Special Issue – The Idea Behind

Over the past decade, my duty as editor of Central European Neurosurgery/Journal of Neurological Surgery A has been to bring together, every 2 months, a new issue including original articles, reviews, technical notes, and case reports, which ideally is interesting and stimulating for the reader. The scientific focus and the number of the articles submitted to the journal in the last decade reflect the substantial changes in the fields of experimental and clinical neurosurgery during this period of time. Some fields, such as spinal endoscopy, became increasingly popular with increasing numbers of submissions. Other fields did not remain in the scientific focus, either being accepted as routine over time or due to unconvincing results, and the number of submissions went down.

As editor but also as an active academic neurosurgeon, I consider issues centered around one of the “hot” topics as ideal, thereby avoiding the need for searching in different, not just neurosurgical, journals for obtaining an overview of the state-of-the-art and new developments. However, the number of submissions to a neurosurgical journal is barely sufficient for compiling an issue with a defined focus. Therefore, I decided to collect, with the help of experts as co-editors, high-quality articles dealing with one of the “hot” topics and to publish a special issue every 6 months. Today, you are holding a special issue mostly dealing with the different aspects of brain mapping. I hope that you appreciate the issue and the concept behind it.