A NEW YEAR MESSAGE TO OUR READERS AND CONTRIBUTORS

Abdulla A.-B. Badawy

Happy New Year to our readership and contributors, to members of the Editorial Advisory Board and to the many independent expert referees for this journal, to members of the Editorial Team, and to members, officers and staff of the Medical Council on Alcohol (MCA), the European Society for Biomedical Research on Alcoholism (ESBRA), and to our publisher Oxford University Press (OUP). I wish everyone a healthy, happy and successful 2002.

Professor Gian Luigi Gessa has now been the ESBRA Chief Editor for a whole year and both he and Dr Giancarlo Colombo have been responsible editorially for most of the submissions in neuroscience and behavioural pharmacology. I wish to congratulate them for their exemplary editorial performance and I am certain of their positive impact on the standing and perception of Alcohol and Alcoholism. Professor Gessa and Dr Colombo thus complement an already strong Editorial Team dedicated to our contributors and wider readership, whose confidence in this Team, I am certain, is fully justified.

I would like to take this opportunity to draw the attention of our contributors to some important changes, which are detailed in the ‘Instructions to Authors’ section at the end of this, and future, issues. Firstly, for all new submissions, while remaining as brief as possible, particularly for Rapid Communications, the Abstracts must be structured into the following sections: Aims, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. This should facilitate the rapid screening of the Abstract by the ever-busy reader and bring this journal into line with other journals in this field. Secondly, because of the continuing increase in submissions and despite a continually rising rejection rate, a limit on the size of papers has been imposed. This should enable us to accommodate more articles in each issue and thus publish the largest number of papers as rapidly as possible in this bi-monthly journal. Rapid Communications will now be limited to four printed pages of the journal and a maximum of 3000 words. One printed page of the journal contains approximately 900 words, and authors should estimate how much space Tables and/or Figures will occupy and reduce their text accordingly. Similarly, a full-length paper will now occupy a maximum of six printed pages of the journal and up to 5000 words. To help achieve these limits, authors need, among other measures, to be as concise as possible in all sections of their papers and to avoid excessive referencing and unnecessary presentation of their results in more than one format.

The processing of typescripts can be enhanced further if authors initially enclose a disk of their paper along with the hard copies and, when sending the hard copy of the revised version, to enclose a disk of this version stating that this is the final (revised) version and to date this at the top of the first page. Authors should also give their e-mail addresses, if any, at the time of first submission, to facilitate communication with them and to expedite the correction of their proofs, which are now in most cases sent to them electronically. If authors take these recommendations into account in conjunction with the above measures regarding the length of papers, we can ensure the most expeditious processing of their submissions. We anticipate an even faster processing once electronic mail submission is uniformly introduced.

We should also like to encourage prospective authors to take advantage of the accelerated processing of Rapid Communications to submit their novel and interesting findings via this section. Our Reviews and Commentaries sections also include unsolicited contributions and we hope that authors will take the initiative to submit Reviews and Commentaries of topical, controversial and/or new issues of special interest in alcohol research and treatment. Our readers are also encouraged to use the Letters to the Editors section to air their views and/or criticisms of research published in the journal and elsewhere and thus enhance scientific debate. Finally, as the premier European journal in this field, Alcohol and Alcoholism has taken the lead by establishing a Book Review section for books published in European languages other than English, which is being coordinated by Professor Otto M. Lesch and Dr Jonathan D. Chick. We therefore invite alcohol researchers in mainland Europe to take the initiative and offer to review books published in their own languages and to communicate their initiatives to Professor Lesch and Dr Chick.

The Editorial Team of Alcohol and Alcoholism values its partnership with contributors to the journal. We assure contributors of our strong commitment to promoting both their interests and our partnership to enhance alcohol research and its dissemination. We therefore look forward to our continued collaboration in 2002 and beyond.





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