Since Neurointervention, the official journal of the Korean Society of Interventional Neuroradiology (KSIN), started publication in 2006, there have been several important steps of improvement: conversion from Korean to English in 2011, listing in PubMed Central and PubMed in November 2011, increase to 3 issues per year since 2020, being added in the Directory of Open Access Journal in April 2020, and listing in Scopus this year. Such progress was based on the efforts of all members, including editorial board members, executive board members of KSIN, and active reviewers all over the world. The journal, Neurointervention, has now become an international journal because of the active participation of authors abroad, which reached 76% of submitted articles in 2021.
There seem to be only 3 journals that specify the topic confined to neurointervention:
Interventional Neuroradiology (the official journal of the World Federation of Interventional Neuroradiology),
Journal of Neurointerventional Surgery (the official journal of the Society of Neurointerventional Surgery), and
Neurointervention (the official journal of KSIN). There may be other journals in other languages. Other specialty journals like the
American Journal of Neuroradiology, Neuroradiology, and
Neurosurgery have published neurointervention-related articles. A comparison of the journals shows a continuously increasing citation rate worldwide (
Fig. 1) [
1]. The citation rate for
Neurointervention has also increased over the years. Its calculated journal impact factors from the Web of Science Core Collection were 1.236 in 2017, 1.513 in 2018, 1.676 in 2019, and 1.703 in 2020.
When considering the increasing number of articles related to neurointervention, consideration of its identity (i.e., where neurointervention came from and what medical field it belongs to) is warranted. If its identity is not clearly defined, several medical fields such as radiology, neurosurgery, and neurology may either try to include neurointervention within their boundary or even exclude it as outside their boundary.
Could interventional neuroradiology, neurointerventional surgery, or endovascular surgery be independent academic fields? To answer that, the name of the field needs to be defined independently from the related medical fields the name came from. It would be necessary to define the specialty, recruit medical personnel from various fields, and communicate with related medical fields.
Neuointervention has been devoted to the development of neurointervention, the unique medical field related to high-end computing and automated equipment dealing with radiation, ultrasound, and radiofrequency, in addition to rapidly evolving device technologies. As a rapidly evolving medical field, efficient and effective management of publication practices is essential for the society journal. Because Neurointervention belongs to the KSIN as its publisher, the peer review and publishing process can be a burden to society members.
Automated screening tools may potentially enhance the peer review process by helping authors, journal editors, and reviewers to identify beneficial practices and common problems in preprints or submitted manuscripts [
2]. There are also many artificial intelligence (AI) programs that help editors and publishers throughout the publishing process, including manuscript preparation, bibliography and citation management, target journal selection, plagiarism prevention, peer review and quality assessment, and editorial workflow and publication production [
3]. The editorial office of
Neurointervention has already adopted some programs, including plagiarism checking and an e-submission system. Other AI systems should be considered for a more rapid and reliable review and publication.
As preprint servers are the latest innovation to speed the process of disseminating new science, preprints have been common practice in some disciplines for decades, but are relatively a new phenomenon in biology and medicine [
4,
5].
Neurointervention still has not clarified the preprint policy that needs to be answered. Are preprints acceptable for submission? Can preprints be cited as a reference? During the COVID-19 pandemic period since early 2020, the number of preprints also soared in the medical field [
6]. Many publishers have allowed the submission of preprints. It is time for
Neurointervention to announce the journal’s preprint policy.
Neurointervention is an international journal based on the diversity of its authors and editorial board members. It also has a unique regional scope, including a focus on characteristics of neurovascular diseases and stroke in Asian and Australasian populations. Citation by other journals has steadily increased in the Web of Science Core Collection. The journal is eligible to be listed in this database. The current status of the journal in the international network can be more easily found by being listed in this database.