The five-year process of preparing for the revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) has been organized around a series of conferences convened by the American Psychiatric Association, in collaboration with the World Health Organization and the U.S. National Institutes of Health, to address the future of psychiatric diagnosis. Obsessive-Compulsive Spectrum Disorders: Refining the Research Agenda for DSM-V is the fruit of one of those conferences and presents the most academically sound, thought-provoking, and timely papers from the proceedings.

As the conference and...