The most important skill a scientist needs, after the skills needed to execute a study, is the ability to report his or her scientific endeavors in writing.
The editors-in-chief of four international neuroscience journals — Brain and Behavior, the European Journal of Neuroscience, the Journal of Neuroscience Research, and Neuroscience, the journal of the International Brain Research Organization — come together in this workshop to offer insight into what editors look for, what their roles are, and what you can to do to make your paper stand out.
Providing some clarity around what happens once a paper is received, Paul Bolam, co-editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Neuroscience, outlines the steps in a typical review process:
The editorial office conducts a quality check.
The editor-in-chief sends the paper to a section editor, who distributes it to reviewers.
Peer review takes place.
The section editor evaluates the reviews and makes a recommendation to the editor-in-chief.
The editor-in-chief considers the recommendation and makes a final decision.
Watch the recording to learn more about the review process, including why peer review is important, what’s essential to include in your paper, and how to be ethical and ensure reproducibility in your experiments.
Speakers
Paul Bolam, PhD
Paul Bolam is the co-editor-in-chief of the European Journal of Neuroscience, the journal of the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies (FENS). He is an emeritus professor and senior scientist at the Medical Research Council Brain Network Dynamics Unit, at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom.
Maryann Martone, PhD
Maryann Martone is a professor emerita at the University of California, San Diego, where she maintains an active laboratory. She started her career as a neuroanatomist, specializing in light and electron microscopy, but her research for the past 15 years has focused on neuroinformatics. She led the Neuroscience Information Framework (NIF), a national project to establish a uniform resource description framework for neuroscience, as well as the NIDDK Information Network (dknet). She is the current Chair of the Governing Board for the International Neuroinformatics Coordinating Facility and a founder of SciCrunch, a technology start creating tools to help publish reproducible science.
Eric Prager, PhD
Eric Prager is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Neuroscience Research and the developmental editor for Current Protocols in Neuroscience and Current Protocols in Toxicology. He received his bachelor’s in psychology from the Pennsylvania State University, his master’s in counseling psychology from the University of Denver, and his PhD from the Uniformed Services University in Neuroscience, where he investigated the long-term consequences of a nerve agent exposure. In addition to his being a full-time editor at Wiley, he is working to identifying common problems in scientific reproducibility, including pitfalls in conducting research and reporting erroneous results, which may lead to problems in replication and increased retractions.
Juan Lerma, PhD
Juan Lerma is a research professor at Institute of Neurosciences of Alicante, Superior Council of Scientific Investigations-University Miguel Hernández. Lerma is interested in the molecular basis of neuronal communication, specifically in properties and signaling mechanisms of glutamate receptors, and defining the molecular, synaptic, and cellular alterations underpinning the behavioral features that define brain disease.
John Foxe, PhD
John Foxe is the Killian J. and Caroline F. Schmitt Chair in Neuroscience, director of the Del Monte Institute for Neuroscience, and chair of the department of neuroscience at The University of Rochester. His research investigates the neurobiological bases of neurodevelopmental and neuropsychiatric conditions such as autism and schizophrenia. He uses electrophysiological and neuroimaging techniques to understand how inputs from the various sensory systems are combined in the brain, and what happens when these multisensory integration abilities are affected by disease. Before joining the university in 2015, he served as director of research for the Children’s Evaluation and Rehabilitation Center at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Foxe has authored more than 250 research and clinical papers, book chapters, commentaries, and proceedings and serves as editor-in-chief of The European Journal of Neuroscience.
