About the Journal

Neural Regeneration Research(NRR; ISSN 1673-5374), found in April 2006, is a peer-reviewed,open access (www. nrronline.org) international journal published monthly. The journal is dedicated exclusively to presenting creative scientific advancements on the subject of neural regeneration. It publishes articles on original experimental and clinical research, high-quality reviews, and perspective articles.

NRRhas been indexed by Science Citation Index Expanded (2019 JCR Impact Factor 3.171 and Q2 in the category of Neurosciences), PubMed and SCOPUS.

We hope that, with your support,NRRwill be a highly recognized journal in the field of neural regeneration.

Aims and Scopes

NRRpublishes papers on a broad range of topics of the latest advances in both the clinical and laboratory investigation of science topics with creative results that are relevant to intervention,repair, protection, and regeneration after nerve injury. Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, changes in translation and regeneration of adult neurons; repair and regeneration of axons and dendrites of injured neurons; changes of neurons, microenvironment and new vessels during neural regeneration; histomorphological as well as cell biology or molecular cell biology changes during intervention, repair, protection and regeneration after nerve injury; new theories,new technologies, and new methods in neural regeneration research.

NRRwelcomes academic and technological articles that provide innovative contributions to existing research. The journal publishes rigorous scientific articles with high technical standards,sound methodology, analytical and statistical methods, ethics of experimentation, repeatable results, comprehensive and convincing discussion,and data-supported conclusions without overstatements.

Welcome to submit your manuscript electronically http://www.editorialmanager.com/nrr/.

Abstracting and Indexing

NRR is indexed with, or included in, the following:Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-E), Web of Science, PubMed, PubMed Central, SCOPUS,EMBASE/Excerpta Medica, Scimago Journal Ranking, DOAJ, BIOSIS previews (BP), ChemicalAbstracts (CA), Index of Copurnicus (IC), OvidSP,Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) and Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD).

International Editorial Board

Editors-in-Chief

· Kwok-Fai So, Member, Chinese Academy of Sciences; Fellow, National Academy of Inventors; Director, GHM Institute of Neural Regeneration, Jinan University; Jessie Ho Professor in Neuroscience, Department of Ophthalmology of Li Ka Shing Faculty of Medicine, The University of Hong Kong;Chairman, Board of Directors of China Spinal Cord Injury Network; Director, Hong Kong Spinal Cord Injury Fund (HKSCI Fund).

· Xiao-Ming Xu, Professor and Mari Hulman George Chair of Neurological Surgery, Scientific Director, Spinal Cord and Brain Injury Research Group, Indiana University School of Medicine,USA; Member, Scientific Review Group,National Institutes of Health.

Associate Editors

· Vance P. Lemmon, Walter G. Ross Distin guished Chair, Department of Developmental Neuroscience and Neurological Surgery,University of Miami, USA.

· George M. Smith, Professor, Department of Neuroscience, Shriners Hospitals Pediatric Research Center, Temple University School of Medicine, USA.

Editorial Board Members

The editorial board led by Professor Kwok-Fai So and Xiao-Ming Xu comprises over a hundred members who are dedicated to developing a journal presenting outstanding peer-reviewed,evidence-based scholarly research in neural regeneration.

Rigorous Peer Review

NRRwill rigorously peer-review submissions and publish all papers that are judged to be technically sound and to uphold appropriate ethical standards. Judgments about the importance of any particular paper are then made after publication by the readership, who are the most qualified to determine what is of interest to them.Before manuscripts are sent for review, potential peer reviewers are contacted to confirm their availability and absence of conflicts of interest as well as their agreements to have their names included in the published paper.

NRRuses a double-blinded peer review system.

NRRprovides at least three effective peer-review reports to each submitted manuscript. Once the manuscript has passed quality control, it will be assigned to the strict double-blinded peerreview process. EachNRRsubmission will be given detailed assessment by 3-5 external reviewers.

The time from the submission to the first editorial decision averages 4 weeks. The review time can be shortened to 7 days for the paper with sophisticated comments transferred by recognized journals. After evaluation, the Academic Editor chooses between the following decisions: Accept,Minor Revision, Major Revision, Reject or sent for another round of peer-review.

