IN Neuroscience

Research Topics

It is important for us to be able to bring together our peers around their hot topic - normally we do this through small conferences or holding sessions at major conferences. We therefore conceived Frontiers Research Topics to give researchers the opportunity to bring their own community together and bring focus to their topic.

A Research Topic can be a greatly impacting set of publications, unifying the efforts of some of the best researchers and encompassing the latest advances in a hot topic – a broad perspective bringing together key methods and results.

In Frontiers it is the researcher’s agenda that is important and articles are not invited, but carefully selected (as in a conference) from article proposals and rigorously peer-reviewed. Research Topics are meant to be an encyclopedic coverage of a focused research area with a collection of a minimum of 10 articles (Original Research, Methods, Hypothesis & Theory, Reviews, etc), but have no upper limit.

Like all research published with Frontiers, all Research Topic articles are freely available on the Internet and submitted to PubMed Central and other archiving facilities. The publishing fee for authors is discounted with respect from regular articles. For more information on publishing fees, please click here.

We created a special IT platform to manage and present Research Topics, making it incredibly easy to host a Research Topic using this platform. Each Research Topic gets a dedicated homepage on the Frontiers website, where all articles are aggregated. In the upcoming versions of Frontiers, it will be possible to initiate discussions, blogs, collaborations, share data, and much more. It is not a one-off affair. The site can become a hotbed of continued discussion, and regularly updated with new articles - much like a repeated annual conference.

So, Frontiers Research Topics are a fantastic opportunity for you to bring your research area to critical mass, to intensify collaborations, to promote the research area to funders, to make sure that the research area is represented in the knowledge base of academia, and to make each discovery in science count in the education of future scholars. As the ultimate continuous reference source by leading scientists, Research Topic articles also become highly cited articles.

Hosting a research Topic is a great opportunity to boost the visibility of your research interests and provide a broad perspective on the latest advances in your area. This is also an occasion to unite the best researchers in your area and intensify collaborations.

Hosting an influential Research Topic is not a task for just any excellent researcher: it requires a leader to prompt top researchers in engaging within this challenge and to manage the reviews of all contributions, thus securing a successful result.

The Frontiers Editorial Office shall assist you in every step of the organization, so to maximize the final impact while minimizing your concerns, but please keep in mind that your involvement and time investment are essential ingredients. Research Topics require some advanced planning and are often best carried out by two or more co-editors.

1. Topic Host Editors: You can host your Research Topic on your own, of course, but it is probably more fun (and less work!) to co-host it with several colleagues. We recommend 2-4 hosting Topic Editors for a Research Topic.
2. Title: The title of your Research Topic is of course very important. It should be one that can last for years as a focus of research.
3. Description: This is like an abstract, around 500 words. It should set the scope of your Research Topic. Make sure to think encyclopedic where you cover the range of questions, theories, methods, areas of impact, historical, etc.
4. Deadlines: Decide on a set of deadlines for abstract and article submissions.
5. List of candidate contributorswith potential contribution titles: Please note that Research Topic articles are not invited. Authors must propose articles that you will screen by sending you a brief description of what they would like to cover – like an abstract. Since you can be selective, you should start with the largest list of candidate contributors possible, covering every direction being taken and also related research that is important for your research area. Try to be as comprehensive as possible. The larger your topic is the more interesting the social dynamics will be when your Research Topic is published. Research Topics should contain a minimum of 10 articles, but we recommend around 50 articles in the end.

If you would like to become the host editor of a Research Topic, or simply suggest a topic, please click here. The organization is subject to approval by the concerned specialty chief editor. Please note that you should be a registered user of Frontiers if you want to host or suggest.

It is very simple to contribute to a Research Topic! Submit your article through the standard Frontiers manuscript submission. Select as associate editor the host editor of the Research Topic you wish to contribute to, and don’t forget to mark your submission as part of a Research Topic!

You are definitely encouraged to spontaneously provide your contribution to Research Topics.

You should first submit a maximum one page abstract to the host editor by email. Please include a provisional title, full author list, and format the subject of your email as: "[Research Topic title] –Your Name".

Following approval by the host editor, you will be invited to submit the full article.
For a full listing of ongoing Research Topics, please see the journal links on the right.
For author guidelines and manuscript instructions, click here.

If you have any questions, please contact the Frontiers editorial Office at: researchtopics@frontiersin.org

If you would like to become the host editor of a Research Topic or if you would like to simply suggest a topic click here.

Contact the editorial office at researchtopics@frontiersin.org if you have any questions or require more information.