Editorial Message

As we approach our 18th year of publication, we are delighted with the continued progress of the Journal.In 2012, we received a total of 183 manuscripts, with a monthly average of 15 and an average rejection rate of 49%.From these, we published a total of 83 articles, totaling 405 pages for the entire volume.Thirty percent of these were original articles.Seventy-three percent of published articles were from the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR), with 45% from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), 2% from the Gulf, and 25% from other Arab and EMR countries.The remaining 28% of published articles we received from Canada, China, Greece, India, Italy, Malaysia, and Turkey.Compared with the previous year, we have seen an increase in local submissions from KSA.This includes an increase in active submissions from the journal's affiliated organizations, the Saudi Association of Neurological Surgery, and the Saudi Epilepsy Society.We encourage all members of these organizations to submit their research for consideration in the journal.The average time from received to acceptance of original articles was 4 months, and 2.7 months for acceptance to publication.Reasons for rejection included unrelated topics, poor content, not meeting the requirements of the journal, authors failing to submit revisions and other necessary requirements, and duplicate publication.We are always striving to develop the peer review process to improve the scientific quality of published papers, and in 2012, we changed from a single-blind to a double-blind peer review process.Although this has introduced an extra step in the workflow of the review process,