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JNCCA - Journey from Conception to Infancy
*Corresponding author: Dr. Usha Saha, Department of Anesthesiology, Pain and Palliative Care, Lady Hardinge Medical College, Smt. Sucheta Kriplani and Kalawati Saran Children’s Hospitals, New Delhi, India. usha_shivsaha@yahoo.com
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Received: ,
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How to cite this article: Saha U. JNCCA - Journey from Conception to Infancy. J Neonatal Crit Care Anesth. doi: 10.25259/JNCCA_4_2025
The pediatric category is a very wide range, up to and including, the age of 18 years since birth, a category in which neonates get ignored without receiving their due credit in terms of special care. Even textbooks only mention a little bit and then move on to infant and pediatric issues. The same lack of concern or fear is seen when conducting research and most researchers preferred to ignore or consciously avoided to include these high-risk babies. Hence, this category of patients was bereft of the benefits of advances in anesthesia practice. Even those researchers with the best of intentions would include patient age as up to 12/8/5 years etc., on paper, meaning to include newborns and neonates, but knowingly not including them, or having too small a number to make any meaningful interpretation. Pharmaceutical companies designing and producing anesthesia equipment were also not geared to have appropriately sized and designed advanced equipment. Fluids and drugs are dispensed for adult dosages with a risk of inaccurate dilutions, fluid overloading, wastage, and issues of sterility.
Neonate is a totally different and extremely special category of patients, from birth to 28 days of life, irrespective of the period of gestation, body weight, and size variations.[1] Often, they require surgery within 24 h of birth for survival. Besides the surgical conditions, they may suffer from various medical diseases, intracardiac shunts, chromosomal defects, congenital and genetic defects and syndromes, and multiple organ dysfunction. Many conditions are unique to this age, and often new for the anesthesiologist too, and add to the high perioperative morbidity and mortality.[2,3] Neonatal anesthesia is the most challenging branch of anesthesia and a super specialty in its own capacity. Even as late as the 19th century, in many countries, newborns underwent major surgeries without anesthesia, or using only muscle paralysis, as physicians felt babies did not feel pain, and were too weak to tolerate anesthesia.
Neonatal Anesthesia Society (NAS), a unique society of its kind in the entire World, aims to bridge this gap in knowledge through continuing medical education and Conferences to spread awareness about the need for special care in this age group; disseminate knowledge related to their anatomy, physiology, adaptation process, perioperative risk factors, prevention, and management of complications; measures to reduce the very high perioperative morbidity and mortality, perioperative monitoring, and resuscitation, to encourage research in this age group; and provides hands-on training through Workshops.
Within 5 years, this highly specialized society has become strong with 180 members and experts sharing the same goal. Following three conferences themed on basic important issues related to neonatal anesthesia, NAS is geared for the 4th annual conference (NASCON 2025) themed on another significant topic of concern, “Neuro-spine procedures in the newborn and neonate – challenges for the anesthetist” to be held in September 2025 at All India Institute of Medical Sciences Nagpur.
To further the cause of neonatal anesthesia, the first ever Textbook “Clinical Anesthesia for the Newborn and Neonate” was published by Springer in 2023. It has fifty chapters covering most topics in neonatal anesthesia, contributed by dedicated experts from all around the world. The book is easily available on Amazon in print and as an e-book, at a reasonable price, and will be a boon for any medical library.
JOURNAL
In pursuit of excellence, the need for another platform was felt, besides NAS, that would allow to share scientific information and research with the medical fraternity all around the world. This led to the conception of the Journal of Neonatal Critical Care and Anesthesia (JNCCA), a baby of NAS. The seed was sown in September 2023 and the first issue was published in May 2024. The official launching of the journal was done in July 2024 at the Inauguration ceremony of the 3rd Annual National Conference of NAS, NASCON 2024, in New Delhi.[4]
At the start, it seemed a simple task – starting a journal! Writing a chapter for a book, doing a research project or publishing an article or case report in another journal, seemed easier (as these are one-time jobs), and despite spending my entire life reading journals, I realized the immense involvement that is needed to make it run with success, a journal being a recurring activity, recurring editing, not forgetting the recurring financial implications. However, the Scientific Scholar team was extremely supportive and contributed immensely to allaying my fears. To start with, we have started biannual publication, until it gets its due acknowledgement in the medical world. Today, as we move into 2025, we have published 2 issues and are working toward the 3rd issue.
