We are now accepting online submissions at http://n.edmgr.com. All formats (Research Articles, Reports, Viewpoints, etc.; see below) can be submitted electronically. Please contact the editorial office (neuron@cell.com) for further assistance or see the Editorial Manager website for detailed instructions. If you are unable to or do not wish to submit the manuscript electronically, you will need to send four hard copies of the text, four sets of high-quality figures, and an electronic file of the text along with a cover letter to: Neuron, Cell Press, 1100 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02138. If you would like the reviewers to receive hard copies of the figures, it should be noted in the cover letter and four copies must be supplied with the submission. Authors are allowed to indicate up to three scientists whom they wish to exclude from the review process because of potential competition or conflict of interest.
If a manuscript is closely related to papers in press or submitted elsewhere, it will be considered for publication only after copies of these related papers are provided. Under no circumstances will any paper be considered that contains any data that have been or will be submitted for publication elsewhere (including symposium volumes). Revised manuscripts will be reconsidered only if resubmitted within 3 months of the date of the original decision unless there is prior approval from the editor for an extension of the deadline. For submissions that are not published, only available figures will be retunred to authors.
Organization and General Style of Research Articles
Summary
A single paragraph of fewer than 150 words. The primary goal of the Summary should be to make the general significance and conceptual advance of the work clearly accessible to a broad readership. References should not be cited in the Summary.
Running Title
No more than 50 characters (including spaces).
Introduction
Succinct, with no subheadings.
Results and Discussion
These sections may each be divided by subheadings or may be combined. Footnotes should not be used and will be transferred to the text. Gene symbols should be italicized; protein products are not italicized. Nonstandard abbreviations should be defined when first used in the text. All text should be letter quality and double spaced.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental Material including movies, figures, and tables that the authors wish to have attached to the online publication can be submitted with the rest of the electronic submission. If you are submitting hard copies, please include four copies of the Supplemental Material as hard copies or on disk, as appropriate.
Experimental Procedures
This section should contain sufficient detail so that when read in conjunction with cited references, all procedures can be repeated.
References
The references include only articles that are published or in press. Unpublished data, submitted manuscripts, or personal communications should be cited within the text only. Personal communications should be documented by a letter of permission. Abstracts of work presented at meetings may not be cited. Please use the following style for references:
Article in a periodical:
Sondheimer, N., and Lindquist, S. (2000). Rnq1: an epigenetic modifier of protein function in yeast. Mol. Cell 5, 163¨C172.
Article in a book:
Sorenson, P.W., and Caprio, J.C. (1998). Chemoreception. In The Physiology of Fishes, D.H. Evans, ed. (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press), pp. 375¨C405.
An entire book:
Cowan, W.M., Jessell, T.M., and Zipursky, S.L. (1997). Molecular and Cellular Approaches to Neural Development (New York: Oxford University Press).
Figures
Submitted figures need to be of sufficient quality for reviewers to judge the data. When uploading figures to the Editorial Manager electronic submissions website, the preferred resolution is 300 dpi and individual figures should not exceed 3 Mb in size. Our preferred file type for figures is .tiff, but we also accept .jpg, .eps, and .pdf files. Upon acceptance of a manuscript for publication, you will be asked to provide final high-resolution digital figure files for use by the printer. This set of production figures can be uploaded to our FTP site or sent on a disk, but not submitted via Editorial Manager. We also still require a final set of print-quality hard copies of the figures for all accepted manuscripts for color matching. If your manuscript has been accepted for publication and you would like to send us digital files of the images in addition to the hard copies, please see our Guidelines for Sending Electronic Images. Authors of published manuscripts will be charged $1000 for the first color figure and $250 for each additional color figure, which partially defrays the cost of separating and printing color figures. There are no page charges.
Figure Legends and Tables
Legends and tables should be included in the submitted manuscript as separate sections, following the style of the journal. Each figure legend should have a brief, separate title that describes the entire figure without citing specific panels.
Publication Schedule
Papers that do not conform to the general criteria for publication will be returned immediately, without detailed review. Otherwise, we try to let authors have reviewers' comments within a month. If revisions are a condition of publication, generally only one revised version of the paper will be considered. Articles will be published within 12 weeks of acceptance.
Distribution of Material
Publication of a research article in Neuron is taken to imply that the authors are prepared to distribute freely to academic researchers for their own use any materials (e.g., cells, DNA, antibodies, mice) used in the published experiments. In cases of dispute, authors may be required to make primary data available to the Editor. Nucleic acid and protein sequences as well as X-ray crystallographic coordinates, atomic coordinates (along with structure factors), and microarray data must be deposited in the appropriate database and must be accessible without restriction from the date of publication. Microarray data should be MIAME compliant (for guidelines, see www.mged.org/miame).
Reports
Neuron also considers submissions reporting exciting and provocative observations for publication as a Report. Reports must fit into fewer than 6 published pages. This corresponds to a text of fewer than 35,000 characters (including spaces) and less than 4 single-column figures. Reports follow the same general organization as research articles.
Minireviews
A Minireview discusses briefly a focused topic of recent experimental research and makes it accessible to researchers in other areas. It should direct the reader to a few (no more than 20) key papers in the field, which come under the heading "Selected Reading." Personal communications and submitted manuscripts should not be cited. A Minireview should provide a critical but balanced view of the field. Proposals for Minireviews should be sent to one of the Editors at neuron@cell.com.
Neurotechniques
Neurotechniques provide a unique forum for presentation of a "cutting-edge" technology that opens new avenues for experimental investigation of important neurobiological questions. Neurotechnique manuscripts should include in the form of a brief statement: the experimental objectives, the limitations of current techniques, and a detailed protocol of the new technique. In addition, there must be some data to demonstrate the power of the technique. Only a few Neurotechniques will be published during the course of a year, and publication is strictly contingent on the enthusiastic recommendations of the reviewers. The work will be judged on its technical merits, novelty, general interest, and ability to make interesting experimental areas accessible.
Viewpoints
Viewpoints provide a unique forum for presentation of a scientific argument or synthesis that may not fit the standard criteria for a Neuron research paper. Viewpoints should be closely tied to empirical data, and provide novel insights into a significant question or issue in neurobiology. In addition, the argument or theory put forth in a Viewpoint should lead to testable predictions. Viewpoints are no longer than 6 printed pages in Neuron, and only a few will be published in a single year. The work will be judged on its theoretical and technical merits, its general interest, and, most importantly, whether it really represents a significant scientific advance over existing theories in the literature.
Case/Clinical Studies
Case/Clinical Studies provide a unique forum for presentation of clinical and scientific data, on one or a few patients, which would be of significant interest to clinical investigators and basic researchers. The study should provide important insights into the etiology of a neurological/psychiatric disease or demonstrate the efficacy of an innovative therapeutic strategy, in a small number of patients. Work that illuminates the functional role of a given brain region as evidenced by an abnormal function in a subject with a well-defined lesion may also be appropriate for consideration as a Case Study. The work will be evaluated on its technical merits, novelty, and general interest.
Letters to the Editor
Letters to the Editor should present short, decisive observations of interest based on published data. They should not be preliminary observations that need a later paper for validation. For sequence analyses, authors must provide database accession numbers and other relevant information.
Presubmission Inquiries
Authors interested in feedback on presubmission inquiries can submit them in the form of a brief Summary or Abstract to neuron@cell.com.
