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Editorial

KEEPING THE RECORD STRAIGHT—The Legacy Project and Letters to the Editor

Why is the old literature, from 5 years or 15 years or 35 or 55 years ago so important? Obviously, there are some fabulous experiments in the older literature, the experiments on which everything we think we know about the nervous system are built. But more importantly, paying attention to the past is one way to keep ourselves honest. Many of our sister journals reject a very large number of submitted papers, and more on the grounds of novelty than on the grounds of technical merit. This has created an atmosphere that pressures authors to sell their work to editors and reviewers on the grounds of novelty, and this in turn leads to the temptation to claim that one's work is newer than it may be, often at the expense of proper acknowledgment of what has been done in the past by others. Of course the Journal of Neurophysiology wishes to publish outstanding papers that break new ground and change conceptual frameworks. And some of the papers we publish will indeed truly be classics in years to come, although it is hard to predict which of the papers we publish today will have been most important 10 or 20 years from now. But as importantly, we believe that all the papers we publish should properly acknowledge the relevant literature, claim novelty when appropriate, admit corroboration (which can be very important), and attempt to reconcile, fairly, differences with other published reports.

Ensuring that a manuscript does appropriate justice to the existing literature is part of the review process. We ask all 1,500 of you who have reviewed for us in the past year to pay attention to appropriate literature citation in your future reviews. On our part, we will do our best to ensure that authors comply with reasonable requests that they modify their texts to place their work in the appropriate intellectual context. But keeping the record straight does not only deal with appropriate citation of the past, it can also deal with the correct interpretation of experiments, the proper controls, or a variety of other issues that are relevant to the evaluation of data collected and reported with all good intentions by authors who are trying their best to unravel difficult neurophysiological problems. Therefore we think it will be useful to provide a "Letters to the Editor" feature in the Journal of Neurophysiology. A "Letter" should be short (optimally no more than 400–500 words), deal with a single issue relevant to a paper that was previously published in the Journal of Neurophysiology, and submitted after correspondence with one of the Associate Editors or Chief Editor. We reserve the right to reject letters that are personal attacks, silly, or inconsequential. Assuming that the "Letter" makes a valid and substantive point, it will be sent to the author(s) of the original published paper to allow them a chance to reply, and the letter and the reply will be published together in the same issue.

We hope that "Letters to the Editor" will allow our readers to help us keep the record straight. We trust that anyone who finds a serious mathematical error in one of our papers will bring it to our attention. We hope that short discussions about appropriate or inappropriate use of statistics will ensue. We trust that failure to acknowledge in a major way previous work will come to our attention, and most importantly, we hope that failures to replicate published data will be aired, so that the field may learn of these in a constructive fashion. As editors, authors, and reviewers, we cannot expect to be always correct. We can however demand of ourselves that we always be scrupulously honest with ourselves and others. The Legacy Project and "Letters to the Editor" can help remind us all that we are all in the business of searching for the truth about the nervous system.

Eve Marder, Chief Editor
Journal of Neurophysiology
September 2003, Volume 90

This Article Full Text (PDF) Submit a response Alert me when this article is cited Alert me when eLetters are posted Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Download to citation manager Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Google Scholar Articles by Marder, E. Search for Related Content PubMed Articles by Marder, E.