Search

BackgroundThere is a clear gender gap in scientific authorship. Although the proportions of female authors in medicine and psychiatry have increased over the past decades, women are still underrepresented.AimsTo analyse authorship gender trends in eating disorder research.MethodFirst and last author gender in research articles on eating disorders during the period 1997–2016 were assessed in eating disorder specialty journals, high-impact psychiatry journals and high-impact clinical psychology journals.ResultsThe total number of papers on eating disorders increased substantially over the observation period, although a decrease was observed in high-impact psychiatry journals. Female authorship increased in both specialty journals and high-impact psychiatry journals. Authors were significantly less likely to be female in high-impact psychiatry and clinical psychology journals than in speciality journals.ConclusionsEating disorder research has been increasingly allocated to specialty journals over the past 20 years. A consistent gender gap between specialty and high-impact journals exists.Declaration of interestC.M.B is a grant recipient from Shire Pharmaceuticals, Inc. and has participated as a member of their scientific advisory board. These positions are unrelated to the content of this article.

Background.Establishing a valid communication is not only a basic clinical need to be met but also a relevant ethical commitment.Methods.On the basis of the relevant literature, ethical issues arising from specific, important situations in clinical practice were identified.Results.The main ethical problems regarding communication about the disorder, both in general and in relation to prodromal stages, were described and discussed together with those regarding communication about voluntary and involuntary treatments, “dual roles” enacted in clinical practice, genetic counseling, and end-of-life conditions; on the basis of what emerged, ethically driven indications and suggestions were provided.Conclusions.Several situations put the psychiatrist in front of relevant dilemmas and doubts which are no easy to face with; an ethically driven approach based upon the principle of the best interest of patients may support clinicians in their decisions.

Aims.Leucht et al. in 2012 described an overview of meta-analyses of the efficacy of medication in psychiatry and general medicine, concluding that psychiatric drugs were not less efficacious than other drugs. Our goal was to explore the dissemination of this highly cited paper, which combined a thought provoking message with a series of caveats.Methods.We conducted a prospectively registered citation content analysis. All papers published before June 1st citing the target paper were independently rated by two investigators. The primary outcome coded dichotomously was whether the citation was used to justify a small or modest effect observed for a given treatment. Secondary outcomes regarded mentioning any caveats when citing the target paper, the point the citation was making (treatment effectiveness in psychiatry closely resembles that in general medicine, others), the type of condition (psychiatric, medical or both), specific disease, treatment category and specific type. We also extracted information about the type of citing paper, financial conflict of interest (COI) declared and any industry support. The primary analysis was descriptive by tabulating the extracted variables, with numbers and percentages where appropriate. Co-authorship networks were constructed to identify possible clusters of citing authors. An exploratory univariate logistic regression was used to explore the relationship between each of a subset of pre-specified secondary outcomes and the primary outcome.Results.We identified 135 records and retrieved and analysed 120. Sixty-three (53%) quoted Leucht et al.’s paper to justify a small or modest effect observed for a given therapy, and 113 (94%) did not mention any caveats. Seventy-two (60%) used the citation to claim that treatment effectiveness in psychiatry closely resembles that in general medicine; 110 (91%) paper were about psychiatric conditions. Forty-one (34%) papers quoted it without pointing towards any specific treatment category, 28 (23%) were about antidepressants, 18 (15%) about antipsychotics. Forty (33%) of the citing papers included data. COIs were reported in 55 papers (46%). Univariate and multivariate regressions showed an association between a quote justifying small or modest effects and the point that treatment effectiveness in psychiatry closely resembles that in general medicine.Conclusions.Our evaluation revealed an overwhelmingly uncritical reception and seemed to indicate that beyond defending psychiatry as a discipline, the paper by Leucht et al. served to lend support and credibility to a therapeutic myth: trivial effects of mental health interventions, most often drugs, are to be expected and therefore accepted.Protocol registration: https://osf.io/9dqat/

IntroductionDevelopments in information and communication technologies have enabled electronic health and seen a huge expansion over the last decade. This has increased the possibility of self-management of health issues.PurposeTo assess the effectiveness of the Baby Buddy app on maternal self-efficacy and mental well-being three months post-birth in a sample of mothers recruited antenatally. In addition, to explore when, why and how mothers use the app and consider any benefits the app may offer them in relation to their parenting, health, relationships or communication with their child, friends, family members or health professionals.MethodsWe will use a mixed-methods approach, a cohort study, a qualitative element and analysis of in-app data. Participants will be first-time pregnant women, aged 16 years and over, between 12 and 16 weeks of gestation and recruited from five English study sites.Evaluation planWe will compare maternal self-efficacy and mental health at three months post-delivery in mothers who have downloaded the Baby Buddy app compared with those that have not downloaded the app, controlling for confounding factors. Women will be recruited antenatally between 12 and 16 weeks of gestation. Further follow-ups will take place at 35 weeks of gestation and three months post-birth. Data from the cohort study will be supplemented by in-app data that will include, for example, patterns of usage. Qualitative data will assess the impact of the app on the lives of pregnant women and health professionals using both focus groups and interviews.EthicsApproval from the West Midlands-South Birmingham Research Ethics Committee (NRES) (16/WM/0029) and the University of the West of England, Bristol, Research Ethics Committee (HAS.16.08.001).DisseminationFindings of the study will be published in peer reviewed and professional journals, presented locally, nationally and at international conferences. Participants will receive a summary of the findings and the results will be published on Best Beginnings’ website.

BackgroundReferral letters sent from primary to secondary or tertiary care are a crucial element in the continuity of patient information transfer. Internationally, the need for improvement in this area has been recognised. This aim of this study is to review the current literature pertaining to interventions that are designed to improve referral letter quality.MethodsA search strategy designed following a Problem, Intervention, Comparator, Outcome model was used to explore the PubMed and EMBASE databases for relevant literature. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were established and bibliographies were screened for relevant resources.ResultsA total of 18 publications were included in this study. Four types of interventions were described: electronic referrals were shown to have several advantages over paper referrals but were also found to impose new barriers; peer feedback increases letter quality and can decrease ‘inappropriate referrals’ by up to 50%; templates increase documentation and awareness of risk factors; mixed interventions combining different intervention types provide tangible improvements in content and appropriateness.ConclusionSeveral methodological considerations were identified in the studies reviewed but our analysis demonstrates that a combination of interventions, introduced as part of a joint package and involving peer feedback can improve.

Students and inexperienced writers often have misconceptions about the writing process and characteristics of good papers that effectively prevent them from writing as good a paper as they possibly could. Here are eight common misconceptions you should be aware of before you even begin writing: Writing the psychology paper is the most routine, least creative aspect of the scientifific enterprise, requiring much time but little imagination. The important thing is what you say, not how you say it. Longer papers are better papers, and more papers are better yet. The main purpose of a psychology paper is the presentation of facts, whether newly established (as in reports of experiments) or well established (as in literature reviews). The distinction between scientifific writing, on the one hand, and advertising or propaganda, on the other hand, is that the purpose of scientifific writing is to inform, whereas the purpose of advertising or propaganda is to persuade. A good way to gain acceptance of your theory is by refuting someone else's theory. Negative results that fail to support the researcher's hypothesis are every bit as valuable as positive results that do support the researcher's hypothesis. The logical development of ideas in a psychology paper reflflects the historical development of ideas in the psychologist's head. Misconception 1. Writing the psychology paper is the most routine, least creative aspect of the scientific enterprise, requiring much time but little imagination.

