Abstract
During the course of this past year, JCBFM has had amazing success. The journal has handled 735 manuscripts in 2005, a record high. As a result, we had to purchase additional pages to relieve some of the backlog of manuscripts on their way to the hard copy journal. I have also had to lower the acceptance rate to approximately 30%. The good news is that we are receiving manuscripts of very high quality in many different, but overlapping brain areas, and our impact factor for 2004 was 5.7. My hope is that the outstanding manuscripts continue to be submitted and the impact factor continues to increase.
I direct your attention to the ‘new’ Instructions for Authors of submitted manuscripts (in this issue). Basically, these new guidelines describe the idea that manuscripts to the journal must be shortened and the reference lists reduced. We cannot any longer afford the luxury of publishing manuscripts that are 12 to 20 pages long. You can easily read through these guidelines, but for original manuscripts, these should be no longer than 8,000 words (that is about 10 journal pages), with up to 40 references. Manuscripts not adhering to these length guidelines will be returned, unreviewed. I am sorry to have to impose such limits (for all types of manuscripts), but this is necessary for the future good of our journal.