Updated April 2018
This page contains information on:
- Presubmission Inquiries
- Types of Articles
- Policies
- Editors
- Senior Editors
- Reviewing Editors
- Associate Editors
- Editorial Staff
- Reviewer Recognition
- Contact Information
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Presubmission Inquiries
If you wish to submit a Research Report to JNeurosci and would first like to have an editor review whether your work may be suitable for JNeurosci, you have the option to submit a presubmission inquiry via our submission system. Please click the button below to proceed to the screen where you can submit your Presubmission Inquiry. Be sure to include a cover letter, information on all authors, an abstract, and a significance statement.
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Types of Articles
Research Articles
JNeurosci publishes research reports which are restricted to 650 word Introductions and 1500 word Discussions. Presubmission inquiries are not required, but if the authors would like to check with the editors if an article is within the scope of those currently being reviewed at the Journal, they may do so through the submission website.
Journal Clubs
Journal Clubs are scholarly reviews of papers recently published in JNeurosci. Only graduate students and post-docs may be authors on Journal Club articles.
Letters to the Editor
JNeurosci does not publish letters to the editor in the print edition. Responses to articles may be submitted online via a link on the article's web page. Responses will also be visible via the Letters to the Editor link on JNeurosci's home page.
Invited Articles
JNeurosci publishes four types of invited articles, which appear in the Features section at the front of each issue. TechSights provide overviews of technical developments in neuroscience, including where we are with the technology and where we want to go. Dual Perspectives are pairs of short, expert mini reviews that provide opposite and/or complementary hypotheses related to an important question in neuroscience. Viewpoints are topical reviews, generally 3,000-5,000 words in length, that cover a current topic of interest in neuroscience. Progressions explores scientific journeys that have commenced with papers published in The Journal of Neuroscience.
This Week in the Journal
This Week in the Journal highlights articles from different sections of the current issue and is written by the Features Editor. Guided by reviewers' comments, the editors select important articles covering the full range of topics in neuroscience.
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Policies
In submitting a manuscript to JNeurosci, all authors must agree to abide by all relevant Society for Neuroscience policies, including its Guidelines for Responsible Conduct Regarding Scientific Communication. Manuscripts with multiple authors are reviewed with the explicit understanding that all authors have seen and approve of the submitted version and agree to abide by the Society's policies.
JNeurosci recognizes its responsibility to ensure that questions of scientific misconduct or dishonesty in research are adequately pursued. Should scientific misconduct or dishonesty be suspected or alleged,JNeurosci follows the recommended procedures outlined by COPE when dealing with allegations of misconduct.
Policy on Ethics
It is expected that authors submitting papers to JNeurosci will have conducted their work in strict accordance with the Society's Policy on Ethics. SfN follows the recommended procedures outlined by COPE when dealing with allegations of misconduct.
Policies on the Use of Animals and Humans in Neuroscience Research
All animal experimentation reported in JNeurosci must have been conducted in accordance with the Society's Policies on the Use of Animals and Humans in Neuroscience Research.
Policy on Prepublication
JNeurosci generally does not consider manuscripts that have been previously published.
Posting to a preprint server such as bioRxiv, Authorea, Open Science Framework, etc. is not considered prior publication. Authors who have posted to bioRxiv and Authorea have the option to transfer their files directly for consideration by JNeurosci. Posting a manuscript to a preprint server while under consideration for JNeurosci is allowed up until the point of acceptance. Abstracts, theses, posters, or manuscripts that have been posted on the Internet for the purpose of receiving commentary from the community are not considered prior publication. Online posting is typically done at a prepublication repository that has been designed for the purpose, but posting on an institutional web site or other Internet location is acceptable.
It is essential that the authors retain the copyright for any prepublished material that they submit to JNeurosci, and that they are willing and able to relinquish to JNeurosci any copyrights and/or licenses that JNeurosci requires for publication of accepted manuscripts. Authors should realize that other journals might not consider prepublished material and that prepublication will restrict their alternatives when a manuscript is not accepted by JNeurosci.
Policy on Molecular Data
JNeurosci subscribes to the policies of The Journal of Biological Chemistry on protein & nucleic acid sequences and genomic & proteomic data, which it modifies as follows.
Protein and nucleic acid sequences: Newly determined nucleotide or protein sequences must be deposited in GenBank (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/), EMBL (http://www.ebi.ac.uk), or the DNA Databank of Japan (http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp). Accession numbers must be reported in the manuscript and data must be available upon acceptance and publication of the manuscript. No data are to be withdrawn following publication.
Genomic and proteomic data: Authors of papers that include functional genomics data such as microarray, ChIP seq, RNA-seq, or other high-throughput data are required to deposit the data in a MIAME-compliant database such as GEO (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo), ArrayExpress (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/arrayexpress) or CYBEX (http://cibex.nig.ac.jp/data/index.html) and to provide accession numbers. Data must be publicly accessible upon acceptance and publication of the manuscript. No data are to be withdrawn following publication.
