On behalf of the Journal of Korean Neurosurgical Society (JKNS), we would like to once again express great gratitude to all authors for submitting their articles to JKNS in 2018. A summary of the papers submitted to the JKNS is as follows. During the year, we received a total of 236 articles; all submissions were previewed by the Editor-in-Chief, and most were requested for peer review [2]. Among these articles, 38 are currently under review. Of the remaining 198 articles, 63 have been accepted for publication and 134 have been rejected. Overall, the acceptance rate is 31.8%.

Stratification of the articles by nationality (Fig. 1) revealed that slightly over half (50.8%) of the articles were submitted by researchers from South Korea, followed by those from China and Turkey (n=31, each). A majority of articles were submitted under the clinical article category (60.1%), followed by the case report and review article categories (Fig. 2). The article type case report, however, was accepted for publication only once because the editorial committee decided to restrict the publication of case reports per the JKNS policy. The acceptance rate of clinical articles, review articles, and laboratory research is 38.1%, 68.2%, and 21.1%, respectively.

It cannot be denied that the contribution of the authors and editorial board members was very important. However, we believe that the dedication of the reviewers was the most critical factor for improving the relevance of our journal. Therefore, our editorial committee selected best reviewers to convey our gratitude to those who reviewed the papers submitted to our journals in the past year. Three aspects were considered in the selection of the best reviewers : numbers of paper reviewed, speed of the review, and quality of the review [1, 3]. We requested the editors of each section to recommend reviewers who provided good-quality review, and the review quality was determined by the recommendation list of the editors. We checked the reviewing records to determine the number of articles reviewed, and duration taken for the reviews. Finally, six reviewers were nominated for the JKNS best reviewer of 2018; each reviewer has contributed to the fields of stereotactic and functional, neurovascular, neurotrauma, brain tumor, spine, and pediatric neurosurgery. We would like to announce the best reviewers in an alphabetical order of their last names (Fig. 3).

Stereotactic and functional   Neurovascular

Neurotrauma        Brain tumor

Spine           Pediatric neurosurgery

Although the editorial committee of JKNS selected only six reviewers for 2018, we would like to express our deep gratitude to all reviewers for their contribution to our journal.