Migraine-anxiety related dizziness (MARD): a new disorder?

L ast year we said goodbye to Ian Whittle whom we thank for all his hard work and welcome Peter Warnke from Liverpool as our new Associate Editor for Neurosurgery. We also say goodbye to many members of the editorial board and welcome new faces. The vitality of the journal rests with its reviewers and authors. We listed our reviewers in the December issue and reiterate our thanks to them. With over two thousand submissions a year the burden on unpaid reviewers forever increases. In order to reduce the burden we have tried to make an early decision on priority for the journal with the result that over a third of papers do not go out to review. This will include many papers that are well conducted and worthy of publication but which we consider are not best suited to the JNNP, usually because they are too specialised. In order to assist authors with the decision of whether to submit to the journal we have revised the website guidelines. In summary we wish to attract papers of general interest to the multi-disciplinary readership of Neurologists, Psychiatrists, and Neurosurgeons. Papers should be of direct clinical relevance and so we will not generally publish papers on normal brain function nor on animal studies. We hope that these changes will provide a quick decision for our authors whilst reducing the burden on reviewers. Nevertheless prioritising between good papers remains very difficult and to assist this we have established a weekly editorial meeting. As we enter 2005 we reiterate our thanks to reviewers and authors and hope to continue to attract similar high quality manuscripts to those we have handled over the last year.