Peer Review & Editing
Section 1: Review & Editorial Policy
1. Review Policy: The journal follows a double-blind review process. After submission, the editorial office will conduct a preliminary review of the manuscript. The editorial office will reject the manuscripts which are insufficient in originality, having serious scientific or technical mistakes, lacking valuable information, or not in the scope of the journal. The manuscripts which have passed the preliminary review will be anonymously sent to two or more reviewers. The editor-in-chief will conduct the final round of review and the editorial office shall impartially select manuscripts on the basis of academic quality and the review comment. The authors must respond to the reviewers' every comment and submit the revised version in time. This process would be repeated until the reviewers and editors are satisfied with the manuscript.
2. Editorial Policy: All authors shall be responsible for their own writing. For the accepted manuscripts, the journal may make some technical or wording amendments. However, if the amendment involves a change of meaning, the editorial office will contact the authors for confirmation.
3. Review and Editing Process:
(1) Submission: The authors submit the manuscript online and will receive a confirmation email.
(2) Receipt: The editor receives the manuscript, sets a serial number and sends the number to the author via email.
(3) Preliminary review: The editor conducts a preliminary review. If passed, the manuscript will be sent out for external review.
(4) External review: The manuscript will be reviewed by at least two reviewers.
(5) Final review: The editor-in-chief will make the final decision (accept/modify/reject) taking into consideration the comments of external reviewers.
(6) Editing: The accepted manuscript will be edited, typeset and published.
Authors can contact the editorial office for any question on submission.
4. Timing: The editorial office will notify authors of the review result within 3 months after submission, during which time the authors cannot re-submit the manuscript to other journals. If authors do not receive any feedback within 3 months, they can withdraw the submission or re-submit the manuscript to another journal after they confirm with the editorial office. The editorial office will notify the authors in time once the decision is made. If authors cannot return the revised manuscript within the time prescribed, they have to apply for an extension. Unjustified delay of revision will be regarded as withdrawn of submission.
5. 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.
6. 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 xuebao@shsmu.edu.cn. 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.
Section 2: Correction and Retraction.
1. 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.
2. Correction: If there appears to be an unintended scientific mistake in the article which would not lead to significant impacts on the results and conclusions, 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.
3. 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 conclusions 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.