In official partnership with:

The Swedish Society of Spinal Surgeons (4S)

Special Issue Title:
The power of national and collaborative registries in spine research

Team:
Editor-in-Chief, Neurospine:
Prof. Inbo Han

Deputy Editor, Neurospine:
Prof. Jin Sung Kim

Associate Editor, Neurospine:
Prof. Sun Ho Lee

Special issue guest editors:
Ass. Prof. Adrian Elmi-Terander (Scientific secretary, The Swedish Society of Spinal Surgeons), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden Prof. Paul Gerdhem (Board of Swespine Registry), Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden Prof. Marisa Gandia (Chair, EANS IM Committee), University Hospital La Paz, Spain Prof. Claudius Thomé (President-elect of the EANS), University Hospital Innsbruck, Austria Dr. Victor Staartjes (Group Leader, MICN Laboratory), Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden

Call for Papers:
Dear Colleagues,

In official partnership with the the Swedish Society of Spinal Surgeons (4S), we are pleased to announce a Special Issue in Neurospine devoted to “The Power of National and Collaborative Registries in Spine Research.”

Scandinavian countries - especially Sweden - have a long tradition of national quality registries conceived for continuous quality assurance and sustained by robust infrastructure, governance, and high follow-up rates. When appropriately designed and maintained, these registries evolve into powerful research platforms that deliver population-level, high-quality evidence and enable prospective cohort studies and even registry-based randomized controlled trials (R-RCTs) with pragmatic enrollment and long-term outcome capture.

Beyond national infrastructures, multi-institutional collaborative registries can also deliver real-world insights: depicting heterogeneity in treatment protocols, quantifying surgeon and center effects on outcomes, and powering analyses of rare diseases and low-volume procedures with higher data quality than single-center series. With this Special Issue, we aim to (i) highlight the scientific value unlocked by mature national registries, (ii) showcase the Scandinavian model as a template for successful deployment and governance, and (iii) feature best-in-class collaborative registry studies from around the world.

We particularly welcome submissions based on prospective registry research and, importantly, a hierarchically higher layer of “research on registries”—including work on follow-up and attrition, data completeness and linkage, case-mix and risk-standardization, governance and consent models, implementation science, and methods to enable fair comparative effectiveness across centers and surgeons.

Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.e-neurospine.org by registering and logging in to the website. Once you are registered, you can access the submission form directly here. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline , and all submissions that pass the initial pre-check will proceed to peer review. Accepted papers will be published in the journal and featured on the Special Issue webpage.

We welcome submissions of research articles, review articles, and commentary. For planned contributions, authors may send a title and a short abstract (approximately 100 words) to the Editorial Office for preliminary consideration and announcement on the website.
Please note the following guidelines:

• • Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously or be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except in conference proceedings).
  
• • All manuscripts will undergo a rigorous single-blind peer-review process.
  
• • Detailed submission guidelines, including formatting requirements and other essential information, can be found on the Instructions for Authors page.

Neurospine is an international, peer-reviewed, open-access quarterly journal. Before submitting your manuscript, please ensure it is well-formatted and written in proficient English.

Keywords
National quality registries; collaborative multi-institutional registries; real-world evidence; registry-based RCTs; comparative effectiveness; surgeon/center variation; rare diseases; data quality & follow-up; hierarchical modeling; PROMs; data linkage; implementation science.

Timeline

Adrian Elmi-Terander (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden)	Paul Gerdhem (Uppsala University Hospital, Sweden)	Marisa Gandia (University Hospital La Paz, Spain)

Claudius Thomé (University Hospital Innsbruck, Austria)	Victor Staartjes (Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden)