Over the past year Neuro-Oncology has continued to thrive. We are grateful for the support of the Society for Neuro-Oncology (SNO), the European Association of Neuro-Oncology (EANO), and the Japanese Society for Neuro-Oncology (JSNO) as well as the neuro-oncology community for the continued success of the journal. I am especially grateful for the dedication, hard work and support of our Managing Editor, Elizabeth Martinson, as well as our Executive and Associate Editors, our Editorial Board, and all of the ad hoc reviewers who are listed in the subsequent pages.
Neuro-Oncology remains the leading journal in the field. This year the impact factor rose to 6.776, the highest ever. We are grateful to the authors who submitted the outstanding papers that made this possible. Our submissions are on target to reach 750 this year, and the number of online downloads increased significantly over the past 12 months.
Currently, approximately 20% of original papers are accepted, although this will likely decline to about 15% in the future. Over the past year we implemented a number of changes to improve the speed and helpfulness of reviews. This includes metrics for reviewers that evaluate the timeless and quality of their reviews. In addition, we have declined without peer review an increasing number of papers that are unlikely to be accepted, allowing the authors to resubmit to other journals without delay. The average time to first decision overall is currently 17.1 days, and the average time to first decision for papers sent out for review is 28.3 days. We are working to try to reduce this time eventually to 21 days. Following acceptance papers usually appear online in approximately 4–5 weeks.
Our goals is to publish the most important and novel papers in the field that will significantly increase our understanding of the biology of nervous system tumors and neurologic complications of cancer, and improve the outcomes and quality of life in our patients. Clinical trials should be well designed and adequately powered with appropriate endpoints. These trials should almost always include correlative studies that will allow us to learn from the trial, even if it is negative. Laboratory and translational studies should be novel and important. Studies that do not use multiple cell lines or patient-derived xenografts, or do not investigate mechanisms or have in vivo experiments, are unlikely to be published.
Neuro-Oncology has an international readership and is accessed by 175 countries. It is the official journal not only of SNO, but also of EANO and JSNO. We are strongly committed to publishing important neuro-oncology studies from all over the world, and we currently receive papers from over 50 different countries; however, we would like to further increase contributions from authors outside North America in the coming years. To help with potential language difficulties for non-native English speakers Oxford University Press has an English language editing service that may be of help to some authors (www.oxfordlanguageediting.com).
The success of Neuro-Oncology is due to the support of the neuro-oncology community. As always, we welcome feedback and suggestions to improve the journal (pwen@partners.org).