Wikipedia:Peer review/Neuropsychopharmacology/archive1

Neuropsychopharmacology

I hope to put this article up for candidacy as featured article at some point. I have tried to impart a sense of the revolutionary strides that have been made in this field within the last 15 or so years, and have tried to provide a prudent, complete set of links out to appropriate articles so that a reader with minimal background can follow through (at this time I have not edited many links coming to this page yet). I am not professionally trained in this or related fields, so there's a chance that some of the detail may be open to debate. Otherwise there could be just about anything that someone may find could be improved. Thanks in advance for any help. --RichG 13:10, 7 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Having very little knowledge of pharmacology and neuroscience, I find it a bit hard to follow. I don't expect to grasp all the technical details, but the writing could be improved (it's not bad, but could be better). A good idea is to open each section with a brief, very general explanation of how the concept to be described relates to the topic at large. The section on "Neurotransmission" comes to mind as violating this principle, starting out listing facts without relating them to neuropsychopharmacology. (The reader shouldn't be assumed to have memorized the information in the lead section.) The writing style I'm suggesting might introduce a tiny bit of redundancy, but it makes it much easier to get an overview for a non-expert. The images are also a bit hard to understand, and would benefit from more detailed captions. Looks great otherwise. Fredrik | talk 20:46, 8 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]
- Thanks for the feedback and correction of my confounded error of writing "ACPN" ! I spent some time trying to add some "down to earth" content to clarify things and improve the flow, and I wound up elaborating some things I felt were terse. I also expanded the diagram captions.--RichG 11:44, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting topic, but could use several types of improvements.

It needs a concise, defining lead sentence.
The intro is too long and contains some vague blather, like the phenomenology reference: the link is irrelevant and doesnt explain the usage, which is nearly unintelligible. Some of this material belongs in a history section and some could be dropped.
All through the article there are nearly contentless remarks such as "xxx is a rapidly changing field" or "xxx shows promise of importance". Don't make the vague value judgements, either cut them or provide enough facts for the reader to draw such conclusions.
The article doesn't give me the sense that the topic has been adequately "mapped" here in its broad categories. Instead there are bits and pieces of trivia with some generalizing statements. The outline of the article should resemble the topic list of an intro course on this subject.
There should be a listing with a subsection for each of the major categories of pharmacologically relevant neurotransmitters (dopamine, serotonin, etc), and a similar overview with a subsection for each major family of psychotropic drugs (phenothiazines, SSRIs, etc). At least that is the core content the reader would expect to find in this article.
What is the difference between psychopharmacology and neuropsychopharmacology? Is the latter a subset or a superset of the former? If the latter covers neurology drugs as well as psych drugs, then there needs to be coverage of the major neuro drugs which are anticonvulsants. If its the other way around, and only some part of psychopharmacology is included in neuropsychopharmacology, then that needs to be spelled out. If the answer is that the terms are in practice interchangeable, then use the simpler term and make a redirect from the one with the extra syllables.
There is way too much detail about the journals. Links to the major two would suffice. The Hungarian journal of whatever has an impact factor of what?

Sorry if the comments sound harsh, but the topic and much of the content is a good enough start to be worth improving. alteripse 10:48, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

I greatly appreciate the time you took to review this article. I think you are quite right about some things, but with other things I feel you are highly misplaced - not to say that I think I have 100% effectively conveyed my intentions within the article.

First of all, there is no "intro" course to my knowledge. The scope of the field is huge. Brain processes are incredibly complex. You could consider the "5th generation of progress" work to be an "introduction" text to the field, and it is thousands of pages long with something like 20,000 references. Have you taken a look at it? This is not a simple topic that can be summarized as "this, this, and that".
Because this topic is of such wide scope, my goal was to try to provide a flavor for the topic, with summaries of central aspects, samples of detailed schemas, and some indication of the direction. As I mentioned, there is no way to really represent this field in a few pages. Since it is really an amalgam of many things, I tried to establish appropriate article linking.
As far as a lead sentence, I agree, and actually worked on this before I saw your post.
I agree that a part of the intro might be better suited to a history section. But the phenomenology reference is accurate. It is there to convey that modern psychiatry is gaining some real basis. That you think it is "blather" makes me think you might not really know what it means. However, the statement in the article may be somewhat obtuse, and I will see if I can clarify it further.
I believe your claim concerning statements like "xxx is rapidly changing"... is probably quite on target. I will definitely focus some effort there.
As I mentioned, one cannot map the entire field in a reasonable-size article. However, if this is the case it should somehow be mentioned. I had actually thought about some type of statement but never included it.
There should not be categories with neurotransmitters. The neuropsychopharmacology article should discuss the relevance of neurotransmitters, not duplicate the article "neurotransmitter", which actually links to separate articles on each of them. What's the point of interlinking if you have to totally duplicate information? Again, I'm not claiming to have 100% achieved the goal of describing neurotransmitter relevance.
It was mentioned in the article that it includes psychoactive as well as neurologic agents. It is agreed that specific mention of anti-epileptic or anti-convulsant drugs could be made. If you want to contrast with psychopharmacology, you can look at that article. (I think that article needs some expansion to include more information about non-hallucinogens)
Sure, my mention of the impact factors and what-not are somewhat arbitrary. Perhaps that stuff could use some explanation. But I don't know how you can say I place too much emphasis on the journals. This is where the knowledge is. Much of this field is so new that some stuff virtually just doesn't exist elsewhere. Perhaps that could be clarified in the article.

In summary, my defense here represents some of the notions I had hoped to address in the article. If these goals can be achieved, I think the article will be closer to what it should be.--RichG 13:16, 9 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

If you can have an intro biology course you can have an intro pharmacology course or an intro neuropsychopharmacology course. Any field can be "mapped", just like you can make a map of anything from a meadow to a hemisphere. It is a matter of judging what should be included at what scale.

I think you achieved your intention but you haven't convinced me that "flavor" is a better approach for an encyclopedia article than a balanced overview. I did admire the quality of your linking.

I think I know what you intended to say, but your link is to an entirely different meaning for phenomenology and it leaves the reader guessing. Say it more clearly. If I don't know, I promise the majority of your readers without a medical degree will be even more in the dark.

As above, you can map any field if you have the scale of the article right. By your argument we cannot have an article on astronomy, or physics, or medicine, or molecular biology that attempt to tell the reader what topics are contained within the field. Any field is big from a close perspective. That is what you need to reconsider.

OK, you have persuaded me you are right on this point.

It might be worth while giving an explicit answer to my question for those of us who aren't sure. Is this a subfield of psychopharmacology, or a supercategory encompassing both psychoactive and neuroactive drugs?

As above, most of the current knowledge of any field resides in its journals, but that is a cop-out in an intro article. See what proportion of the pharmacology article (I havent checked) is devoted to discussing journals.

Perhaps we disagree on what should be the priority goal of an encyclopedia article on a field like this. If you were writing an encyclopedia article on Canada it would be different from a tourism brochure of the same length. It would mention each province and some salient information. A tourist brochure might give lots of detail about a nightclub in Quebec and a ski resort in British Columbia and not even mention Alberta. Flavor is nice but for Wikipedia an encyclopedic overview might be even nicer. alteripse 01:15, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

To conserve space on the Peer review page I have continued this discussion on Talk:Neuropsychopharmacology, with a digression on the philosophy and mapping of the article.--RichG 12:19, 10 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again for the motivation to reassess article structure. I moved historical things to "history", clarified several aloof statements, added some stuff I hope will further improve the article. --RichG 13:05, 11 November 2005 (UTC)[reply]