Only 15-20% of the approximately 2000 manuscripts submitted per year are published inNRR. We are committed to giving fast and authoritative decisions for each submitted manuscript.

About one-third to a half ofNRRsubmissions will be rejected by the first round of editorial review and will not enter the peer review process. Quick rejection decision will help the authors to submit the rejected manuscript to other journals as soon as possible and will not delay the final publication of the article. A peer-review report together with the reviewer’s name, if permitted, is posted at the end of the article.

Authors who receive a decision of Minor Revision or Major Revision have 21 days to resubmit the revised manuscript.

If you are submitting a revised manuscript, include the following items with your revised submission:

· Response to reviewers form: Address the specific points made by each reviewer.

· Revised manuscript (marked-up copy):Include a marked-up copy of your manuscript file showing the changes you have made since the original submission.

· Revised manuscript (clean copy): Upload a clean copy of your revised manuscript that does not show your changes.

Criteria for Publication

· The study presents the novel results of pri mary scientific research.

· Experiments, statistics, and other analyses are performed to a high technical standard and are described in sufficient detail.

· Results reported have not been published elsewhere.

· Conclusions are first-time publications, pre sented in an appropriate fashion and are supported by the data.

· The research meets all applicable standards for the ethics of experimentation and research integrity.

· The article adheres to appropriate reporting guidelines and community standards for data availability.

· The article is presented in an intelligible fashion and written in American English.

For more publication criteria, please seeAdditional file 1.

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically http://www.editorialmanager.com/nrr/.

Cover letter

Authors are strongly encouraged to provide as much information as possible to the editors,including:

· Declaration that the manuscript is original,has not been submitted to or is not under consideration by another publication and has not been previously published in any language or any form, including electronic.

· Indication that all authors approve the final version of the manuscript and of its submission toNRR.

· Disclosure of all funding sources (including the name of granting agencies, grant numbers, and grantees)

· Recommendation of 3-5 scientists as potential peer reviewers for your manuscript, including their contact information. The recommenced reviewers should be in the same field of your study, but not from the same institutions and have not copublished articles previously.

· Once submitted toNRR, the manuscript should not be submitted to other journals, whether it is undergoing or awaiting the paper review process.

Transfer of copyright agreement

Once your paper is successfully submitted, all copyright license agreements (Additional file 2)should be signed by all authors and uploaded to the editorial system.

Article Type

· Review:Reviews are topical reviews that cover a current topic of interest in neural regeneration.Authors from internationally renowned laboratories who have acquired outstanding achievements are invited to write reviews. The invited reviews should introduce compelling new stories about how scientists or laboratories yielded their striking thoughts or achievements, rather than simply describe their research progress or current status in the field of neural regeneration.

Submit an outline for your paper before writing,and submit the manuscript within 2 months after receiving permission from theNRReditorial committee.

Word limit: 3000-5000 words not including the abstract, 50-80 references.

· Perspective:Authors from internationally renowned laboratories who have acquired outstanding achievements are invited to write a short paper. The invited perspectives should introduce compelling new stories about how scientists or laboratories yielded their striking thoughts or achievements. These papers will provide readers with novel perspectives on the thoughts and insights of neural regeneration researchers.

Word limit: 1000-1500 words not including references, 1-2 authors, 10 references maximum,no abstract, 1 figure required.

· Research Article:NRRwill consider manuscripts on any clinical or basic science topic with creative results that are relevant to intervention, repair,protection, and regeneration after nerve injury.

Word limit: 4000-6000 words, 30 references minimum.

· Imaging in Neural Regeneration:We will consider photographic, radiographic, or artistic images that have excep-tional visual impact and have relevance to nerve regeneration, nerve injury and disease repair.

Word limit: 1500-2000 words, no abstract, 2-3 figures required to display the relationships between histology, nerve repair, nerve regeneration, and function.

