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.