Publishing Ethics

1. Peer review system

(1) The peer review is conducted by the editorial board of Journal of Chongqing University of Technology (Natural Science) in the form of double-blind review. All manuscripts are initially reviewed by the editorial office and then sent to a peer review, which mainly evaluates the scientific significance, innovation and practicality of the manuscripts, and the chief editor finally decides whether the manuscripts can be published or not. For the ones to be accepted, editors will screen them on the Chinese National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI). If the plagiarism rate is less than 10%, they will pass the detection. If the plagiarism rate is equal to or higher than 10%, they will be regarded as academic misconduct. For manuscripts with academic misconduct, the editorial office implements strict rejection procedures. The author must be highly responsible for the manuscript and check it word by word before submission to ensure that there are no fundamental errors, such as errors in terms of data calculation, formula writing, English title and abstract translation. The journal will organize experts to conduct random inspection on manuscripts every year. If there are serious problems with manuscripts, the main authors will be put on the blacklist of the journal and publicized on the official website. Simultaneously, the editorial office will inform the corresponding author or the instructor of the quality assessment of the manuscripts by email and will not accept your manuscripts thereafter.

(2) Special Column and Special Invited Manuscript Review: The above manuscript review process is also applicable to submissions for special columns and special invited manuscripts. Manuscripts submitted to special columns and special invited manuscripts will undergo the same review and editing process as regular submissions and will also be subject to the final decision of the editor-in-chief. The editor-in-chief is responsible for the entire content of the journal, including special issues. When organizing special columns and special invited manuscripts, the editorial office will invite authoritative experts in the field to serve as special invited editors. The responsibilities of special invited editors include proposing the themes of special column, soliciting manuscripts, organizing peer review and addressing any issues that arise during the publication of the special issue. The work of special invited editors is supervised by the editor-in-chief to ensure the fairness of manuscript review.

2. Duties of Authors

Each author must make a substantial academic contribution to the manuscript and agree to the order of authorship and the submission to the journal.

(1) Author Qualification

The following people are eligible to be authors:

§ Those who make significant contributions to the concept, idea, topic, design, and data acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of the research;

§ Those who write the manuscript or revise its essential content;

§ Those who conduct comprehensive review and check on the final published manuscripts, and make the final draft;

§ Those who agree to be responsible for all aspects of the research work and ensure to investigate and resolve any accuracy or scientific integrity issues in any part of the manuscript.

Those who do not meet all 4 criteria should not be regarded as authors, but if they have consent, they can be thanked in the part "Acknowledgements". When the author is a group, all members of the group should meet the above criteria and should be responsible for the quality, accuracy and ethics of the manuscript, and all authors should participate in determining the order of authorship.

(2) Originality of the manuscript

The author should ensure the manuscript is an original work with proprietary intellectual property rights and has not been publicly published at home and abroad, free from plagiarism, forgery and multiple submissions, not involving confidentiality and other copyright infringement issues. The work and words of others used in the manuscripts should be cited as a reference. All submissions will be screened via using CNKI's AMLC system by the editorial office.

(3) Conflict of interest

When submitting, authors should disclose any financial or non-financial conflicts of interest that may bias the research findings of their work.

(4) Correction

When authors become aware of serious errors or inaccuracies in their published manuscripts, especially non-subjective intentional errors, the author is obliged to inform the editorial office promptly and cooperate to withdraw the manuscript or issue an appropriate "Correction Statement”.

3. Duties of the Editor/Editorial board

To ensure the fairness, rationality, and effectiveness of the peer review process, the editors must abide by the following codes of academic ethics:

(1) The editor/editorial board should process each manuscript in a fair, impartial and timely manner; the decision to accept or reject should be made only on the basis of the scientific, innovative, readability and other content of the manuscript itself and the matching degree with the receiving range of the journal.

(2) The editor/editorial board should not be biased against the author's affiliation, gender, professional title, academic honor, etc.

(3) The editor/editorial board should abide by the confidentiality principle. On the one hand, the author's research content should be kept confidential, and on the other hand, the information and comments of reviewers should be kept confidential as well.

(4) The editor/editorial board should not be motivated by interests to interfere with the peer review process of external reviewers to ensure that reviewers give comments independently.