· Letters to the Editor:Brief communications and case reports should be labeled as such and must offer an im-portant new observation and not simply review the literature. In rare instances, we will consider case reports for this article type, but only if the topic is extraordinarily novel.Templates forNRRpapers (Review, Perspective,Research Article, and Imaging in Neural Regeneration) are shown inAdditional file 3.

Reporting Guidance

Manuscripts should be prepared in accordance with ICMJE Recommendation for the Conduct,Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly work in Medical Journals. The following guidelines should be followed when writing an article:

· ARRIVE guideline (Animal Research: Reporting of In Vivo Experiments)

· CONSORT statement (CO Nsolidated Standards of Reporting Trials)

· TREND statement (Transparent Reporting ofEvaluations with Nonrandomized Designs)

· SPIRIT statement (Standard Protocol Items: Recommendations for Interventional Trials)

· STROBE statement (STrengthening the Reporting of OBservational studies in Epidemiology)

· PRISMA statement (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses)

· MOOSE checklist (Meta-analyses Of Observational Studies)

· STARD statement (STAndards for the Reporting of Diagnostic accuracy studies)

Submitted manuscripts should be written according to the specifications presented at www.equator-network.org. Additionally, self-assessment checklists and a flow chart should be provided upon submission.

Data Availability

Data-sharing statement in basic research

NRRencourages authors to upload original experimental data on international data hosting and management databases prior to or after publication, including original data, images, or tables. Such open access of data will increase study transparency, accelerate the scientific research pace, and establish a credible system of scientific research.

Data-sharing statement in clinical trials

Manuscripts submitted toNRRthat report the results of clinical trials must contain a data-sharing statement as inAdditional Table 1.

Open-Access Service Fees

Authors of invited papers may, at the discretion of theNRReditorial committee, be granted complete waivers for the open-access service fee.

When a paper is accepted for publication, the authors will be issued an invoice for payment of the open-access service fee. The open-access service fee is used to pay for online open access,development and maintenance of the editing and reviewing system, and data processing for exposure on Google Scholar, iPhone, iPad and Android smartphones, as well as for PubMed indexing and CrossRef presentation. The openaccess service fee will, at the discretion of the editorial committee, be reduced or waived for manuscripts from low-income countries according to the quality of manuscript. Consideration of research articles is not related to author’s ability to pay the fee. The cost for language polishing is billed separately.

Ethics

According to the ICMJE recommendations,the authors should follow all ethical principles for medical research involving humans and experimental animals.

Requirements for ethical issues related to animal experiments

· Medical researchers should abide by international guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals, the Weatherall report on the use of non-human primates in research(2006), and The National Centre for the Replacement, Refinement and Reduction of Animals in Research (NC3Rs).

· The authors’ institutional animal care and use committee that approved the animal experiments and the associated permit number(s) should be stated in research papers.

· The methods section ofNRRpapers reporting results of animal research must include required ethics statements, such as “The protocol was approved by the Committee on the Ethics of Animal Experiments of the University of ABC (permit number XXXX). All surgery was performed under anesthesia, and all efforts were made to minimize animal pain,distress, and death.” Guidelines for euthanasia methods approved byNRRfor use in animal experiments is shown inAdditional Table 2.

· Data and methods appearing inNRRpapers that are used to support conclusions should be shared for replication of the results by others.Original experimental data or DOI numbers registered in international databases should be provided upon submission to facilitate reference by peer reviewers and other readers.

· Original data from studies involving genes,proteins, mutants and diseases should be registered on international public databases,and the registered identifier should be provided upon submission. The international public databases suggested byNRRinclude Figshare or re3data.

· A small amount of data or certain special data may be submitted as attachments to the research paper for publication in the supplementary data section online.

· For data harvested from other open-access means, the source must be indicated. Studies involving animal experiments should be reported according to ARRIVE guidelines(https://www. nc3rs.org.uk/arrive-guidelines).Additionally, self-assessment checklists should be provided upon submission.Requirements for ethical issues related to clinical trials

· All studies performed using the human body or involving human samples should be registered in an international clinical trials registry platform, such as ClinicalTrials.gov, ISRCTN registry, Chinese Clinical Trial Registry prior to participant recruitment. The registry platform, register identifier and the date of registration should be provided upon submission and included in the abstract of the manuscript.

