About Behavioral and Brain Functions

What is Behavioral and Brain Functions?

Behavioral and Brain Functions is an Open Access, peer-reviewed, online journal that encompasses all aspects of neurobiology where the unifying theme is behavior or behavioral dysfunction.

Behavioral and Brain Functions is aimed at the scientific community interested in behavioral and cognitive neuroscience, investigating the psychological, computational, and neuroscientific bases of normal and abnormal behavior including the mind. The interdisciplinary nature of the field covers developments in human and animal behavioral science, neuroscience, neuropsychology, cognitive psychology, neurobiology, linguistics, computer science, and philosophy.

Behavioral and Brain Functions will provide a forum for exciting findings within behavioral and cognitive neuroscience. The journal's electronic format allows for the immediate publication of accepted articles and the presentation of large data sets, and supplemental information.

Content overview

Behavioral and Brain Functions considers the following types of articles:

• Research: reports of data from original research.
• Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative descriptions of any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually written by opinion leaders that have been invited by the Editorial Board.
• Methodology articles: present a new experimental method, test or procedure. The method described may either be completely new, or may offer a better version of an existing method. The article must describe a demonstrable advance on what is currently available.
• Hypotheses: short articles presenting an untested original hypothesis backed solely by previously published results rather than any new evidence. They should outline significant progress in thinking that would also be testable.
• Short reports: brief reports of data from original research.
• Commentaries: short, focused articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders invited by the Editorial Board.
• Study protocols: describe proposed or ongoing research, providing a detailed account of the hypothesis, rationale, and methodology of the study.
• Debate articles: present an argument that is not essentially based on practical research. Debate articles can report on all aspects of the subject including sociological and ethical aspects.
• Book reviews: short summaries of the strengths and weaknesses of a book. They should evaluate its overall usefulness to the intended audience.

Peer review policies

• Manuscripts submitted to Behavioral and Brain Functions will generally be reviewed by two experts with the aim of reaching a first decision within six weeks.
• Reviewers will be asked to evaluate whether the manuscript is scientifically sound and coherent, whether it duplicates already published work, and whether or not the manuscript is sufficiently clear for publication. Reviewers will also be asked to indicate how interesting and significant the research is.
• The Editor-in-Chief will reach a decision based on these reports and, where necessary, he will consult with members of the Editorial Board.

Edited by Terje Sagvolden, Behavioral and Brain Functions is supported by an international Editorial Board.

Publishing in Behavioral and Brain Functions

All articles will be listed in PubMed immediately upon acceptance (after peer review), and will be covered by PubMed Central, Thomson Reuters (ISI), CAS and Scopus.

Articles in Behavioral and Brain Functions should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. However, because articles in this journal are not printed, they do not have page numbers. Instead, they have a unique article number.

The following citation:

Behav Brain Funct 2004, 2:1

refers to article 1 from volume 2 of the journal.

As an online journal, Behavioral and Brain Functions does not have issue numbers either. Each volume corresponds to a calendar year.

To keep up to date with the latest articles from Behavioral and Brain Functions, why not register to receive alerts? Registration also enables you to customise your subject areas of interest, store your searches, and submit your manuscripts.

Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts should be submitted electronically to Behavioral and Brain Functions using the online submission system. Full details of how to submit a manuscript are given in the instructions for authors.

General journal policies

Behavioral and Brain Functions is published by BioMed Central, an independent publisher committed to ensuring peer-reviewed biomedical research is Open Access. That means it is freely and universally accessible online, it is archived in at least one internationally recognised free access repository, and its authors retain copyright, allowing anyone to reproduce or disseminate articles, according to the BioMed Central copyright and licence agreement. Behavioral and Brain Functions however, has taken this further by making all its content Open Access.

Behavioral and Brain Functions's articles are archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and also in repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France and in e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications. The journal is also participating in the British Library's e-journals pilot project, and plans to deposit copies of all articles with the British Library.

BioMed Central is working closely with the Institute for Scientific Information to ensure that citation analysis of articles published in Behavioral and Brain Functions will be available.

Behavioral and Brain Functions is able to deliver summaries of frequently updated content via Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. These are accessible via the orange "XML" button at the top of the list of recent articles or the list of most accessed articles. For more information about RSS feeds see our publisher's website.

For further information about general policies please see the instructions for authors.

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