World Journal of Psychiatry

About World Journal of Psychiatry

About the World Journal of Psychiatry

The World Journal of Psychiatry (WJP) is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal of psychiatry published by Baishideng Publishing Group (BPG). Its ISSN is 2220-3206 (online). The journal was launched on 31 December 2011 and appears monthly; volume 15 was published in 2025 and volume 16 in 2026, a numbering sequence that matches a 2011 launch with annual volumes. BPG is based at 7041 Koll Center Parkway, Suite 160, Pleasanton, California, USA, and WJP is one of its World series of clinical journals, all operated through the same editorial systems, the same manuscript platform and the same group policies. Manuscripts are submitted through BPG's F6Publishing system, and the journal's DOI pattern, illustrated by articles such as 10.5498/wjp.v15.i11.108591, embeds the volume, issue and article number in a form that makes any WJP citation easy to verify.

WJP's stated mission is to publish original, high-quality research in psychiatry across clinical, translational and basic studies, including research involving artificial intelligence. That last phrase, present in the journal's current aims and scope, is worth noticing: it signals an editorial willingness to consider computational and AI-assisted work in mental health — prediction models, digital phenotyping, natural language processing of clinical text and similar topics — provided the work is genuinely psychiatric in its question and its evaluation. The journal is not, however, a general medical or general psychology title. Its centre of gravity is mental disorders, their mechanisms, diagnosis, treatment and care, and manuscripts whose psychiatric content is incidental should expect difficulty at editorial screening.

Quick Facts

Aims and Scope in Detail

The journal's aims and scope list the sub-fields it covers: adolescent psychiatry, biological psychiatry, child psychiatry, community psychiatry, ethnopsychology, forensic psychiatry, geriatric psychiatry, military psychiatry and neuropsychiatry, among others. Read as a map, that list covers the lifespan (child, adolescent, adult and older-adult psychiatry), the levels of explanation (biological and neuropsychiatric mechanisms through to community and cultural psychiatry) and the applied settings in which psychiatrists work, including forensic and military contexts. A submission should be able to name its place on that map in one sentence. Papers that span categories — a biological study of an adolescent disorder, or a community intervention evaluated with neurocognitive outcomes — are welcome in principle, but they still need a primary home and a clear statement of which readership the work chiefly addresses.

The article types the journal publishes are listed in its scope statement: clinical study, basic study, case report, editorial, review, minireview, systematic review, meta-analysis, guidelines and correspondence. Each type carries different expectations. A clinical study needs a defined population, pre-specified outcomes where the design allows it, appropriate ethics approval and consent reporting, and statistics matched to the design. A basic study needs a clear translational rationale: an animal or cellular finding presented without any route to psychiatric relevance will struggle. A systematic review or meta-analysis needs a reproducible search, explicit eligibility criteria and a risk-of-bias approach that a reader can audit. A case report needs a genuine lesson — a rare presentation, an unexpected adverse effect, a diagnostic trap — not simply a record that a case occurred. Guidelines need an author group with standing to issue them and a transparent method for reaching recommendations. Authors who choose the article type honestly, and then meet that type's evidentiary standard, give editors and reviewers far less reason to hesitate.

Indexing and Metrics — With Dates Attached

The publisher states that WJP is abstracted and indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), Current Contents/Clinical Medicine, Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition, PubMed and PubMed Central, as well as Reference Citation Analysis, the China Science and Technology Journal Database and the Superstar Journals Database. PubMed Central presence matters practically: it means full texts are archived in a permanent public repository, which satisfies many funder public-access policies and protects the article's availability independently of the publisher's own site.

On metrics, the publisher's current journal page reports the 2026 edition of Journal Citation Reports as citing a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 3.0 for WJP, with a JIF without journal self-citations of 2.8, a 5-year JIF of 4.2, a rank of 112 out of 293 in the Psychiatry category and a Q2 quartile for both the JIF and the 5-year JIF. The same page gives a 2026 Journal Article Influence Index of 9.9. Earlier editions show the journal's trajectory and explain why undated numbers found on third-party sites disagree with each other: the 2025 JCR edition cited a 2024 JIF of 3.4 (rank 79/288, Q2), the 2023 edition cited a 2022 JIF of 3.1 (then Q3 in a smaller category), and the 2022 edition cited a 2021 JIF of 3.5. The lesson is general and important: quote an impact factor only with its JCR year, treat any undated figure on an aggregator site as stale until checked, and remember that category size changes between editions, so ranks from different years are not directly comparable. A Q2 psychiatry journal with a JIF around 3 is a solid mid-field position: selective enough to carry weight in hiring and promotion contexts that count SCIE quartiles, without the extreme rejection rates of the category's top titles.

