Editorial : methods and models in sleep research

Abstract

It has been our great pleasure to edit this Special Issue on “Methods and models in sleep research” as a tribute to Vincenzo Crunelli. After 18 years as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Neuroscience Methods Vincenzo stepped down on 31st December 2017. His experience and dedication have been invaluable to set the Journal as a leading academic journal in the field of neuroscience methods and techniques.

One of his initiatives was the regular publication of journal issues dedicated to the review of emerging thecnological advances and questions on a specific topic. Some of these Special Issues gathered contributions presented at international workshops dealing for example with computational neuroscience (volumes 169 (2008); 210 (2012); 220 (2013)) or behavioral measurements (volumes 268 (2016) and 300 (2018)). Others focused on methods and models for the study of neurological diseases (volumes 252 (2015); 260 (2016); 265 (2016); 272 (2016); 292 (2017)) or reported the outcome of a challenge for machine learning algorithms and analysis of Alzheimer’s disease neuroimaging data (volume 300 (2018)). In honor of Vincenzo’s own research interests, we decided to launch a Special Issue on sleep - a complex behavioral state shared by all animals. [excerpt]