ature Neuroscience is currently ranked at #70 among the journals in the Neurosciences, showing 572 papers cited a total of 8,661 times to date. In the November update of ISI Essential Science Indicators  Web product, Nature Neuroscience was identified as the journal with the most improved citation record, with a 15% increase in total citations. Such an increase indicates that Nature Neuroscience is an up-and-coming journal in its field. In this interview, editor Charles Jennings discusses the journal’s citation record and its editorial aims.

Many neuroscience journals are relatively specialized, whereas our aim is to publish papers of exceptional quality and significance in all areas of neuroscience. The field has become incredibly broad, and now spans everything from the biophysics of ion channels to the neural correlates of consciousness. In the past, the various disciplines have not always communicated effectively with each other, but that seems to be changing; there’s an increasing awareness that if you really want to understand the brain, you have to study it at many levels. Yet people are being overwhelmed by the sheer volume of literature, as journals become thicker and more numerous, and that tends to promote specialization at the expense of breadth. One of our main objectives is to provide a high-visibility forum, so that the best papers are seen by people outside the immediate field. We also publish a much more substantial "front end" than most journals, including news & views, reviews, book reviews, correspondence, commentaries, editorials and so forth. The aim is to provide a complete "information package" that will be accessible to any neuroscientist, and I’d like to think that by doing so we’re helping our readers feel more connected to the larger scientific community.

  How do you see the current state of affairs in the field covered by your journal, and what predictions would you make about the field’s future?

The most obvious trend I see these days is the increasing need for an interdisciplinary approach. A nice recent example is the so-called "language gene" that was published in Nature this month. It turns out to encode a transcription factor, and people with only one copy of the gene show deficits of speech and language. Understanding the causal relationship between the gene and the behavioral deficit is going to require studies at every level from molecular to cognitive neuroscience. There will be many more examples like this, as we start to reap the benefits of the human genome project and other genomic technologies such as microarrays.

I think neuroscience has a bright future. The questions it addresses are fundamental, so people are unlikely to lose interest, and they are also difficult, so they will not be solved any time soon. They also have immense practical implications, so there is a strong case for continued funding.

  Did you expect this journal to become highly cited, or is this surprising to you?

It’s gratifying, but not surprising to us. The Nature titles all have high citation impacts in their respective fields, and when we launched Nature Neuroscience, our intention was that it should establish itself quickly as a premier journal. I should emphasize, however, that achieving a high impact factor is not our primary goal. It’s a by-product of our main purpose, which is to publish papers of exceptional significance in all areas of neuroscience. I suspect that systems neuroscience and psychophysics papers tend to get fewer citations than papers in molecular or cellular neuroscience, but that won’t stop us from publishing them if we think they are important.

  What factors do you see that may affect the evolution of your journal?

Clearly, the web is affecting all aspects of scientific publishing, and technological change will be a major driving force in our future evolution. One thing we have done recently is to introduce Advance Online Publication, in which we publish papers on the web before they appear in print. These web publications are complete and definitive, and can be cited with a digital object identifier instead of a volume/issue/page number. It will be interesting to see how quickly the scientific community starts to accept these as "real" citations—there’s no reason why they should not.

I am sometimes asked whether Nature Neuroscience will still be in print five years from now. I don’t know the answer; print still has some advantages—it looks nice, for instance—but electronic publication is evolving rapidly and the gap is becoming narrower every year. So print journals may persist, but as web sites become more sophisticated and offer more features, I’m sure that the print version alone will no longer be seen as sufficient. We’ll have to adapt to these changes in many ways, some of which we can’t yet foresee.

Although the technology may change, our editorial mission will remain unchanged—to publish the best work in all areas of neuroscience, so that it reaches a wide readership. One of the advantages of being a multidisciplinary journal is that you are more "evolvable"—a highly specialized journal will thrive only as long as its subject matter remains topical, whereas a journal with a broader purview is better placed to cover new fields as they emerge.

  What would you like to convey to the general public about this journal’s work?

One rewarding aspect of my job is seeing our papers covered in the popular press. We tend to get a lot of press coverage; that’s partly because neuroscience touches on many questions of deep human interest, but it’s also because we make an effort to provide a good service to science journalists. For instance, we try to write press releases that convey the excitement of our papers without over-selling the conclusions, and we also make our papers available to journalists in advance via our press web site. I think journalists appreciate these things, and have come rely on Nature Neuroscience as a good source of stories. That’s good for us, and it’s also good for our authors because it increases the visibility of their work. More generally, I think scientists have an obligation to explain their discoveries to the public who support their work, and I’m pleased that Nature Neuroscience can help to make that happen.

Nature Neuroscience
Charles Jennings, Editor
Nature Publishing Group, Macmillan Publishers, Ltd.