Editorial Leadership and Process

WJP's current editors-in-chief, as listed by the publisher, are Paolo Girardi, Professor in the Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology and Health Studies, Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, and Marianna Mazza, of the Department of Neurosciences at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Rome. Earlier volumes were led by other editors-in-chief, including Rajesh R. Tampi, Panteleimon Giannakopoulos and Ting-Shao Zhu, which is normal for a journal of this age and a reminder to check the current masthead rather than an old PDF when deciding to whom a presubmission enquiry should be addressed. The full editorial board is published on the journal's website, and BPG's model adds in-house editorial handling: manuscripts are selected by an in-house editor and then peer-reviewed by external reviewers, with production handled by a named production department whose editors are credited in each issue.

The publisher publishes process statistics for the journal, and they are unusually informative for authors planning around deadlines: a mean duration of peer review of 22 days, a mean of 41 days from submission to first decision, a mean acceptance rate of 54.5%, and a mean time to publication of 153 days. Three cautions apply. First, these are means across all manuscripts the publisher counts, and individual manuscripts vary widely. Second, an acceptance rate above half does not mean review is lenient; it often reflects a submission pool that includes invited content and manuscripts pre-screened for fit. Third, the gap between first decision (about six weeks) and publication (about five months) is filled by revision, re-review, acceptance processing, the article processing charge step described below, and production — authors who revise slowly extend their own timeline more than the journal does. Treat the figures as planning aids published by the publisher, not as guarantees.

Open Access, Licensing and the Article Processing Charge

All BPG journals are open access, and BPG applies the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) licence: others may distribute, remix, adapt and build upon the work non-commercially, and license derivatives on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. Copyright is retained by the authors, who grant BPG a licence to publish and to identify itself as the original publisher. For most academic reuse — teaching, sharing with colleagues, depositing in an institutional repository, reusing a figure in a non-commercial thesis — CC BY-NC is permissive. Authors whose funders require a fully commercial-use licence such as CC BY should check compliance before submission, because a non-commercial licence does not satisfy every funder mandate, and this point cannot be fixed after publication.

An article processing charge is invoiced on acceptance and is payable in full before publication; the publisher states that the charge covers peer review, copyediting, typesetting, long-term archiving and journal management. BPG's APC policy is tiered: standard rates for general unsolicited manuscripts, reduced levels for young scholars under 45 as first authors and for registered editorial board members or peer reviewers as first or corresponding authors, preferential terms aligned with the Research4Life programme (full waiver for Group A countries, a reduced level for Group B), and a full waiver for invited manuscripts. Because the exact amount depends on article type and on which tier an author qualifies for, and because BPG updates its charge documents, this profile does not quote a single figure: authors should read the current APC document linked from the journal's page before submitting, confirm their tier with the editorial office at acceptance, and never pay an invoice that does not come through the official system. No charge is made for submitting or for peer review itself; the charge arises only on acceptance.

Ethics, Reporting and the Author Agreements

BPG's copyright and licence agreement, signed for every article, bundles certifications that amount to a checklist authors should satisfy before submission, not after. Authors certify that the manuscript is not simultaneously under consideration elsewhere and not already published; that it contains no redundancy, plagiarism, data fabrication or falsification; that conflicts of interest are fully disclosed; that experiments involving human subjects and animals complied with relevant laws and humane-care requirements, with the corresponding author responsible for providing ethics approval documents for work raising ethics issues; and that permission has been obtained for any material from other copyright holders. The group also publishes peer review reports and related documents alongside articles in its model, which authors should be aware of when they write responses to reviewers: write every response as a document you are content for readers to see.

Psychiatry raises field-specific ethics duties on top of these general ones. Case reports and case series must be anonymised so that patients cannot be identified from clinical detail, images or timelines, and authors should consider whether consent for publication is required in their jurisdiction and institution. Studies of vulnerable populations — children, people with impaired capacity, prisoners, military personnel — need ethics approvals that specifically cover those groups. Intervention trials should be registered and reported to the relevant reporting standard, and AI-related studies should disclose data sources, model provenance and validation populations, because a model trained on one health system's records may not generalise to another's. Reviewers for a psychiatry journal will look for these points; addressing them in the methods and ethics statements of the first submission is far easier than repairing them in revision.

Who Should Submit — Fit and Strategy

WJP fits authors who want an SCIE-indexed, PubMed Central-archived, open access psychiatry journal with a mid-field impact factor, a monthly publication rhythm and a publisher-stated first decision in about six weeks. It is well matched to sound clinical studies, replications, regional and health-services psychiatry, lifespan sub-specialty work and systematic reviews that are competently executed but unlikely to clear the novelty bar of the category's highest-impact titles. The breadth of its sub-field list makes it a sensible home for forensic, military, community and cross-cultural psychiatry, topics that general medical journals often treat as peripheral. Its open access model and Research4Life-linked waivers also matter for authors in lower-income settings, provided they confirm their APC tier early.

