Dear Readers,
We are very excited to celebrate the 10th anniversary of Neural Regeneration Research (NRR). With this first issue of 2017, we would like to express our sincere thanks for your continued support and wish you a Happy New Year! We would also like to share with you a brief overview of the growth of the journal in the past 10 years.
Founded in April 2006, NRR is an international Open Access journal published by Wolters Kluwer - Medknow, with its mission focused on reporting high quality and novel scientific advancements in the field of neural regeneration.
NRR has been indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE) and PubMed, and is committed to publishing articles on basic, translational, and clinical research, as well as novel technologies related to neural regeneration in the peripheral and central nervous systems. We hope that, with your support, NRR will be a premier journal in the field of neural regeneration. Looking back at the history of the journal in the past 10 years (Figure 1), we can clearly see that we are moving towards that direction.
Figure 1.
The milestones of Neural Regeneration Research (NRR) in the past 10 years.
Abbreviations: INRS, International Neural Regeneration Symposium; ISCITT, International Spinal Cord Injury Treatments and Trials Symposium; APSNR, Asia Pacific Symposium on Neural Regeneration.
Now, NRR has been widely accepted by scientists from all of the world and, in 2016, numerous readers visited our website from countries in Asia, North America, South America, Europe, Africa, and Oceania (Figure 2).
Figure 2.
Geographic area analysis of NRR's website visitors and their percentage of visits in 2016.
Additionally, the downloads of articles published in NRR have been steadily increasing with > 140,000 full text downloads and > 44,000 PDF downloads in 2016 (Figure 3).
Figure 3.
Summary of downloads of NRR articles using different media devices in 2016.
Moreover, NRR offers unique opportunities, summarized in Figure 4, for those who wish to publish their work in the journal. First, our journal is an open access journal allowing free downloads through different search sites. Second, we offer vigorous review on technical, ethical, scientific, and language issues of submitted manuscripts. Third, our editorial office makes every effort to facilitate fast peer review and publication after the acceptance of the paper. Fourth, we closely track the published articles through views, citations, and downloads to increase the impact of the published work. We acknowledge authors who publish the most cited articles in NRR (Figure 5). Lastly, we have been organizing annual International Neural Regeneration Symposiums (INRS) to bring scientists together to discuss cutting edge research and to facilitate collaborations among scientists in this field.
Figure 4.
Opportunities for publishing in Neural Regeneration Research.
Figure 5.
Authors of the most cited articles published in Neural Regeneration Research between 2014 and 2015.
Since we took the editorship of NRR in 2011, the journal's citation performance has grown dramatically from 154 in 2011 to 1,000 in 2015 (Figure 6). A further growth of the journal's citation in 2016 also occurred. This growth will be reported in our editorial next year.
Figure 6.
Journal citation report (JCR) during 2011–2015.
Similarly, the journal's impact factor has increased markedly from 0.22 in 2014 to 0.968 in 2015, indicating a tremendous increase in the journal's impact (Figure 7).
Figure 7.
Journal's impact factor trend (Source: Journal Citation Report).
At this special celebration of the 10th anniversary of NRR, we and the editorial staff of NRR are highly motivated and confident that NRR will move up to another level of excellence. We hope that NRR will be an excellent platform to present your cutting edge research in neural regeneration, and, by working together, we will make NRR one of the finest journals in the field. We appreciate your feedback and your interest in NRR.
Sincerely,
Editors-in-chief of Neural Regeneration Research
Kwok-fai So and Xiao-Ming Xu