Charvy Narain is an Associate Editor at Nature Neuroscience. In the budding tradition of Ai Lin Chun and Henry Gee, she recounts her Day in the Life of a Nature Neuroscience Editor.

My day as a Nature Neuroscience editor isn’t quite as colourful as Henry Gee’s (though I do think I’m better dressed than him: scroll down to the third paragraph below the picture of Henry’s adorable dog), and I don’t live anywhere as exotic as Tokyo, but it still has its own charm (which is perhaps just as well).

Nature Neuroscience is based in swinging New York, and once upon a time (well, two years back), I lived and worked there too. Then my husband inconveniently got a job in Oxford, and the powers-that-be at NPG kindly allowed me to keep both my job and my husband, and I moved to Oxford. I did my D.Phil. (everybody from Oxford will look down on you forever if you call it a Ph.D) at Oxford too, so this really felt like moving back with your parents, especially when I bump into people who I had last seen at the giant farewell party I gave three years back, who then proceed to ask ‘I thought you were in New York’. Many of them are probably secretly convinced that I’ve made it all up.

However, it’s all true, and I still spend considerable time in the New York office, often combining my stay with conferences and meetings in the US. Meeting our authors and referees in the flesh is always great: as an editor, you can know a great many people entirely through email and perhaps talking to them on the phone, without ever meeting them. So if you ever see me at a meeting, please don’t be shy about introducing yourself (and angrily demanding to know why I rejected your brilliant paper!).

Conveniently, Oxford turns out to have a Macmillan office, and once again, the munificent powers-that-be decreed that I could have a desk there (NPG is owned by Macmillan, in case you are confused by the connection between the two). Here I spend most of my days reading through manuscripts, and for each paper that I read, I write a short summary, which gets discussed with my other colleagues in New York, thanks to the magic of the internets. A lot of people seem to think that editors make a decision based on just reading the abstract and/or the covering letter, so I’d like to take this opportunity to say: THIS IS NOT TRUE!

Sorry, had to get that off my chest. At least one editor will read your paper, and in the case of more complicated decisions, one or more of the other editors may read the paper too, perhaps followed by a discussion at our twice-weekly telephone editorial meetings. The editorial meetings are also when we decide on things like what articles we should commission news and views articles on, what should go on the cover, suggestions for referees, and a whole lot of other things which go into making Nature Neuroscience the gripping read it is.

This mix of things is what makes this such a great job for me: that and not knowing what brand new research I’m going to read about today (well, I have a rough idea: I trained in cognitive neuroscience, and that tends to be the bulk of what I handle). As a working scientist, I often felt like I knew more and more about less and less, and one of the lovely things about this job is the breadth of research that I get to read about. It’s almost worth (metaphorically) moving back with your parents for.