Submissions

Please review the suitability of the content of your manuscript based on the journal aims and scope. Then, determine the article type for your manuscript. All manuscript must be formatted according to the guidelines listed here prior to submission. Non-complying manuscript will be returned to authors for correction before it is assigned to or considered by an editor, thus delaying the peer-reviewing process.

NeurosciRN considers the following type of articles for submission:

1. Mini-Review – concise review of current or updated knowledge or advancements in the related fields.
2. Research or Technical Notes – short and concise technical report or single or more experiments leading to convincing observations to prove a hypothesis. This type of article must have a clear objective of the study, concise discussion and a clear conclusion. Studies reporting negative findings also fall within this category.
3. Case Notes – short and concise description of a unique, unusual or novel occurrence of a clinical case or presentation.
4. Data Notes – short and concise description of a research dataset or resources that highlight the origin and relevance of the dataset or resources to facilitate research reproducibility.
5. Hypothetical Notes – hypothetical paper involves a critical interpretation of current literature leading to a profound but untested hypothesis.
6. Views – articles featuring a review, commentary or an opinion on a currently published paper or book.
7. News – articles featuring a report on local or international neuroscience-related outreach or scientific programmes, obituaries of a prominent neuroscientists as well as individual success stories.

 

SUBMISSION

All manuscript must be submitted via the Open Journal System for NeurosciRN which is accessible HERE. New users must register for an account before submitting their manuscripts. The registration page is accessible via this LINK.

 

When a new submission is received, the editorial assistant will check on the formatting of the manuscript to ensure it matches the standard of the journal's requirements. Qualified articles will be assigned to an Editor to assess the suitability of the article for NeurosciRN. After passing all the initial scientific merits, in-house formatting standard and requirements, the editor will initiate a single-blinded review protocol, where the reviewers are aware of the names and affiliations of the authors, but the reviewer reports provided to authors are anonymous.

All articles must be reviewed by at least 2 reviewers. Peer reviewers are to be suggested by the authors. The managing editor will decide on the suitability of the suggested peer reviewers or invite other peer reviewers from the relevant field of expertise to review the article. Editors or members of the editorial board can also act as reviewers as long as they are not involved as the managing editor who oversee the peer reviewing process of the article. The managing editor will make the decision on the submission assigned to him/her. More than 50% of peer reviewers must agree on the acceptance before a formal acceptance decision is made by the managing editor. Decision made by the managing editor is final.

In the case of revision, the revised manuscript will be returned to the same managing editor for assessment. For any scientific dispute or technical revision of the manuscript, the managing editor will request the former peer reviewers to re-assess the revised manuscript to ensure satisfactory changes have been made to meet the scientific merits for acceptance.

All articles are subjected to peer-reviewing except for articles submitted to Editorial or News and Views sections, where members of the editorial board will save to evaluate the content and suitability of the manuscript.

NeurosciRN aims to keep the duration of peer-reviewing under 6-week. A decision by the assigned editor shall not take more than a week after all reports have been obtained from reviewers. NeurosciRN also adopted a constructive peer-reviewing policy where peer-reviewers are requested to suggest improvements to the manuscript under evaluation. The manuscript will be rejected when the methodology employed in the study was flawed and the conclusion made was not supported by the results. Other reasons for rejection include plagiarism, falsification of results and conducting a study on animal or human without approval from the ethical committee board approval.

 

There are several editorial decisions for each submission:

• Accept Submission - the manuscript is accepted for publication.
• Revision Requested - revisions are needed to address concerns raised by the editors/reviewers leading to a resubmission of a revised manuscript. A period between 2 weeks and 1 month is normally given to authors to address all concerns raised by the editors/reviewers.
• Reject and Resubmit for Review - in the case where the concerns raised by the editors/reviewers are substantial and may need more than a month to address, the manuscript will be rejected and the journal welcomes future resubmission of a revised manuscript. Authors will have to provide a rebuttal letter and reference to the previous submission to accelerate peer-reviewing exercise.
• Reject - a manuscript is highly not suitable for publications due to various technical flaws or interpretation will be rejected. The same manuscript will not be considered for future resubmission to the journal.
• Decline submission - when a manuscript failed to adhere to the journal homestyle requirements or failed to comply with the Author Guidelines as well as Terms of Service.

 

The observations and associated materials published or posted by NeurosciRN are licensed by the authors for use and distribution in accord with the Creative Commons Attribution license CC BY-NC 4.0 international, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

 

All manuscript reporting observations made on human subjects must adhere to the World Medical Association Declaration of Helsinki which is downloadable HERE or accessible HERE. Similarly, all studies made on animal subjects must be approved by Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee (IACUC) in accordance to guideline or information provided at American Association for Laboratory Animal Science which is accessible HERE. National or institutional granting bodies, ethical approval and approval number must be provided in the manuscript. The journal reserves the right to request for and review all relevant documents needed to clarify such clearance or compliance.

