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Serendipity versus the superorganism

What, we might well ask, is this individual issue of the Journal of Mental Health for? It is roughly the same size as a small paperback book, but in a book one would expect successive chapters to have some connection with each other. This journal issue, by contrast, is aimed at readers with a range of interests in the broad general field of mental disorders, their treatment and their alleviation, but the successive papers do not interconnect. There is no particular reason why someone with a strong interest in the economic costs of supporting self-poisoning adolescents should want to know anything about the attitudes of their own personnel to routine outcome measurement. Furthermore the Journal of Mental Health is by no means the only journal publishing mental health-related papers. There are a hundred other journals which could equally well have published papers on any of the topics covered in this issue. Journals vary widely in status. A highly specialized title does not mean that a journal has a high status within its chosen field. A geomorphologist may report his more boring routine research in Plate Tectonics but if he (nearly always ‘‘he’’ in that field) discovers something really interesting and important he will submit it to Nature. To cope with this problem, information practitioners like my successors are coming up with increasingly sophisticated systems for delivering to our customers exactly what they say that they want to read. A high and rapidly increasing proportion of all scientific and medical reading is now done on screen, or by end-user printing on demand. There are many medical libraries which now only subscribe to a handful of printed journals but have on-line access to packages of hundreds. To browse through all of these would be extremely time-consuming, but, fortunately for the hard-pressed researcher, it is extremely easy to set up search strategies. A reader interested in, say, self-poisoning adolescents can be set up with a service which delivers to his or her desktop (marginally more likely to be her in this particular case) copies of all the relevant papers from the journals her library subscribes to, and lists of relevant papers from journals her library doesn’t subscribe to. The latter group can be rapidly supplied, again direct to her desktop, as individual papers without any added clutter, for a fairly modest fee. Many heavy users of the Institute of Psychiatry library service never physically enter the library’s premises at all.