· The ethics committee that approved the trial and the associated permit number(s) should be stated in research papers. Clinical trial manuscripts submitted with no indication that ethical guidelines were followed will not be accepted byNRR. In addition, whether participants gave informed consent(Additional file 4) should be indicated. If the research does not require/not obtain informed consent, then reasonable reasons are needed.

Patient Consent Privacy

Identifying information should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, sonograms,CT scans, etc., and pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian,wherever applicable) gives informed consent for publication. Authors should remove patients’names from figures unless they have obtained informed consent from the patients. The journal abides by ICMJE guidelines: 1. Authors, not the journals nor the publisher, need to obtain the patient consent form before the publication and have the form properly archived. The consent forms are not to be uploaded with the cover letter or sent through email to editorial or publisher offices. 2. If the manuscript contains patient images that preclude anonymity, or a description that has obvious indication to the identity of the patient, a statement about obtaining informed patient consent should be indicated in the manuscript.

Clinical Trial Registration

Prospective and interventional clinical trials,which are performed to evaluate the effects of the interventions (study drug, surgical procedure,equipment, and behavior therapy) on health outcomes, should be registered in advance at a clinical trial registry approved by the WHO Registry Network. The date of registration and registration number should be indicated in the submission.Purely observational studies do not require registration.

According to the ICMJE recommendations,authorship credit requires:

· Substantial contributions to the conception or design of the work, or the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data.

· Drafting the work or revising it critically for important intellectual content.

· Final approval of the version published.

· Agreement to be accountable for all aspects of the work in ensuring that questions related to the accuracy or integrity of any part of the work are appropriately investigated and resolved.

All of these conditions must be met. Each author should be able to identify which co-authors are responsible for specific other parts of the work.In addition, authors should have confidence in the integrity of the contributions of their coauthors. Any individuals listed as co-authors on a manuscript will receive email confirmation of the manuscript submission.

A contributorship statement is required for every manuscript submitted and should outline who has contributed what to the planning, conduct, and reporting of the work described in the article. This should include both authors and contributors.

Alteration to the first and corresponding authorship after submission is not permitted.Any change in authors after submission must be approved by all authors. This applies to additions,deletions, a change of order to the authors’ names or a change to the attribution of contributions.Any alterations must be explained to the Editor.The Editor may contact any of the authors and/or contributors to ascertain whether they have agreed to any alteration.

Participation solely in the acquisition of funding,the collection of data or general supervision of the research group does not justify authorship. We wish authors to assure us that all authors included on a paper fulfil the criteria of authorship.Conversely, we also ask for assurance that there is no one else who fulfils the criteria that has been excluded as an author.

Competing Interests

Examples of competing interests include the following: board membership, consultancy,employment, expert testimony grants (including pending), contract research, lectures/other education events, speakers’ bureaux, patents(planned, pending or issued), receipt of equipment or supplies, royalties, stock/stock options/other forms of ownership, additional expenses not included in COIs already specified, other personal or professional relationships that may influence or appear to influence.

TheNRRjournal requires that all authors must download and complete a copy of the ICMJE COI disclosure form (Additional file 5). A statement of competing interests will be included in the published articles. If there are no competing interests for any authors, the default statement on the published article will be ‘None declared’.

Plagiarism

NRRwill strictly follow the requirement of Committee on Publication Ethics.

· AllNRRpapers will be screened twice using Crosscheck to verify originality, once after submission and again prior to publication.NRRpapers will be likely screened more times if they do not pass the prior two screening pro?cedures. The screening results will be provided to the authors.

· EachNRRpaper should be original, with a similarity index of < 5% against any single paper in the database and with a total similarity index of < 20% against all papers in the database.

· Similarity between new submittedNRRmanuscript and the papers previously published by the same research team or author should be no more than 50%

· No retracted articles should be cited.

· For dishonorable events anonymously or non-anonymously reported, editors will contact the corresponding author of the paper with the issue and provide the results to the person who reported the event.

