About East Asian Archives of Psychiatry

East Asian Archives of Psychiatry

East Asian Archives of Psychiatry is the official peer-reviewed journal of the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists, published in Hong Kong, China. Described by its publisher-side journal site as one of the few English-language psychiatric journals in Asia, it publishes original research and psychiatric reports from Hong Kong, China, other Asian countries and other parts of the world. The journal is published by the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press, is fully funded by the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists, and appears quarterly, in March, June, September and December. It is a continuation of the Hong Kong Journal of Psychiatry, and under its present regional title it serves as a platform through which psychiatrists and mental-health professionals in East Asia and beyond can share research in clinical psychiatry and related fields.

Identity, Publisher and Bibliographic Record

The journal's standard abbreviated title is East Asian Arch. Psychiatry. Its print ISSN is 2078-9947 and its electronic ISSN is 2224-7041, the e-ISSN stated on its own journal site. Its publisher is the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press, and its editorial office is given in its information for authors as Room 906, 99 Wong Chuk Hang Road, Aberdeen, Hong Kong, China — the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Jockey Club Building — with manuscripts and editorial correspondence directed to the Chief Editor by email. Articles carry digital object identifiers in the journal's own DOI series, beginning 10.12809/eaap, and authors are recommended to share their articles using that DOI, which links to the most recent version of the manuscript.

Two organisational facts define the title's identity. First, it is not a commercial journal that a college merely endorses: the journal site states that East Asian Archives of Psychiatry is fully funded by the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists, and on acceptance authors transfer copyright to the College. Second, its publishing is handled inside Hong Kong's specialist medical establishment, through the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press — the press of the academy of which the College is a constituent member college. That combination of college ownership, academy publishing and a Hong Kong editorial base is the institutional backbone of the journal.

From the Hong Kong Journal of Psychiatry to a Regional Title

The present title is explicitly presented on its own issues as a continuation of the Hong Kong Journal of Psychiatry. Earlier still, material from the College describes the journal's predecessors as the Journal of the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists and then The Hong Kong Journal of Psychiatry, so the current title is the third name in a single, continuing college journal line rather than a new journal founded from nothing. Volume numbering confirms that continuity: articles cited as Hong Kong Journal of Psychiatry appeared at volume 13 in 2003 and volume 15 in 2005, while work under the East Asian Archives of Psychiatry title was already appearing at volume 20 in 2010, and Scopus coverage of the present title is recorded as beginning in 2010.

The retitling therefore widened the journal's stated geography without breaking its history. A journal whose name had referred only to Hong Kong took a name referring to East Asia, matching the scope its own instructions were already claiming: its 2011 instructions for authors said the journal aimed to encourage the exchange of ideas, research and development of psychiatry between the East and the West, and that it was circulated among psychiatrists and colleagues in the field. The journal still publishes Hong Kong research prominently, but the title now signals that Hong Kong is its base, not its boundary.

The Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists Behind the Journal

The owning college has its own traceable history. The Hong Kong Psychiatric Association was founded on 28 July 1967, with objectives that included promoting psychiatry in Hong Kong and fostering relationships with national and international psychiatric organisations, and in April 1968 it became a member society of the World Psychiatric Association. Following the work that led to the establishment of the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine by statute in 1993, the association became one of the Academy's constituent colleges — in that way, the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists was formed. The College has since played a key role in postgraduate psychiatric training in Hong Kong, holding its fellowship examination and conferring its own fellows.

That training role matters for understanding the journal. East Asian Archives of Psychiatry is the publishing arm of the body responsible for specialist psychiatric training and continuing medical education in Hong Kong, not a detached academic title. The connection shows in practical features such as the journal's continuing medical education activity: Fellows of the College, and College members and inceptors registered for the medical CME programme, have been invited to take part in a CME/CPD programme by answering a quiz related to an article published in the current issue. The journal thus functions simultaneously as a research outlet and as part of the College's professional education infrastructure.

Scope: Psychiatry Reported From Asia to the World

The journal's stated scope is deliberately broad within psychiatry. Its journal site says it publishes original research and psychiatric reports from Hong Kong, China, Asian countries and other parts of the world, and its author guidance describes its original articles as covering controlled trials, interventional studies, studies of screening and diagnostic tests, outcome studies, cost-effectiveness analyses and large-scale epidemiological studies. In practice that breadth is visible in the subjects its issues have carried: validation work connected with the Hong Kong Mental Morbidity Survey, studies of pathways to care for people with first-episode psychosis in Hong Kong, work on consultation-liaison psychiatry in Hong Kong general hospitals, a themed treatment of forensic psychiatric services in Hong Kong, and regional work such as the Early Psychosis Declaration for Asia published in the journal in 2012 by the Asian Network for Early Psychosis.

Two emphases follow from that record. The first is Asian populations and Asian services in their own setting — how mental disorders present, how patients reach care, and how services are organised in Hong Kong and elsewhere in Asia — rather than research that treats the region only as a data source. The second is exchange: the journal's early instructions under the present title framed its mission as exchange between East and West, and its international advisory and editorial boards are credited on its site with ensuring that the journal has a global perspective. Contributions from outside Asia are therefore part of the model, not an exception to it.

Types of Articles Published

The journal's current information for authors, dated 1 December 2024, sets out a defined set of manuscript categories, each with its own limits. Editorials are invited contributions on papers published elsewhere in the journal, limited to 1,000 words, and unsolicited editorials are not accepted. Review articles are systematic reviews or meta-analyses of recent developments in clinical topics, or scoping reviews that identify areas for future research, up to 5,000 words with a structured abstract. Original Articles provide new information based on original research, up to 4,000 words, also with a structured abstract. Perspectives are narrative reviews of a specific topic, up to 2,500 words, which describe no new information and may include subjective opinion or personal experience.

