Editorial

Dear colleagues and friends,

Effective from the 1st of January, I took over responsibility as the Editor-in-Chief of Neurosurgical Review from Helmut Bertalanffy. I would like to thank Helmut and his editorial team for the fantastic job they have done in overseeing the journal over the past 12 years. Their work has broadened the acceptance of the journal within the international neurosurgical community and, as a direct result, driven its impact factor to increase remarkably to 2.176. Consequently, Neurosurgical Review has become one of the five most important international neurosurgical journals. Before the editorial team changed, Springer Publishing company had decided to publish the journal from 2016 exclusively in an online version. Along with this change, the managing editorial software was also renewed.

The journal will now be managed by a group of neurosurgical collaborators at Essen university hospital (Phillipp Dammann, Nicolai El Hindy, Ramazan Jabbarli, and Karsten Wrede) supported by the local editorial office represented by Sandra Braun.

One of our major aims is to be as fast as possible in reviewing and publishing any submitted manuscript. This will lead to a certain number of papers being rejected immediately after submission, if their priority does not seem to be sufficient for the review process. Furthermore, it will be our policy to publish only a minimal number of Case Reports, most likely resulting in an immediate rejection of these manuscripts.

We will soon inaugurate new software that will automatically check all manuscripts for plagiarism. Also, the editorial board will be re-organized to some extent. With the appointment of some younger international editorial board members, we will both try to speed up the review process and to bring some new innovative ideas into our board. It is our dedicated wish to incorporate more international experts in our board, in particular coming from Africa, America, Asia, and Australia.

We would like to enlarge the readership of Neurosurgical Review by increasing the number of high quality original research and by the establishment of new manuscript formats. Among the changes that we are considering with this goal in mind is the inauguration of a new type of paper that we call: “Short Review.” This publication type would condense a “typical” review article by summarizing recent scientific achievement and answering an “up-to-date-question” that is regarded as of a broad importance for the neurosurgical readership.

Accordingly, we will try to further increase the impact and quality of Neurosurgical Review.

Please help us to achieve our aims by submission of many excellent manuscripts!

Thank you for your support!

Ulrich Sure, Essen, Germany