Two were withdrawn by the authors before the review process was completed, and, at the time of writing this report, six others were pending the outcome of reviewers' evaluations. Of the remaining 51 manuscripts, 16 (31%) were accepted for pubhcation, while 35 (69%) were rejected.
The interdisciplinary character of the journal is exemplified by the fact that ten of the contributors to Volume 1 were anthropologists, including five medical anthropologists and three psychological or psychiatric anthropologists; five were psychiatrists, including two with training in anthropology; two were crosscultural psychologists; one was a sociologist; one an epidemiologist; and one a Native American health worker. Since roughly half of first-year submissions were by anthropologists and other social scientists, a third by psychiatrists and psychologists, and the rest by epidemiologists and medical and public health personnel, the editors' objective that the journal function as a forum for interdisciplinary research has been met. The journal's international orientation is shown, in part, by the nearly ten percent of submissions by scholars from non-Western cultures.
The editor-in-chief is particularly grateful to the 78 scholars who reviewed papers for Volume 1. Without their time and critical assessments, Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry would be unable to maintain the high standards it has set. Also to be thanked are the many authors who chose to submit their work to a new journal. They made it possible for this journal to select the best of a remarkably good group of submissions, and to publish only papers of high quality. The relatively high rejection rate, notable for a journal in its first year of publication, is the result of a very strict review process that has received the strong support of the journal's editorial group.