Shorter forms have their own place. Case Reports, limited to 1,000 words, are brief discussions of a case with unique features not previously described, and should give appropriate clinical information including the year, month and place of presentation. Commentaries, up to 1,200 words, discuss an area of controversy or difficulty in diagnosis, treatment, broader management or conceptualisation, and are usually solicited. Letters to the Editor, up to 800 words, discuss a recent article in the journal — with the authors of the article commented on invited to reply — although letters that do not refer to a recent article may also be considered. Its 2011 instructions also listed book reviews among the journal's article types, and book reviews appear in its issue contents.

Peer Review and Editorial Process

East Asian Archives of Psychiatry operates a double-blind peer-review process in which the identities of authors and reviewers are kept confidential. All manuscripts are subject to that process except editorials and letters to the editor, which are reviewed internally. Submitted manuscripts are first reviewed internally, and those that do not comply with the information for authors, or that are of insufficient priority for publication, are rejected at that stage. The remaining manuscripts are assigned to the Chief Editor or an editor to send for external peer review, and at least two independent reviewers are invited for each manuscript, usually given two to three weeks.

Reviewers must have sufficient expertise in the area of research to evaluate a paper's originality, scientific content, conclusions and importance, and they must disclose potential conflicts of interest and decline promptly if they cannot deliver an objective review in time. Where appropriate, a manuscript is also reviewed by the journal's statistical adviser to appraise its statistical content. Manuscripts requiring revision are returned to authors, usually with two to three weeks for resubmission, and a request for revision does not indicate that a manuscript will be accepted. Further rounds of review may be held if necessary, and the final decision rests with the Chief Editor. Accepted manuscripts then undergo technical editing and copyediting, with the corresponding author sent galley and page proofs to check.

Ethics, Standards and How to Submit

The journal anchors its editorial practice in international medical publishing standards. It adheres to the recommendations of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors and the core practices of the Committee on Publication Ethics, follows the ICMJE definition of conflict of interest and its four criteria for authorship, and requires studies to be conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. For studies involving living humans, an appropriate ethics review board must be consulted and named in the manuscript, with its approval number or waiver, together with a statement on how patient or guardian consent was obtained or waived. Reporting checklists are built into submission: a CONSORT checklist and flow diagram must accompany reports of randomised trials, and EQUATOR Network guidelines such as PRISMA for reviews and CARE for case reports are recommended for other manuscripts.

Manuscripts must be written in English, using British English spellings, prepared generally in the IMRaD structure, and submitted in Word format as a blinded manuscript with a separate title page. Structured abstracts of no more than 250 words are required for review and original articles, five index terms should be selected from Medical Subject Headings, and references are numbered in the order cited and presented in Vancouver style. Sponsors and grant numbers, conflicts of interest, author contributions and a data availability statement — describing how the complete data on which the manuscript is based can be accessed — must all be provided. Manuscripts are assessed for plagiarism before peer review, duplicate submission and redundant publication are prohibited, and the journal does not accept large language models as credited authors or LLM-generated article content. Submissions are sent to the Chief Editor by email, and there are no submission or page charges for publication.

Indexing, Open Access and the Move Online

The journal is widely indexed for a regional specialist title. Its own site lists indexing in MEDLINE/Index Medicus, EMBASE/Excerpta Medica, PsycINFO, Scopus, EBSCO, Index Copernicus, ProQuest (Cambridge Scientific) and Thomson Gale, and its articles appear in PubMed, consistent with its MEDLINE listing. Scopus coverage of the present title runs from 2010, matching the year the regional title began. For readers and librarians, that indexing means the journal's Hong Kong and Asian research is discoverable through the same biomedical databases used for psychiatry titles published in Europe and North America.

Access is open. The journal describes itself as an open access journal freely available on its website, states that it is fully open access in its current author information, and publishes articles under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence, with copyright transferred to the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists on acceptance. The journal is self-archived, and the version of record can be downloaded from its website and shared freely, subject to that licence. Most recently, a chief editor's message announced that the journal would be going green starting from Volume 34, Issue 4, the December issue, while maintaining quarterly publication and remaining available online at its journal site, easap.asia — a shift from print-centred distribution to an online-only presence that preserves the quarterly rhythm on which its readers and indexers rely.

Place in East Asian Psychiatry Publishing

East Asian Archives of Psychiatry occupies a distinctive niche: an English-language, peer-reviewed psychiatry journal owned by a regional professional college, published in Hong Kong, indexed in the major biomedical databases, free to read, and free to publish in. Its significance is not scale — it is a quarterly specialist journal, not a large commercial title — but continuity and representation. Through three titles, from the Journal of the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists through the Hong Kong Journal of Psychiatry to the present name, it has given Hong Kong psychiatry a permanent scholarly record, and since taking its East Asian title it has extended that record to researchers across Asia who need a peer-reviewed English-language venue rooted in the region's own clinical experience, services and populations.

For readers of this directory, the practical points are the verified ones: the journal is based in Aberdeen, Hong Kong, China; it is the official journal of the Hong Kong College of Psychiatrists and is published by the Hong Kong Academy of Medicine Press; it appears quarterly in March, June, September and December; its ISSNs are 2078-9947 in print and 2224-7041 online; and it publishes original research, reviews, perspectives, case reports, commentaries, editorials and letters across clinical psychiatry, epidemiology and mental-health services, with a particular welcome for work from Hong Kong, China and the wider Asian region.