Because the published work is very fresh and still wet from the laboratory. This fact is reflected as well by the outstanding recent index of Neuroscience Letters. Vice versa, a paper published in any journal can get its first citation in Neuroscience Letters. This extraordinary performance is well documented by the statistical time-series data available from ISI.

  Have there been specific developments in the field of Neuroscience & Behavior that may have contributed?

...a fast journal is not just satisfying the desires of authors, but provides interaction and feedback between scientists that influences the way science might go.

We regularly observed that an exciting novel topic in the neurosciences induced a cluster of advance guard papers in Neuroscience Letters which in turn was followed by delayed trailers full of details. Almost all the "hot" topics in neuroscience showed this profile, e.g., apoptosis, prion protein, stem cells, cognitive networks conceptualized by fMRI.

I like to focus on Alzheimer’s research as a prototype field of great achievements, where publications in our journal trace the ramified research paths through molecular and genomic neuroscience but witness also the enormous integration of basic and clinical science which appeared unbelievable some 20 years ago.

  What would you like to convey to the general public about the work of Neuroscience Letters?

I am emphasizing the joint ardor and corporate identity of the editors and the publisher which brought up the long-term potentiation of an idea set out 30 years ago, human values which might still be superior to the perfection of a mere computer system.

It is with great satisfaction that we, the editors of Neuroscience Letters, received your letter acknowledging the high ranking in frequency of citation over the last 10 years. The distinction reflected in your observations corroborates our novel concept laid down when founding the journal 30 years ago: to produce short papers within a short time—complete and compact papers, of course, not just preliminary communications. This happened at a time when authors presented their work in papers of 20 printed pages which typically appeared in print 18 months after submission—how slow the pace of neuroscience was in those times! Authors like the format of four printed pages, as the message has to be straightforward, avoiding redundancy. In particular the fast-growing neuroscience community outside the natively English-speaking world has a considerable benefit from the short format of the journal's articles. We learned that the readers like this format as well, because the message is compact and fully expressed by the paper's title. Most importantly, the short publication delay between the acceptance of a manuscript and its printed availability in the libraries went down to an unprecedented six or eight weeks, and thus the journal mirrors what is presently going on in the laboratory. This makes our journal attractive for scientists who work in a fast and competitive field, and we often can anticipate the upcoming trends in neuroscience from the focus and spectrum of submitted papers. With regard to the timing it is easily possible to get work published in Neuroscience Letters much ahead of an abstract submitted simultaneously to the Society of Neuroscience. However, a fast journal is not just satisfying the desires of authors, but provides interaction and feedback between scientists that influences the way science might go. Thus, it is obvious that this fast-publishing journal has a considerable impact on the turnover rate of research and the speed at which new concepts may develop.

Neuroscience Letters
Manfred Zimmermann, Editor-in-Chief and founder (1973)
Elsevier Science, publishers