Developmental milestones as ACNS turns one year old

Abstract

The first year of Annals of the Child Neurology Society (ACNS) has been marked by extraordinary progress, and we pause here to review and celebrate the journal's successful launch. As an official journal of the Child Neurology Society, ACNS offers a venue for clinical and translational research articles, clinically relevant basic science articles, patient reports, teaching vignettes, and quality improvement articles. It also provides a forum for discussion of important professional issues and factors that affect the care of children with neurological disease. The society maintains its traditional relationship with Annals of Neurology, with its focus on more basic research. Several years ago, the American Neurological Association created Annals of Clinical and Translational Neurology (ACTN), and the addition of ACNS by the Child Neurology Society forms an Annals “family” of journals that together support a wide range of scholarly endeavors. We have a great collaborative relationship with the editors of Annals of Neurology, and authors of manuscripts that cannot be accepted by Annals are offered consideration by ACNS or ACTN. We expect this transfer option to eventually become an important source of articles for ACNS. The first few months were spent building the journal's infrastructure. It takes considerable behind‐the‐scenes time and effort to create policies, websites, social media accounts, the editorial board, a detailed guide for authors, letter templates, and an initial reviewer database. ACNS features several innovative initiatives, including a monthly Editor's Choice article that is highlighted in an email to the society's members, a trainee mentoring program for novice writers, and ACNS Fast Track, a rapid review cycle designed to generate an initial publication decision within two weeks of submission. The first articles began to appear in December 2022. The initial ACNS articles have been remarkably good, led by a series of excellent review articles by pioneers in the field. The first article after the opening editorial was Harvey Sarnat's eloquent review of axonal pathfinding and guidance in the development of the nervous system, a basic science topic with obvious clinical relevance. Curtis Coughlin and Sidney Gospe contributed an outstanding summary of pyridoxine dependency. These authors were instrumental in unraveling the clinical features, genetics, and molecular mechanisms of pyridoxine dependency, so not surprisingly, their review is a tour de force. Nordli and Galan provide a detailed case‐based review of magnetoencephalography, a valuable tool for identifying an epileptogenic zone and for pinpointing language, motor, and visual functions in relation to a brain lesion. Fernández and Peters provide an intriguing glimpse of potential clinical uses of artificial intelligence and algorithm‐driven machine learning to process data and improve performance. The ACNS research articles have also been outstanding, although we cannot highlight all of them. Roberts and colleagues analyzed prospective observational data from 276 babies in their Neonatal Seizure Registry, concluding that inability to tolerate oral feedings by the time of