Authors should look elsewhere, or at least think carefully, in a few situations. If a funder mandates CC BY, the CC BY-NC licence is a problem to resolve before submission. If a study's contribution is primarily psychological theory, neuroscience method or general medicine with only a psychiatric sample, fit at screening is doubtful. If a promotion or grant rule specifies Q1 only, a Q2 journal does not meet it regardless of other merits. And if a manuscript reports a trial, a cohort or a review that duplicates the group's earlier publications in part, BPG's redundancy certification and screening make salami publication a serious risk rather than a grey area. None of these cautions is unusual; the value of stating them is that every one can be checked in an afternoon, before months are invested in a submission cycle.

Practical Submission Checklist

• Confirm identity: World Journal of Psychiatry, ISSN 2220-3206 (online), Baishideng Publishing Group, submission via F6Publishing.
• Do not confuse WJP with World Psychiatry, the World Psychiatric Association journal — a different title with different ISSNs and metrics. Check every citation and application form for this error.
• Name your sub-field from the journal's scope list and your article type, and write to that type's evidentiary standard.
• Prepare ethics approvals, consent and anonymisation statements, trial registration where applicable, and conflict and funding disclosures before submitting.
• Read the current APC document, identify your tier (standard, young scholar, board member or reviewer, Research4Life, invited), and budget accordingly; payment falls due on acceptance, before publication.
• Check funder licence requirements against CC BY-NC 4.0.
• Use the publisher's process averages (first decision about 41 days, publication about 153 days) for planning, not as promises.
• Write responses to reviewers as public-facing documents, in line with the publisher's practice of publishing review documentation with articles.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is WJP's impact factor? The publisher reports a 2025 Journal Impact Factor of 3.0 from the 2026 edition of Journal Citation Reports, Q2 in Psychiatry (rank 112/293), with a 5-year JIF of 4.2. Earlier editions gave 3.4 for 2024 and 3.1 for 2022; always cite the year.

Is the World Journal of Psychiatry indexed in PubMed? The publisher states it is indexed in SCIE, PubMed and PubMed Central, among other services. Verify current status in the NLM Catalog under ISSN 2220-3206 if your institution requires documentary proof.

When was the journal launched and how often does it appear? It was launched on 31 December 2011 and is published monthly.

Who leads the journal? The current editors-in-chief listed by the publisher are Paolo Girardi (Sapienza University of Rome) and Marianna Mazza (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart, Rome).

What licence applies to published articles? CC BY-NC 4.0, with copyright retained by the authors. Commercial reuse is not permitted under this licence.

Does WJP charge authors? Yes — an article processing charge is invoiced on acceptance and payable before publication, with reduced tiers and waivers described in the publisher's APC policy, including full waivers for invited manuscripts and for Research4Life Group A countries.

Reading the Journal as a Librarian or Evaluator

Committees and librarians assessing WJP should work from primary records rather than from aggregator pages. The NLM Catalog entry under ISSN 2220-3206 establishes the title, its online-only form and its PubMed status. The Clarivate master journal list establishes SCIE coverage. The publisher's own journal page is the correct source for the current editors-in-chief, the current process statistics and the JCR figures it quotes, each tied to a named JCR edition. Where a dossier or an institutional report gives a different impact factor for the journal, the discrepancy is almost always a difference of year: this journal's reported JIF was 3.5 for 2021, 3.1 for 2022, 3.4 for 2024 and 3.0 for 2025, so an undated figure of any of those values may once have been correct. Evaluators should also note the journal's article volume: a monthly journal publishing large issues will contain a wide range of individual article quality, and the standing of a single paper is better judged by its own citations, its methods and its fit to the question at hand than by the journal average alone. That caution applies to every high-volume open access title, and WJP's transparency about its acceptance rate and timelines at least gives evaluators real process data to work with, which many comparable journals do not publish at all.

Bottom Line

The World Journal of Psychiatry is an established, monthly, open access psychiatry journal from Baishideng Publishing Group, running since the end of 2011 under ISSN 2220-3206, indexed in SCIE and PubMed Central, and reporting a 2025 impact factor of 3.0 (Q2) in the 2026 Journal Citation Reports. It offers broad sub-specialty coverage, published process statistics that help authors plan, and a tiered charge system with genuine waiver routes. Its conditions are equally clear: CC BY-NC licensing, an acceptance-stage processing charge, and a demanding set of ethics and originality certifications that psychiatric research must meet in any case. Authors who confirm fit, licence and charge tier in advance — and who take care not to confuse the journal with World Psychiatry — will find WJP a predictable and credible home for solid psychiatric scholarship.