The revision of the psychiatric profession's diagnostic taxonomy, the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual," also known as "DSM III," is underway. The process will result in the publication of "DSM-IV." Those involved in the revision seek both to make as few changes as possible and to satisfy an entire field. The Revision Task Force must convince mental health professionals that the DSM-IV is an improvement over the DSM-III and a previous revision known as DSM-R. Task force leaders seek to convince their profession, in a series of journal articles, that while the DSM-IV will leave the previous editions mostly unchanged, it will also be more empirically based than the earlier versions. At the same time, the leaders seek to place their work in line with past editions by using empiricist language to describe the development of all three manuals. The aim of the narratives is to argue that the major innovation of the new edition is not surprising new content, but rather, the systematic nature of the revision process. Observations of the revision process in one subcommittee suggested that the process does in some ways match the representations of it by task force leaders as more open, explicit, and empirical than previous ones. However, further data analysis may show that the DSM-IV process is more like the earlier revision processes than task force accounts would have the mental health community believe. An appendix presents contrasting excerpts from DSM-III-R and DSM-IV. (SG)