Authors of papers that include proteomics data should comply with the guidelines developed by Molecular and Cellular Proteomics (http://www.mcponline.org/site/misc/CheckList.pdf).
Policy on Computer Code and Software
Computational models: We recommend that new computational neuroscience computer code be deposited in a suitable repository such as GitHub, ModelDB, BioModels, CellML, or Visiome. Studies using custom code central to the conclusions should include a statement in the Materials and Methods section, under the heading "Code Accessibility", indicating whether and how the code can be accessed, including any accession numbers or restrictions, and be cited in the references. Code should be available upon acceptance and publication of the manuscript.
Software: If new software or a new algorithm is used for data analysis, authors are encouraged to deposit it in an appropriate public repository. A statement should be included in the Materials and Methods section, under the heading "Software Accessibility", indicating whether and how the software or algorithm can be accessed, including any accession numbers or restrictions.
Policy on Image Manipulation
JNeurosci subscribes to the policy of The Journal of Cell Biology on image manipulation, which it modifies as follows.
Original data: The editors reserve the right to request any original data from authors at any stage in the submission, review, or publication process, including after publication. Failure to provide requested information may result in publication delays or revocation of acceptance.
Image manipulation: All images in manuscripts accepted for publication will be scrutinized by our production department for any indication of manipulation that is inconsistent with the following guidelines. Manipulation that violates these guidelines may result in production delays or revocation of acceptance.
- No specific feature within an image may be enhanced, obscured, moved, removed, or introduced.
- Constructing figures using images taken from different parts of the same gel, or from different gels, is discouraged. But when this is necessary it must be made explicit by the arrangement of the figure (e.g., using dividing lines) and in the text of the figure legend.
- Recordings obtained at different time points or from different sites must not be spliced together to give the appearance of a continuous record. Authors must make it clear in the figure legend how many different recordings are illustrated.
- Adjustments to images or recordings are acceptable if they are applied uniformly to all portions of the image or recording, and as long as they do not obscure, eliminate, or misrepresent information present in the original, including the background. Adjustments involving filtering or scaling (e.g., brightness, contrast, or color balance) must be applied to every pixel in the image or applied uniformly to an entire recording. Non-linear adjustments (e.g., changes to gamma settings) or deleting portions of a recording (e.g. leak subtraction or stimulus artifacts) must be disclosed in the figure legend.
- The minimum resolution for images is 300 dpi.
- At the time of acceptance, authors will be required to submit uncropped images of complete gels for comparison to the prepared figures. If original data cannot be produced, the acceptance of the manuscript may be revoked.
Scale bars: All illustrations documenting results must include a bar to indicate the scale.
Molecular weights and fragment sizes: The migration of protein molecular weight size markers or nucleic acid size markers must be indicated and labeled appropriately (e.g., 'kD', 'nt', 'bp') on all figure panels showing gel electrophoresis.
Policy on Reporting Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis
Starting March 2017. Every manuscript must include an Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis section as a subsection of the Materials and Methods that describes the experimental design and the statistical tests used in the study. Note that a good time to consult a statistician is when planning the study and planning the experimental design. This new section replaces the traditional Statistical analysis section at the end of the Material and Methods section.
Full details of the experimental design of each individual experiment, including the within- and between-subjects factors and a full description of critical variables required for independent replication (e.g. number of animals of each sex, number of brain slices or cells evaluated per animal, number of litters for developmental studies, etc. and justification of sample size used) should be reported in the Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis section. It is critical to control for multiple comparisons and to note in the text how this has been achieved
Authors should identify the precise statistical tests used in the Experimental Design and Statistical Analysis section. In addition, planned comparisons, details of controls and power analyses to determine sample sizes, if applicable should be reported. Describe any statistical software used to perform analyses. For highly complex and heterogeneous statistical analyses, rather than providing a list, this section can refer to where details can be found (e.g. “Statistical design for Experiment 1 can be found in the Results describing Figure 2”).
Complete results of the statistical analyses, including degrees of freedom and any estimates of effects size, should be reported in full in the Results section. Report exact p values rather than ranges (e.g. p = 0.026 rather than p < 0.05). There are many types of analyses that can be reported, but examples include F values (F(1, 72) = 14.5, p = 0.003, ANOVA), t values (t(10) = 2.98, p = 0.043, paired t-test), coefficient of determination (R2), and Bayes factors.
The Journal of Neuroscience encourages authors to report all data in addition to traditional line and bar graphs, using histograms, scatter plots or other means to represent the variability and complexity of the data.