There is no one foolproof way of getting ideas for papers. You have to find the ways that work for you. In the first part of this chapter, we present you with different ways in which you can develop ideas for your research projects. Of course, it is not enough to have ideas. To be a successful researcher, you also need the ability to evaluate your ideas and find out whether they are good ones. You do not want to waste your time on bad ideas. The second part of this chapter deals with the evaluation of your ideas. And once you have come to the conclusion that yours is a wonderful idea, it will be important for you to sell your idea. How do you convince others that your planned study is one that is worthwhile to conduct, and how do you convince an editor of a journal and reviewers that your paper is worth publishing? Especially creative ideas are often hard to sell. Therefore, the third part of this chapter shows you some ways to sell your ideas. GENERATING IDEAS Generating Ideas by Consulting with Others In many colleges and universities, the faculty is among the most underutilized of resources. In Bob's first semester of teaching at Yale, he set aside three hours each week for office hours. He encouraged – sometimes he practically begged – students to come see him during those hours for advice on papers, projects, and the like. He left his door wide open to encourage students to enter. For the most part, though, he sat staring at the walls or at the people scurrying by (but not in) the door. He also encouraged students to make individual appointments if they were unable to see him during his prearranged hours, but for the most part, students also failed to take him up on this offer. Later, business picked up, although much more so among graduate than among undergraduate students. Once, the psychology department faculty at Yale spent the better part of an hour trying to figure out why students are so timid in approaching faculty. Sometimes students try once, are unsuccessful in reaching the faculty member, and give up.

This chapter summarizes the guidelines for preparing a psychology paper presented in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association , Sixth Edition (2009). You should consult this manual for a complete list of guidelines. If you intend to submit a paper for publication, then you cannot afford to be without this manual. It can be obtained from any bookstore or online book retailer, or directly from the American Psychological Association at www.apastyle.org. Journals of the British Psychological Society (BPS) adopted the APA style as of October 2001. Publications other than journal articles of the BPS follow the Style Guide that can be found online by entering the search words “BPS style” in a search engine. Many other non-APA journals will accept papers prepared in accordance with APA guidelines as well, even though there are minor differences in style. You should always consult the guidelines of the journal to which you plan to submit to make sure you are adhering to its style regulations. All examples used to illustrate principles in this chapter are fictitious. Note that the formatting of this book, as printed, does not always follow the conventions described in this chapter. The conventions in the chapter are for preparing manuscripts, not for printed versions of books and articles.

If you write a paper that you believe makes a substantial contribution to psychological knowledge, you may want to consider submitting the paper for publication. Your academic adviser or course instructor can give you advice regarding the publishability of your paper, and an appropriate choice of a journal to which to submit the paper. DECIDING UPON A JOURNAL If you decide to submit a paper for publication, the first step you must take is to decide upon a journal to which you want to submit the paper. Seven considerations should enter your decision: 1. Quality . Journals vary widely in quality. Some journals publish papers that do little more than fill up journal space; other journals publish only outstanding contributions to the literature. Better journals generally have higher rejection rates for submitted papers, so that the probability of a paper being accepted in such journals is lower. Your adviser or course instructor can help you match the quality of your paper to an appropriate journal. 2. Content . All journals limit by content the kinds of papers they accept. Journal editors use either or both of two criteria in deciding upon the appropriateness of a paper's content. The first criterion is substantive focus. What is the topic of research? The journal may accept, for example, only developmental, or cognitive, or applied papers. The second criterion is methodological focus. How was the research done? The journal may accept, for example, only experimental, or theoretical, or review papers.

Rule 1. Your meeting should interest, inform, and persuade your reader . Psychological writing should not be dull or stuffy. You must interest your reader in your paper; otherwise, the reader will find something else to do. Even teachers reading course papers will often read boring papers more quickly and less carefully than they will read interesting papers. Although you can lose your reader at any time, the major decision points for the reader are the title, abstract, and introduction. The optimal title is one that concisely informs the reader of what the article is about. Such a title will minimize the number of people who start the article only to find that the topic doesn't interest them, and maximize the number of people who start the article because the topic does interest them. The abstract should summarize the article and at the same time convey to the reader why the topic, hypotheses, and results are of theoretical or practical interest. The introduction should further motivate the reader by pointing out why the research is a necessary next step in putting together the pieces of an as yet unsolved puzzle. The reader should finish the introduction believing that you have (a) put together one or more pieces of the puzzle, and (b) pointed the way for further pieces to be put together.