AIMS AND SCOPE
The name “Journal of Neonatal Critical Care and Anesthesia” was opted with a vision of wider authorship and readership, and to include a wide range of topics pertaining to newborns and neonates, and their well-being. The Scope of JNCCA includes Anesthesia in newborns, neonates, premature/ postmature baby, add-on surgery up to 6 months age, critical care, syndromes and congenital defects, oncology, palliative care, history, development and advances in neonatal anesthesia, common health problems of the newborn and neonate, investigative procedures (X-ray, computed tomography, radiation therapy, magnetic resonance imaging, echocardiogram, ultrasound, etc.), short procedures, vascular access, perioperative care, critical care and intensive care unit related, airway and ventilation, all surgeries (general, neurosurgical, cardiac, gastrointestinal, thoracic, open heart surgery, open/laparoscopic/endoscopic/robotic), pain, ethics, and research that has impact on postoperative outcome, including fetal and maternal health, fetal surgery, periviable baby, and perioperative neonatal resuscitation.
JNCCA is an open-access peer-reviewed journal committed to publishing high-quality articles in the field of Neonatal Anesthesia and common health problems of newborns and neonates. It is owned by NAS and published by Scientific Scholar. Manuscripts published are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 License (CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0), which allows others to remix, transform, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms.
Jncca.org has an in-house submission portal with modern technology with in-house plagiarism checks, available to editors and reviewers through iThenticate. Reviewers can accept or decline assignments, without even logging in. Manuscript references are hyperlinked to PubMed, CrossRef, and Google Scholar. It has an easy-to-find reviewer from the built-in database or through PubMed integrated into the system. As a manuscript moves through the review, editing, and peer-review process, authors can easily access status information without the need to contact the editorial office. JNCCA has its own unique URL (.org) identities with lifetime copyright, even while being branded with the publisher for global outreach.
While attention is given to the finest details, high-quality printing of journals is maintained. Scientific scholar takes measures at both issue-level and special articles, to effectively enhance the journal’s outreach, along with collaborations with various distributors and libraries for print subscriptions to enhance the growth of the journal. They promote the Journal by all necessary means (e-mailing and search engine optimization) to increase its usage, be it by individuals or institutions.
JNCCA endorses to conform to professional and industry guidelines and best practices in scientific publications, including Recommendations for Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals and Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing. Journal is published biannually, from January 1 to June 30 and July 1 to December 31.
Indexation and impact factors are important considerations that give the journal its weightage and reflect its quality, extent of its circulation and readership, and number of citations. How quickly a journal gets indexed depends on the number and quality of the articles published, and this in turn affects the impact factor. This defines the success of a journal and the onus lies on authors, editors, and reviewers. This is acceptable as long as the process is fair and non-biased.[5-7]
JNCCA is registered with CrossRef, ReadCube, and Portico abstracting partners, and uses PORTICO for archiving the articles. Each article is assigned a DOI number.
Manuscripts are published ahead of print, for improved citations, within 6–8 weeks of final acceptance by the Editor in Chief, i.e., the article is published online and can be cited and quoted using the DOI as a reference source. During this period, changes are allowed, but changes cannot be made after publication, without following accepted procedures for making corrections to the scientific record.
Scientific Scholar LLC (scientificscholar.com) fully supports open-access publishing models and well lives up to its mission “Share, Learn, and Improve.”
References
- Changes in the Newborn at Birth: Fetal-to Newborn Transition In: Clinical Anesthesia for the Newborn and the Neonate. Singapore: Springer Nature; 2023. p. :29-48. Ch. 3
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- Neonatal Mortality and Morbidity: The Burden In: Clinical Anesthesia for the Newborn and the Neonate. Singapore: Springer Nature; 2023. p. :3-10. Ch. 1
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- Impact of Maternal Health and Disease on Neonatal Outcome In: , ed. Clinical Anesthesia for the Newborn and the Neonate. Singapore: Springer Nature; 2023. p. :11-28. Ch. 2
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- Use of the Journal Impact Factor for Assessing Individual Articles: Statistically Flawed or Not? F1000Res. 2020;9:366.
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- Let's Move Beyond the Rhetoric: It's Time to Change How We Judge Research. Nature. 2018;554:147.
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