Psychiatric expert witnesses are some of the most commonly used experts in litigation today. Accordingly, many expert witness referral firms focus heavily on providing a wide array of psychiatric experts in all relevant sub-disciplines to assist attorneys.

However, in case you are interested in defying the natural order of the universe and looking for an expert yourself, head over to Psychiatry Online. The site has an excellent search function that allows one to search, by keyword, eight leading psychiatric journals published by American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc. (APPI). As an example, a simple search on "competence" turned up several thousand online abstracts, with author names included. It is then a small matter of contacting the author of an abstract, who is usually easily located in his or her respective university directory. When evaluating the qualifications of an expert, courts tend to give greater deference those who have published extensively in the field related to the psychiatric concept in issue. Give it a try.

Nick