In this chapter, I will enumerate some of the standards I believe my colleagues and I use in evaluating the contribution to knowledge made by psychology papers. Little has been written about how psychologists evaluate a paper's contribution. Nor have psychologists passed down from one generation to another a clearly explicated spoken tradition of evaluative standards. It is therefore remarkable that psychologists find a high level of agreement in their evaluations of each others' papers. In an Annual Review of Psychology chapter reviewing the literature on memory and verbal learning, Tulving and Madigan (1970) noted their own remarkable agreement in evaluations of papers, and at the same time offered some keenly perceptive tonguein-cheek comments regarding the state of the literature: In the course of preparation for this chapter, we selected a sample of 540 publications – slightly less than one half of all relevant publications that appeared during the main time-period under review here – and independently rated each paper in terms of its “contribution to knowledge”. We agreed to a remarkable extent in classifying all papers into three categories. The first, containing approximately two thirds of all papers, could be labeled “utterly inconsequential.” The primary function these papers serve is giving something to do to people who count papers instead of reading them. Future research and understanding of verbal learning and memory would not be affected at all if none of the papers in this category had seen the light of day. […]

The chapters in this volume by Miller, Smylie, and Woods reflect a sociological approach to understanding the burnout phenomenon. This view implies that the objective situation has changed for the worse for teachers who increasingly experience constraints on the job – for example, intensification of teaching, compliance with administrative regulations, conflicts with parents and supervisors, and unmotivated students. To balance this sociological view, we have decided to compose a psychological position paper that focuses on the responses of the individual teacher to this situation. Thus, we have chosen the opposite extreme to shed some light on the issue. This does not necessarily mean that the blame is put on the teacher when he or she suffers from burnout. Rather, our theory tries to explain why there are individual differences and why not all teachers become victims of a school-system-induced burnout syndrome. There is ample evidence that teachers, in the course of their careers, experience a great deal of stress that may result in depressed mood, exhaustion, poor performance, and attitude and personality changes, which, in turn, may lead to illness and premature retirement. In some societies or school systems, this might occur nowadays more often than in the past (see chapters by Miller, Smylie, and Woods, this volume). The label “burnout” has been suggested for this phenomenon, and clinical observations have been made and empirical research has been conducted for more than two decades (for an overview, see Byrne, this volume).

Objective:To explore women’s perceptions of changes in specific food habits at home, specifically the food budget and shopping, and food preparation, during the COVID-19 period.Design:Non-probabilistic, exploratory study. Participants completed an online self-administered questionnaire. Perceptions of food habit changes were measured on a five-point Likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree). Data analysis was conducted in STATA v16.0.Setting:Chile.Participants:Adult women between 25 and 65 years old (n2047).Results:Of the participants, 72 % were responsible for cooking, 69 % for buying food and 85 % for child care. Difficulties in organising and doing food budget works were observed in groups with a lower educational level, lower income and single mothers with children. Younger participants, dependent workers, women from biparental families with children and those in mandatory quarantine perceived more changes in their food shopping and budget management tasks. Participants more educated, with higher income and non-mandatory quarantine perceived to cook and eat healthier. Older participants perceived minor changes in their food preparation tasks at home; in contrast, more educated women and women from biparental families with children perceived more changes. If women were in charge of the kids or grocery shopping, more food environment changes were noticed.Conclusions:Women perceived changes in their food environments. Some of these changes are perceived worse in the more vulnerable population. COVID-19 presents a challenge for the food system and gender perspectives. This information should be considered in the design of food-related interventions.