Overview

Updated September 2024

Mission

eNeuro’s mission is to publish excellent science that can be discussed, debated, studied, and built upon to advance the understanding of the brain and nervous system.

At the core of eNeuro is a commitment to provide authors with a fair assessment of their work, with any additional experiments requested thoroughly justified, while maintaining high standards of peer review. An international, gender-balanced Editorial Board, a double-anonymous peer review system, and an unambiguous consensus review contribute to a fair, rapid, and transparent experience for authors.

“We want eNeuro to become the flagship of open access neuroscience journals, and to build a reputation for scientific excellence consistent with everything the Society for Neuroscience does in the field. We want authors to have a constructive and satisfying experience with the evaluation of their research. eNeuro is designed to publish studies that will move forward the many areas of neuroscience.”

– Christophe Bernard, Editor-in-Chief

Aims and Scope

eNeuro is SfN’s open access, multidisciplinary journal that publishes high-quality papers in all areas of neuroscience that increase our understanding of the nervous system including molecular, cellular, developmental, cognitive and behavioral research, animal model and computational modeling studies of any length. In addition to original research, the editors encourage submissions that report null results and replication studies. These papers, along with reviews, methods papers, commentaries, and opinions, serve the neuroscience community with both new and sometimes controversial findings.

Criteria

To warrant publication in eNeuro, a manuscript must provide information that is important to the targeted scientific audience. Importance does not necessarily mean mechanistic insight. It can be an observation, but an important one that can move a field forward. We acknowledge that “importance” has a personal valence, but this will be evaluated in a consensual manner by the reviewing editor and the reviewers. They are instructed to answer a simple question: do we learn something useful or important?

More about eNeuro

To support its mission, eNeuro is committed to the following values:

1. Scientific excellence and rigor

We value scientific studies that reflect unbiased and repeatable experiments, methods, procedures, analysis, and reporting to advance the field of neuroscience. We value all studies that advance the field, including replication studies, null results, novel tools or methods, and Registered Reports [PDF].

Our commitment to scientific rigor is reflected in our policies, which are evaluated on an ongoing basis to respond to developments and standards in the field.

2. Open access

We strive to be the best open access, neuroscience-specific journal, and we value the importance of access and exchange of great science.

In keeping with this spirit, eNeuro articles are published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Per the terms of this license, it is not necessary to obtain permission or pay a fee to reuse eNeuro content, provided that a full acknowledgment is made to the original publication in eNeuro.

3. Representation of the breadth of the neuroscience field

Currently, we publish within these broad collections:

4. Fair, transparent, fast, and constructive experience in peer review

We aim to provide authors with a fair, satisfying, and constructive experience with the evaluation of their research, limiting requests for additional experiments and ensuring that such requests are thoroughly justified to allow for the swift dissemination of strong science. By limiting requests for additional experiments, we have been able to provide a quick editorial response from the time of submission to a first decision.

At eNeuro we use two methods to provide authors with a fair, transparent, and constructive peer review process: double-anonymous review and consultation and synthesis.

Double-anonymous review eNeuro strives to mitigate the potential for implicit bias through a double-anonymous review process, where the identities of both the authors and reviewers are concealed throughout the review process. Please review the information for authors for a guide on how to submit your manuscript without revealing your identity. Read Christophe Bernard’s editorial analyzing how the double-anonymous review system at eNeuro may mitigate gender bias in publishing.

Consultation and synthesis During peer review, the reviewers and editors will enter into a consultation process to come to a consensus on the decision and create a clear synthesis statement of what the author should do to improve the paper. This synthesis is published along with each article.

5. Prompt and effective dissemination of peer-reviewed science

We are committed to publishing papers as quickly as possible, while maintaining scientific excellence and rigor. Publishing on a continuous schedule, eNeuro publishes papers a median of 15 days from acceptance.

As a journal of the Society for Neuroscience, eNeuro reaches the largest neuroscience community in the world.

Our communications team works actively to alert the press to articles published in the journals, which has resulted in recent research highlights featured in the New York Times, Washington Post, NPR, Newsweek, TIME, HuffPost. We welcome you to read about the many ways we work to disseminate research to the field.

6. Diversity

We are committed to ensuring diversity across gender, age, and geography among Editorial Board members and reviewers.

We value the reviewers who generously contribute their time and expertise to serve the field. Each year, we recognize our top reviewers who helped make eNeuro successful.

7. Education

We strive to provide information and training to the scientific community in important areas of scientific communication, methodology, and peer review.

For example, to engage new reviewers and provide training in fair, rigorous, and constructive review, eNeuro Offers a Unique Interactive Experience to Reviewer Training—our webinar series on How to Peer Review a Manuscript—that allows trainees, after registering, to download the first submitted version of an eNeuro publication, and walk through their own review process with the host during the webinar.

8. Innovation and experimentation

We value the need for innovation in publishing and seek to experiment with emerging publishing concepts that strengthen the ability to effectively share science with the community.

eNeuro hopes to drive change to provide a positive author experience in peer review, as well as strengthen science.

Publishing concepts adopted at eNeuro include double-anonymous review, consultation and synthesis review, as well as the decision to reject manuscripts that require more experiments. These practices have created an effective, fast, and positive process for both reviewers and authors.

Additionally, eNeuro accepts Registered Reports, a manuscript type that accepts the methodology ahead of researchers running the experiment. Once the methodology has been peer reviewed and accepted, the resulting manuscript is provisionally accepted for publication after the completion of the experiment, regardless of the results themselves.

9. Commentary and discussion

Our aim is to engage the neuroscience community in commentary and discussion about science. Join the discussion on the eNeuro blog.

Indexing and Citation Information

eNeuro has received a 2023 Journal Impact Factor of 2.7.

eNeuro has received a 2023 CiteScore of 5.0.

eNeuro has received a 2024 h5-index of 47 and h5-median 59.

eNeuro is also indexed in PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science, Scopus, and EMBASE.

History

Based on member feedback and the needs of the field, SfN decided that an open-access journal complementing JNeurosci would align with the mission of the Society and serve the field. The process of planning to launch a new journal began after the 2011 SfN Annual Meeting. On November 12, 2014, eNeuro launched with 10 papers. 

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