Journal of Clinical Neuroscience [Neurosurgery Wiki]

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====== Journal of Clinical Neuroscience ======

Publisher: [[Elsevier]]

ISSN: 0967-5868

[[Impact Factor]] (approx.): ~2.2

Scope: Clinical neurology, neurosurgery, neuro-oncology, neurovascular, neurotrauma, and spine

Indexing: PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, EMBASE

📚 Strengths
Broad Clinical Coverage
The journal covers a wide spectrum of clinical neurosciences, including neurosurgery, neurology, and neuro-oncology, offering cross-disciplinary visibility.

Global Submissions
It provides a platform for researchers from low- and middle-income countries or non-English-dominant regions who may be underrepresented in higher-impact journals.

Rapid Turnaround
Often provides quick publication timelines, especially for case reports and retrospective cohort studies.

Accepts Clinical Case Reports
It remains one of the few journals of its tier that publishes case reports, clinical audits, and smaller cohort analyses relevant to everyday neurosurgical practice.

⚠️ Major Limitations
Modest Impact and Visibility
With a relatively low impact factor (~2.2), the journal struggles to attract high-quality prospective or randomized studies. Its findings are rarely practice-changing.

Editorial Inconsistency
Some issues contain well-structured multicenter analyses, while others accept methodologically weak or redundant studies, particularly from retrospective registry data with little added value.

Lack of Theoretical Depth
Articles often lack mechanistic insight, focusing on descriptive statistics over explanatory modeling or translational science.

Overreliance on Registry Studies
A growing trend involves data-heavy but insight-poor studies, using large databases (e.g., SEER, NIS) to generate statistically significant—but often clinically trivial—associations.

Vague Peer Review Standards
Peer review quality is highly variable, with some articles featuring questionable methodological validity and minimal discussion of confounding factors or limitations.

Geographic and Citation Bias
Despite global submissions, citations are often self-contained within the same journal, limiting broader academic dialogue.

🧨 Critical Verdict
Journal of Clinical Neuroscience occupies a niche between higher-tier journals like Journal of Neurosurgery and open-access clinical repositories. While it offers a stage for practical clinical insights and global contributions, it suffers from inconsistent editorial rigor, limited scientific innovation, and an increasing susceptibility to data-driven illusion—publishing papers that are statistically dense but biologically hollow.

It is a useful venue for case documentation, observational series, and hypothesis generation, but it should be read with a critical eye, especially when authors make causal claims based on retrospective or administrative data.

http://www.jocn-journal.com