American Psychiatric Publishing Launches Redesigned Web Sites

American Psychiatric Publishing, a division of APA, has debuted a major redesign and upgrade of its popular Web site, PsychiatryOnline.org. The new PsychiatryOnline.org features a fully integrated experience across key psychiatry titles—bringing together on one platform APA journals, Psychiatric News, DSM-IV-TR, major textbooks covering psychiatry subspecialties, practice guidelines, CME, and other key resources. The result is a more robust treatment, research, and learning tool for users.

American Psychiatric Publishing publishes many of the strongest titles in psychiatry: DSM-IV-TR, five peer-reviewed journals including the American Journal of Psychiatry, major textbooks and reference works, Psychiatric News, CME tools, patient handouts, and APA's practice guidelines.

This upgrade of PsychiatryOnline offers unified search and browse features that allows discovery across all content, no matter what type it is. The DSM Library, Psychiatric News, and each individual journal retains its own Web site with title-specific search and browse so that APA members and other users can focus on the content of most importance to them.

Journal Web sites include the following:

"Our members, and other mental health professionals, are becoming more sophisticated in their use of online content and their information needs are changing," said Publisher Rebecca Rinehart. "We are very pleased to offer them a powerful and dynamic platform that will enable them to retrieve critical content in a manner that is most convenient to them."

The redesign of PsychiatryOnline and the journal Web sites follows from the publishing division's decision to move all of its journals to Silverchair Information Systems' semantic Web development platform—SCM6. Silverchair has hosted DSM-IV-TR and textbooks as part of PsychiatryOnline since launch of that product in 2005, but journals were previously on the HighWire Press platform.

The SCM6 platform enables American Psychiatric Publishing to optimize its information delivery for general and subspecialty psychiatrists, providing a user interface and content design uniquely suited to support different content types like books, journals, and news; psychiatry-tailored topic collections that surface related articles and book chapters; and multifaceted search and browse.

"We are thrilled to be working with American Psychiatric Publishing to develop a fully integrated content portfolio presented through the new PsychiatryOnline," said Thane Kerner, Silverchair CEO. "As one of the first sites to bring books, guidelines, and journals together on the SCM6 platform, we think POL will stand as a distinguished example of portfolio integration and product innovation enabled by a semantic architecture."

The partnership with Silverchair allows American Psychiatric Publishing to bring cutting-edge semantic technologies to bear in enhancing PsychiatryOnline and creating new products for psychiatrists. Silverchair enriches all PsychiatryOnline content by adding semantic "hooks" so that computers can find key concepts within content and automatically make connections to and between them. The source of these "hooks" is a robust psychiatry taxonomy that is compliant with the vocabularies used to index biomedical literature for PubMed and code diseases and treatments for electronic health records. A database of equivalent concepts for each taxonomy term allows normalization of language variations back to a root concept even when authors use different terms to describe the same concepts and searchers use different terms to find them. So a reader searching for "PTSD," "posttraumatic stress disorder," the DSM code 309.81, or even archaic terms like "traumatic neurosis" and "shellshock" receive a consistent results set. The hierarchy of the taxonomy allows articles and chapters to be grouped together based on shared topics to create hierarchical topic collections.

These are some of the enhanced features of the new sites:

"PsychiatryOnline continues to evolve to offer readers new ways to access our content that best fit the ways they work," said Robert Hales, M.D., American Psychiatric Publishing's editor in chief for books. "We are committed to continuing to embrace technological innovations that allow us to reach our readers in new ways."