Should research focus specifically on elderly suicide rates in cross-national ecological studies designed to identify distil risk factors?

(Konradsen and Munk-Jorgensen, 2007) and an entire recent issue of IP (volume 19, issue 4) was dedicated to research papers from LMI countries. What can be done to promote geriatric psychiatry research in LMI countries and subsequent submission and acceptance for publication in geriatric psychiatry journals? Leading international organizations like the WHO, the International Psychogeriatric Association (IPA) and Alzheimer’s Disease International (ADI) play an important role in raising awareness among national policy makers in LMI countries about the rapidly increasing elderly population size in these countries and the importance of high quality, locally acquired research data in planning geriatric psychiatry services. For example, the IPA (Abelskov and Shah, 2001) and ADI (10/66 Dementia Research Group, 2000a; 2000b) have several ongoing initiatives to facilitate this ambition. Patel (2007) described a number of strategies and initiatives to increase research capacity at individual and institutional level in LMI countries, including dedicated funding for building research capacity, creating partnerships between institutions with good research capacity and institutions in LMI countries without good research capacity, and commitment of governments and academic institutions to build research capacity. Specialist geriatric psychiatry journals can also facilitate high quality submissions by increasing the number of reviewers from LMI countries and by offering an advisory service on improving the quality of submissions. IP has an initiative to help researchers improve the quality of their submissions, but the uptake rate for this service is unclear. Caution should be exercised in interpreting the current findings because only two geriatric psychiatry journals were examined and therefore the findings cannot be extrapolated to other geriatric psychiatry journals; and only one researcher examined the two journals.