The destinies of the low- and middle-income country submissions

Objective: To measure the number of submissions to Acta Pyschiatrica Scandinavica from low‐ and middle‐income countries (LIC/MIC) compared with submissions from high income countries (HIC), to compare the way through the peer review process for the three groups respectively, as well as how they do as published articles eventually. Method: By help of the Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica editorial office database all submissions of reviews of the literature, clinical overviews, original articles, brief communications, and case reports from 2002 through 2005 were analysed as to external/in‐house review, acceptance/rejection, number of downloads from Blackwell‐Synergy, and number of citations [Institute of Scientific Information (ISI)] in a comparison between HIC and LIC/MIC. Results: About 14.6% of the total submissions in 2002/2003 came from LIC and MIC countries, 15.5% for the 2004/2005 period. In both periods, a larger portion of LIC/MIC manuscripts were reviewed exclusively in‐house compared with HIC ones and among those papers reviewed by external experts a smaller proportion of the submissions from HIC countries were rejected than of those from LIC and MIC countries. From the first to the second period there is a significant increase of proportion of submitted LIC/MIC papers accepted for publication compared with HIC papers. Full text download and citation statistics did not differ significantly between HIC and LIC/MIC. Conclusion: Low‐ and middle‐income countries manuscripts do gradually better in the competition with HIC papers in Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica. The major observation is that the total number of LIC/MIC submissions to the journal is still low.