Editorial

I am delighted to assume the helm as Editor-in-Chief of Current Psychiatry Reviews and would like to use this editorial as both a brief introduction and to outline my vision for CPSR. I have focused my career on academic psychiatry for the assessment and treatment of mood disorders, both unipolar and bipolar. For the past decade, my primary research activities have been centered on various topics in therapeutics, including research on older and newer antidepressants (Thase, Rush, and Trivedi, 1995; Thase, Entsuah and Rudolph, 2001; Thase et al., 2005), focused psychotherapies (Thase et al., 1996; Thase et al., 1997a), and their combinations (Thase et al., 1997b; Thase et al., 2002), as well as the methodology of clinical trials (Thase, 1999; Thase, 2002). In early 2006, I will quietly celebrate the 30th anniversary of publishing my first peer-reviewed paper (Thase and Moss, 1976). This small randomized clinical trial compared several behavioral methods to treat simple phobia (excessive fear of a nonpoisonous snake) in 30 college student volunteers. Oh, how the content and process of clinical research has changed across the intervening years! There have been mind-boggling advances in neuroscience; research strategies that were in their infancy in the mid-1970s, ranging from molecular genetics to neuroimaging, have clearly come of age and now define the "cutting edge" of research on the mechanisms of vulnerability, pathophysiology, and therapeutic actions on the major mental disorders. Had our little snake phobia study been conceived in 2005, we might have studied how a behavioral intervention leads to reallocation of cerebral blood flow and energy consumption, examined the relationship between genotypes and the persistence of fearfulness, or assessed whether sustained reduction of fearfulness affects brain derived neurotrophic factor levels. Better understanding of the impact of various biases on research results also have emerged, as well as more sophisticated approaches to statistical analyses. In particular, three topics of great relevance to the readers of CPSR come to mind: 1) the pernicious influence of the "file drawer effect" - the selective publication of positive reports and, conversely, the suppression of negative ones - on reviews of the literature; 2) the endemic problem created by Type II error, i.e., when inadequate statistical power leads to the false conclusion that "not statistically significantly different" actually means that there is no difference; and 3) the impact that one's beliefs, allegiances, and affiliations can have on influencing the results of both quantitative research and qualitative reviews. Given the proliferation of journals and the veritable explosion of research results, now more than ever before there is great need for concise, accessible and unbiased reviews that summarize and - whenever possible - systematically synthesize bodies of evidence. Hence, the mission and aims of CPSR: to provide rapid publication of the most up-to-date reviews of the latest advances in clinical psychiatry broadly defined. Whereas our field's most prestigious journals may publish one or two review papers in each issue, each issue of CPSR will include 10 or more such reviews, with sufficient breadth of coverage to interest both generalists and ultrasubspecialists alike. To help accomplish these goals, I am proud to say that we have assembled a truly outstanding international Editorial Advisory Board, which includes experts spanning all relevant domains of research in psychiatry, including psychopharmacology, psychotherapy, epidemiology, nosology, child psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, psychotherapy, forensics, and clinical and molecular genetics. Please help me to keep this stellar Board busy with a steady stream of manuscripts - I look forward to the day in which our publisher, Bentham Science Publishers, Ltd., is obliged to make CPSR a monthly enterprise!