(5) For the reviewers recommended by the author, the editor/editorial board should carefully check whether their basic information is accurate and whether their academic background is consistent with the research background of the manuscript, and whether there is a conflict of interest with the author, and carefully decide whether to submit them to the recommended reviewers; for reviewers the author wants to avoid, if the reasons given by the author are sufficient, their choice should be respected as much as possible.

(6) The editor/editorial board should avoid selecting reviewers who have conflicts of interest with the author (such as project team members, colleagues, teachers and brothers, relatives, etc.) to review their manuscripts; They should also consciously avoid submitting manuscripts that have a conflict of interest with themselves (participating in manuscript writing, project research, or having the family relationship with the author).

(7) The editor/editorial board should protect the integrity of the published papers by publishing "Correction Statement" and retractions where necessary, and by pursuing alleged misconduct or misconduct in research and publication.

4. Duties of Reviewers

During the peer review process, the reviewers should adhere to the following ethical norms:

(1) When receiving the invitation for review, the reviewers should firstly understand the positioning of the journal and the review requirements, then check whether their professional knowledge and research direction match the manuscript, if not, they should promptly and clearly inform the editor/editorial board and suggest the replacement of reviewers.

(2) Reviewers should check their own time allocation and make sure they can submit review comments within the specified time. If not, the editor/editorial board should be informed in time. Otherwise, reviewers should negotiate with the editor/editorial board to decide a acceptable deadline of reviewing to avoid deliberately delaying the review work.

(3) Reviewers should, on the principle of maintaining academic integrity and respecting academic freedom, use their professional knowledge and excellent judgment ability to make an honest, objective and fair evaluation on the strengths and weaknesses of the manuscript and its content, and give reasonable and constructive review comments in a timely manner. Avoid making unfair comments that contains unsubstantiated or malicious criticism and unfair, unfounded accusations to others.

(4) Reviewers should examine the possible interest relationship and whether there is a potential conflict of interest with the manuscript. If so, the editor/editorial board should be informed promptly and all relevant interest relationship should be declared to avoid conflicts of interest. If reviewers can not determine whether certain relationships constitute a conflict of interest that can affect the fairness of the review process, they should consult the editor/editorial board for further advice.

(5) Reviewers should abide by the confidentiality principle of peer review and avoid disclosing the content and related information to any irrelevant person during the review process and after the review is completed.

(6) Reviewers should not be influenced by the source of the manuscript, the author's country, institution, race, religion, political belief, gender or other external factors when reviewing the manuscript, and avoid being driven by commercial interests.

(7) Without the permission of the editorial office of the journal, the reviewer should not transfer the manuscript to other people (colleagues, students, etc.) for review.

(8) In the process of reviewing the manuscript, the review experts should check whether there is any academic misconduct such as duplication, plagiarism, tampering, forgery, etc. If there is any suspicion of such behaviors, they should promptly inform the editor/editorial board and provide relevant evidence.

(9) Reviewers can only recommend the addition of important references related to the research content of the manuscript and should not recommend the author cite his/her own work or that of his/her colleagues for the sole purpose of increasing citations or exposure.

(10) After submitting review comments, the reviewers should contact the editor/editorial board in a timely manner if relevant information is available to influence the initial feedback or suggestion. After publication, the editorial office should be informed of any problems or potential conflicts of interest that were not discovered during the review process.

5. Academic Misconduct

(1) If any academic misconduct is found in a manuscript that has been accepted, the journal has the right to withdraw the manuscript and impose certain penalties on the author concerned by notifying the author’s affiliation and other relevant journals.

(2) If any academic misconduct is found in a manuscript that has been published, the journal will make a retraction processing, publishing a retraction statement, and put the relevant authors into the blacklist, and notify the author’s affiliation.

6. Statement of appeal

If the author believes that the editorial office's decision to reject the manuscript is based on a material misunderstanding of the content or a failure to understand the scientific advance demonstrated by the manuscript, the author has the right to request the editorial board to provide rejection reasons. If authors need to make a complaint, please contact the editorial office at cqlgxbzk@126.com with your draft number. Complaints can only be made by the author himself/herself.