Updated September 2018
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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 addressed to "the Editors," 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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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
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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