by Günther Deuschl
The wealth of scientific information is increasing and there are many ways to cope with this. Some of us are screening the most important journals for interesting papers as their way to keep up to date with the news in the field. Most of them give up after some time. Others restrict this to reading their specialty journals only or leave it to specific questions which they have to solve. Others rely on readers digest formats covering the most important papers of the month. This is meanwhile available by several undisclosed providers and is sent to many of us by e-mail without request. Fortunately most go to congresses to learn about the news. As a matter of fact Medicine is covered meanwhile in 6618 journals, Neurosciences has 517 journals and Neurology has 146 Journals. Going further down to neurological subspecialties there are still several journals which publish peer-reviewed information.
What we read is depending on what we need (to know). This is different for neurologists of different subspecializations. Nevertheless there is a core of common interest for those who are interested in general neurology besides their subspeciality.
Neuropenews, the incoming editor-in-chief Elena Moro and the incoming senior-member of the Neuropenews team, Hans-Christoph Diener have decided to create their way to help with this problem. They will introduce a new format which is another very interesting approach to this problem. They will report and comment one ‘paper of the month’ which is chosen in the following way: Prof. Diener is monthly screening all important journals related to neurology for papers which he considers important for the general neurologist. He has a long track record in doing this because he is editing himself a journal which is collecting the most important monthly news in German language and he is serving for several other institutions as a provider of such news. Therefore, we are glad that he is now joining Neuropenews to do a similar task for our newsblog. He will propose 5-10 papers which he considers the most interesting ones for the general neurologist and then the editorial team of Neuropenews and myself will chose the top candidate among these papers. Given all the above mentioned constraints, this will be a subjective selection but probably not the worst given the number of years of experience involved. I am happy that I can announce this new format. We hope that it will get frequently read, always commented on if necessary and increase the attraction of Neuropenews.