 

Editors, authors and reviewers must adhere to the recommendations for the conduct, reporting, editing, and publication of scholarly work in medical journals stated by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which is accessible at http://icmje.acponline.org/. The recommendation can be downloaded HERE. The corresponding author (or submitting author), managing editor or reviewers must declare any potential conflicts of interests related to the work reported in the submitted manuscript. The declaration statement must be provided towards the end of the manuscript and the corresponding or submitting author is responsible to read, declare and sign the ICMJE conflicts of interests form downloadable HERE.

 

All novel or new research datasets related to DNA/RNA/protein sequences must be submitted to the relevant repositories hosted by National Centre for Biotechnology Information at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov. Gene expression datasets (RNAseq, microarray and etc.) should be deposited in the relevant public domain such as Gene Expression Omnibus at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/ or equivalent repositories. In the case where no public repositories are relevant or available, these datasets must be submitted as a supplementary information to NeurosciRN. All reference IDs for gene or DNA/RNA/protein sequences, gene expression datasets, vector sequences and etc. must be provided within the main text of the manuscript. In any circumstances, authors must make every effort to use official symbols or IDs for any of the well reported resources cited within the manuscript.

 

All submission (except for editorial section) must be accompanied with a cover letter to editor. While highlighting the novelty and the importance findings of the manuscript, authors are required to submit 3 to 5 potential reviewers (including their full name, positions, affiliations and email addresses) to be considered by the managing editor. The suggested peer reviewers must not be affiliated or involved with any parts of the study presented within the manuscript. Peer reviewers from the same country is permitted.

 

All manuscripts must be written in either UK or American english but not the mixture of both. Authors are responsible to ensure that the quality of the written english is acceptable, clear, concise and free from grammatical errors. Although the assigned or managing editor is responsible to proofread the galley prior to publication, the corresponding author (submitting author) assume full responsibility on the content (see Terms of Service), language and final presentation of the galley and must approve the final galley prior to publication.

 

Please use the following template files, which summarise the formatting for all the article types, to prepare your manuscript. Do not alter any formatting within the template and do not alter any sentences highlighted in yellow.

1. Editorial template (for editors only)
2. Mini-review template
3. Research notes template
4. Technical notes template
5. Case notes template
6. Data notes template
7. Hypothetical notes template
8. News and Views template
9. Errata and Corrigenda template

For Mini-review
Mini review articles consist of the following mandatory sections: "Abstract", "Introduction" and "Conclusions". Other sections can be named accordingly based on the topic of discussion. There is no limit to number of subtopics or sections within a mini review article.

For Research/Technical Notes/Data Notes/Case Notes
Research notes articles consist of the following sections: "Abstract", "Introduction", "Materials & Methods", "Results", "Discussion" and "Conclusions".

For Hypothetical Notes
A hypothetical paper consists of the following sections: "Abstract", "Background" and "Hypothesis".

For News and Views
A News and Views article does not contain any specific sections other than the mandatory "Abstract" section.

Requirements for all articles
The following sections must be appended to the end of any article types:

• Authors' names and affiliation(s): the first and the last name of each author must be provided. All related affiliations must be superscripted after the last name and defined after the author list.
• Keywords: author must provide three to five pertinent keywords specific to the article; yet reasonably common within the subject discipline.
• Supplementary Materials: including additional figures, tables, dataset, videos or additional data in any format to be provided and archived in the journal website.
• Acknowledgements: including grants that you have received in support of your research work including the costs to contribute towards the publication in open access.
• Author Contributions: articles with several authors, a short paragraph specifying their individual contributions must be provided.
• Conflicts of Interest: please refer to the explanation of "Disclosure of Conflicts of Interests" section above or state “The authors declare no conflict of interest".
• References: please refer to the "References" section below.

References
Please use American Psychological Association 7th Edition reference style for in text citation and bibliography formatting. You may refer to the APA 7th Edition quick reference guide here: https://apastyle.apa.org/instructional-aids/reference-guide.pdf. The APA 7th Edition style is available in most reference programmes such as:

• EndNote
• Zotero
• RefWorks
• Mendeley

Figures
All figure must be prepared in a dimension not bigger than 17cm x 25cm with resolution of 300dpi for colour figure and 600dpi for halftone/grayscale figure/mix mode. All figures must be provided as separate files in JPEG format as well as embedded within the main manuscript (towards the end of the manuscript).

Tables
Tables must be prepared within the manuscript using the Microsoft Word's table feature. Tables are provided towards the end of each manuscript.