Peer Review and Editing

1.     The journal follows a single-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 comments (accept/reject/revise) will be passed to authors.

2.     For manuscript which is accepted but need revising, authors shall return the revised manuscript to the online submission system in Word format, or send it by email (zgog@163.net，or reply the E-mail that sent review comments) with the author’s phone number, fax number and back-up email address. If the revised manuscript is not returned within 3 months after the deadline, it shall be deemed as withdrawn.

3.     The review time of the journal is about 3 months. The manuscript may be still under review If the result has not been received more than 3 months after submission. Authors should contact the editorial office for confirmation before they submit the manuscript to another journal. Please keep a copy of the manuscript for it will not be returned except for special circumstances.

4.     All authors shall be responsible for their own writing. For accepted manuscripts, the journal may make some technical or wording amendments. Any amendment involving the change of meaning will be sent to authors for confirmation.

5.     Authors may make an appeal if they disagree with the comment of the reviewers. Authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to zgog@163.net. 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 on a case-by-case basis.

6.     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.

7.     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 a scientific mistake in published articles 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.