If the raw data are freely available please state this and how to find them. In addition, if you have pre-registered your study, please state that in the Experimental Design.
The following resources offer helpful guidelines on how to report statistical results:
- Hesson-McInnis, American Psychological Association. (2010) Publication manual of the American Psychological Association (6th ed.). Washington, DC. http://my.ilstu.edu/~mshesso/apa_stats.htm
- Curran-Everett & Benos Guidelines for reporting statistics in journals published by the American Physiological Society. Physiological Genomics (2004) 18(3): 249-251 http://physiolgenomics.physiology.org/content/18/3/249
- Sarter M, Fritschy JM. Reporting statistical methods and statistical results in EJN. Eur J Neurosci. 2008 Dec;28(12):2363-2364
Policy on Copyright
Copyright of all material published in JNeurosci remains with the authors. The authors grant the Society for Neuroscience an exclusive license to publish their work for the first 6 months. After 6 months the work becomes available to the public to copy, distribute, or display under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. The corresponding author may sign the license agreement on behalf of all authors, except authors who are NIH employees. Each author employed by NIH will have to complete and sign an NIH Publishing Agreement and attach it to an unsigned JNeurosci License to Publish form. To view the latest version of the NIH Publishing Agreement, please click here.
JNeurosci License to Publish form can be found here. These forms will be made available to authors in electronic format as a link on their home page at http://jneurosci.msubmit.net upon submission of a resubmission or revision. Authors will be notified via email with a link to complete the License to Publish form and receive a copy of the completed form when available.
Policy Concerning Availability of Materials and Data
By publishing a paper in JNeurosci the author(s) agree to make freely available to colleagues in academic research any clones of cells, nucleic acids, antibodies, etc. that were used in the research reported and that are not available from commercial suppliers.
Authors should, when possible, honor requests for access to any form of published data for appropriate scientific use. The editors reserve the right to request any original data from authors at any stage in the review or publication process, including after publication. Failure to provide requested information may result in publication delays or revocation of acceptance.
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Editors*
Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Marina R. Picciotto
Department of Psychiatry
Yale University School of Medicine
Email: JN_EIC@sfn.org
Features Editor
Teresa Esch, PhD
Email: JN_Features@sfn.org
Senior Editors
Dr. Gregory C. DeAngelis
University of Rochester
Dr. Paul J. Kenny
Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai
Dr. Jeanne M. Nerbonne
Washington University School of Medicine
Dr. David J. Perkel
University of Washington
Dr. Dan H. Sanes
New York University
Dr. Yavin Shaham
NIDA-IRP/NIH
Dr. Ruth S. Slack
University of Ottawa
Dr. Ivan Toni
Radboud University
Dr. Catherine S. Woolley
Northwestern University
Reviewing Editors
Dr. Jose Manuel Alonso
Department of Biological Science
SUNY College Optometry
Dr. Bruno Averbeck**
Section on Learning and Decision Making (SLDM)
NIMH/NIH
Dr. Christopher I. Baker **
Laboratory of Brain & Cognition
NIMH/NIH
Dr. Anne Baron-Van Evercooren
Brain & Spine Institute
The Institut du Cerveau et de la Moelle épinière – ICM
Dr. James Bisley
Neurobiology
University of California, LA
Dr. Roshan Cools
Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour
Dr. Lila Davachi
Psychology
New York University
Dr. Jonathan Demb
Ophthalmology & Visual Sciences
Yale University
Dr. Ruth Anne Eatock
Department of Neurobiology
The University of Chicago
Dr. Paul Frankland
Department of Physiology
University of Toronto
Dr. Fabrizio Gabbiani
Department of Neuroscience
Baylor College of Medicine
Dr. Jay A. Gottfried
Departments of Neurology and Psychology
University of Pennsylvania
Dr. Richard Henson
MRC Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit
University of Cambridge, England
Dr. Jenny Hsieh
Department of Biology
The University of Texas at San Antonio
Dr. Patricia Janak
Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences
Johns Hopkins University
Dr. Artur Kania
Neural Circuit Development Laboratory
Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal
Dr. Ege T. Kavalali
Department of Neuroscience
University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center
Dr. Christoph Kayser
Research Group Cognitive Neuroscience
Faculty of Biology
Bielefeld University
Dr. Jon D. Levine
Department of Medicine & Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery
University of California San Francisco
Dr. Joseph LoTurco
Department of Physiology & Neurobiology
University of Connecticut
Dr. Mark P. Mattson **
Laboratory of Neurosciences
NIA/NIH
Dr. BethAnn McLaughlin
Department of Pharmacology
Vanderbilt University Medical Ctr
Dr. Gavan McNally
School of Psychology
UNSW Sydney
Dr. W. Pieter Medendorp
Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behavior
Radboud University
Dr. Suzanne M. Moenter
Department of Molecular and Integrative Physiology
University of Michigan
Dr. Takeshi Sakurai
International Institute for Integrative Sleep Medicine
University of Tsukuba
Dr. Helen E. Scharfman
Nathan Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research
New York University Langone Medical Center
Dr. Geoffrey Schoenbaum **
Cellular Neurobiology Research Branch
NIDA/NIH
Dr. Jane M. Sullivan
Department of Physiology & Biophysics
University of Washington School of Medicine
Associate Editors
Bernard Balleine
Tallie Z. Baram
Diana Bautista
Michael Beauchamp
Til Ole Bergmann
H. Tad Blair
Donna Calu
Jianhua Cang
Yu-Qing Cao
Monica Carson
Manuel Castro-Alamancos
Joseph F. Cheer
Marlene Cohen
Bevil Conway
Floris de Lange
Mauricio R. Delgado
Hanneke den Ouden
Alain Destexhe
Mingzhou Ding
Joseph El Khoury
Abdeljabbar El Manira
James Fawcett
Lesley K. Fellows
Andre Fenton
Alfredo Fontanini
Alex Fornito
Christie D. Fowler
Michael J. Frank
Jack Gallant
Jonathan Godbout
Shannon Gourley
Christina Gremel
Saskia Haegens
Simon Hanslmayr
Matthew R. Hayes
Biyu He
Jens-Max Hopf
Jenny Hsieh
Andrew Huberman
Ru-Rong Ji
Sheena A. Josselyn
Thorsten Kahnt
Donald Katz
Baljit Khakh
Hackjin Kim
Marlies Knipper
Conny Kopp-Scheinpflug
Rohini Kuner
Mark Laubach
Michael S. Levine
Ifat Levy
Andrew Lieberman
Angelika Lingnau
Mary Kay Lobo
David M. Lovinger
Qiufu Ma
Arianna Maffei
Lori McMahon
Hugo Merchant
Courtney Miller
Lisa Monteggia
Marisela Morales
Maria Concette Morrone
Gabe Murphy
Timothy H. Murphy
John Murray
Vishnu Murty
Maiken Nedergaard
Bernd Nilius
John O'Doherty
Jonas Obleser
Christopher Pack
Luiz Pessoa
Gina R. Poe
Gabriela Popescu
Lucas Pozzo-Miller
Cathy Price
Theodore Price
Antonio Rangel
Matthew Rasband
Margaret E. Rice
Erik D. Roberson
Matthew R. Roesch
Christian Rosenmund
Edward S. Ruthazer
Carlo Sala
Jurgen Sandhkuhler
Krish Sathian
Jorg B. Schulz
Hyojung Seo
Barry Setlow
Hartwig Siebner
Wayne S. Sossin
Tara Spires-Jones
William C. Stacey
Thomas A. Stalnaker
Garret Stuber
Raymond Swanson
Carla Taveggia
Gregor Thut
Philippe N. Tobler
Kuei Y. Tseng
Flora Vaccarino
Matthijs van der Meer
Rufin VanRullen
Timothy Vickery
Rufin Vogels
Henrique Von Gersdorff
Kate Wassum
Nicole Wenderoth
Donna M. Wilcock
Dianna Willis
Bettina Winckler
Danny G. Winder
Catharine Antonia Winstanley
Teresa L. Wood
Lawrence Wrabetz
Lori Zeltser
Fengquan Zhou
Ulf Ziemann
* The views expressed are the editors' own and do not necessarily represent the views of their institution.
** Serving in a personal capacity.
Editorial Staff
Suzanne Rosenzweig
Director of Scientific Publications
Blythe Alexander
Scientific Operations Manager
Adam Buck
Production Manager
Zachary Dourafei
Editorial Manager
Charnay Patterson
Production & Subscription Associate
Courtney Williams
Production & Subscription Associate
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Reviewer Recognition
The quality of JNeurosci depends on the effort that is generously contributed by our reviewers who have lent their expertise and time helping to ensure we publish great science. A special thanks go out to an outstanding group of reviewers who have provided an extraordinary number of thoughtful reviews along with frequent reviewers who have reviewed six or more manuscripts each year.
Dr. Marina R. Picciotto
Editor-in-Chief, JNeurosci
2017
2016
2015
2014
2013
2012
2010-2011
2009
2008
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Contact Information
Society for Neuroscience Central Office
The Journal of Neuroscience
Society for Neuroscience
1121 14th Street, NW, Suite 1010
Washington, DC 20005 USA
Email: jn@sfn.org
Phone: 202-962-4000
Editor-in-Chief
Dr. Marina R. Picciotto
Department of Psychiatry
Yale University School of Medicine
34 Park Street
New Haven, CT 06519 USA
Email: JN_EIC@sfn.org