· For dishonorable events including redundant(duplicate) publication, suspected plagiarism,and undisclosed conflicts of interest,NRRwill abide by the regulations suggested by COPE guidelines (http://publicationethics.org/resources).

Corrections and Retractions

NRRpublishes corrections, retractions, and expressions of concern as appropriate, and as quickly as possible. We follow the ICMJE and COPE guidelines where applicable.

Corrections: A notice of correction will be issued byNRRto document and correct substantial errors that appear in online articles when these errors significantly affect the content or understanding of the work reported (e.g., error in data presentation or analysis) or when the error affects the publication’s metadata (e.g., misspelling of an author’s name). In these cases,NRRwill publish a correction that will be linked to the original article.In very rare cases, we may choose to correct the article itself and re-post it online. If that course is taken, a correction notice will also be created to document the changes to the original article.

Author-initiated retractions:NRRwill retract an article at the authors’ request at any time unless it is under review for a possible violation of Responsible Conduct Regarding Scientific Communications. At the authors’ option, the retraction notice may simply state that the article has been retracted at the authors’ request.Alternatively, the authors may provide a brief explanation of the error(s) prompting the retraction. However, statements of retraction may not assign blame to specific authors or laboratories.

Editorial retractions: The editors reserve the right to retract an article at any time after publication without the consent of the authors if an investigation by an appropriate authority reveals a violation ofNRR’s Ethics Policy.

To request a correction/retraction, please contact the editorial office directly at szb@nrren.org.

Open-Access Publication

NRRis a global open access journal accepted by DOAJ.NRRapplies the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 License to works we publish. This license allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work noncommercially, as long as the author is credited and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.

Anyone interested in reading your research can get free access to your paper at our official website(www.nrronline. org) or PubMed Central.

Authors’ Rights

All authors (or their employers) retain copyright in their work.NRRrequires the authors to provide an exclusive licence to allow the journal to publish the article in related websites and social media and sublicece the rights.

TheNRRAuthor Licence allows authors to use their articles for their own non-commercial purposes without seeking permission fromNRR- the only condition being that a full reference or link to the original is included. Permission fromNRRis required only when articles are used for commercial purposes.

Copyright/Permissions after Publication

· The publisher retains all rights concerning assembling, printing, reproducing, translating,disseminating, exhibiting, publishing, retrieving and indexing part or all of the contents of the article.

· After signing transfer of copyright with the journal, the authors retain the rights.

· In not-for-profit circumstances, when cited appropriately, the use, dissemination and reproduction of part or all of the contents of the article is permitted.

Preprints Policy

NRRaccepts the submission of manuscripts that have previously been posted on a nonprofit preprint server. Authors should notifyNRRof any preprint related to a manuscript submission.Allowing submission does not, of course,guarantee that an article will be sent out for review; it simply reflects a belief that availability on a preprint server should not be a disqualifier for submission. Authors are requested to update any pre-publication versions with a link to the final published article. Authors may also post the final published version of the article immediately after publication. Authors should not assign copyright during the preprint process; authors should retain copyright in their work when posting to a preprint server. Preferably, authors should only grant “no re-use” licenses to their preprints.

Reprints/Subscriptions

We are committed to providing one journal copy and five high-quality reprints to authors for free with a variety of customizations and delivery options available. Reprints can be purchased as print or electronic reprints and as trans-lated articles, and will be customized to your specific requirements and shrink-wrapped.

Dissemination after Publication

Once the paper is published, it will be scheduled for dissemination toNRR’s editorial board members, peer reviewers, authors, readers,and academic experts in the field of neural regeneration via e-Newslettter.

After publication, the papers online can be rapidly retrieved and exposed via Google Scholar, iPhone,iPad and Android smart phones.

Contract Us

English website:http://www.nrronline.org/

Chinese website:http://www.sjzsyj.com.cn

Submission website:http://nrr.edmgr.com/

Telephone:+86(24)23380576/

+86-13804998773

Author inquiries:bwb01@nrren.org

WeChat Official Account:sjzsyj_nrr