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Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Hoboken, NJ, 2008, £100/$200.
ISBN: 978 0 470 11006 5
The arrival of this massive parcel from Reference Reviews was very timely: I had just been asked to act as referee for a scientific paper submitted to a psychiatric journal, on traumatic stress in a specialised profession. I knew a certain amount about the group in question, which is presumably why I was asked to act as referee, but had never considered it in connection with trauma. Looking through the paper as submitted, my impression had been that the authors had done their own little research project efficiently - the questionnaires were sensibly worded, the samples well-chosen, and the statistical analyses seemed to add up. It seemed to me however to be very unlikely that there was as little published on the topic as their literature review suggested, so more could perhaps have been done to link their results up to those of other researchers. The authors also concluded with the rather vague statement that they "intend to carry out further research in this area" but did not suggest a specific programme that would follow up their project. Just as I was mulling this over, the Encyclopedia of Psychological Trauma turned up and answered both my questions very efficiently: there have been other related studies so I was able to suggest some further pieces of comparative study to the authors, and there are clear areas within their field where further research is indicated. I could have dredged all this information up from tools ready to hand, but doing so would have been rather more laborious. Full marks to this as a reference source then.
Psychological trauma is, as the preface points out, "among the most discussed, debated and researched topics in the history of psychology and psychiatry". It has "captured the attention of ... mainstream culture," and has "become...