1. Peer review policy: The journal adopts three-rounds blind review system. After submission, the editorial office will conduct a preliminary review of the manuscript. Manuscripts that do not conform to the publishing scope of this journal or have major defects will be rejected. Manuscripts which have passed the preliminary review will be sent to two or more peer reviewers. Authors must make revision to the manuscript and write a revision statement in respond to each comment of reviewers. The editor-in-chief will conduct the final round of review.
2. Editing instruction: All authors shall be responsible for their own writing. For accepted manuscripts, the journal may make some technical or wording amendments. Any amendment involving change of meaning will be sent to authors for confirmation.
3.Timing: The review result generally will be returned to the authors within 6 months after submission. If authors do not receive the notice of revision more than 6 months, they can re-submit the manuscript to another journal after confirming with the editorial office by phone or E-mail. If the manuscript needs revising, authors must return the revised manuscript, original manuscript and revision statement to the editorial office of the journal within 3 months. If authors do not return the manuscript before the deadline, it will be registered as a new submission.
4.Submission by editors: The editorial staff / editors / editorial board members should not be involved in publishing decisions on papers which they have written themselves or have been written by their family members or colleagues. Any such submission should be strictly subject to the journal’s usual editorial process. Peer review should be handled independently from the relevant author/editor and their research groups.
5.Appeal: The authors may make an appeal if they disagree with the comment of the reviewers. The authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to yyqxxb@cma.gov.cn or yyqxxb@163.com. Detailed reasons for appealing must be stated, including a comprehensive and reasonable answer to the reviewers’ comment. The appeal letter should also be stamped by the author’s institute. The editorial department will consider whether to change the decision case by case.
6.General Situation: Articles published online or in print are considered the final and complete version. In principle, the journal does not make corrections or retractions on published articles. However, in case of the situations described below, corrections or retractions may be carried out if truly necessary.
Correction: If there appears to be an unintended scientific mistake in the article which would not lead to significant impacts on the results and conclusion, the editorial office will publish corrections in the journal as soon as possible, detailing the changes made to the original article and indicating the source of the article. The journal will release the corrected new version of the article, and specify the changes to the original article and the date of update. In addition, the superseded version will also be archived. Readers can obtain it directly, but only the latest version of the article should be used for citation.
Retraction: In the following cases, the editorial office would retract published articles and issue retraction statements:
1) If an article is found to have severe scientific errors making the results and conclusion of the article unreliable;
2) For article suspected of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and data falsification, the editorial office will initiate an investigation and issue a statement to inform readers of the risks associated with the article. Once the investigation is completed, the result will be made public. If the academic misconduct is confirmed, the article will be immediately retracted and a retraction statement will be issued by the editorial office.
