthesis or hypothesis in his/her review based on his/her strong knowledge in that field.” Likewise, the esteemed Prof. Dr. Orhan Öztürk defined the purpose of review articles as giving a comprehensive and academic summary of a narrowly defined subject, and emphasized that a review article must not be a broad sweep where information is listed in succession but should rather make a synthesis including an analysis based on source examination and original discussion (Öztürk 1997).

To develop and improve our journal, we are carefully reviewing our past work and setting new targets every day. We will continue to receive important feedback from our readers. The visible increase in the number and scientific quality of articles submitted to us for review suggests that we are on the right track. I believe, however, that suggestions of our readers are the most objective and significant ones.

We cannot achieve our goal of improving without the interest and support of our authors, reviewers, and readers. I hope we will achieve this goal together.