1. Peer Review Policy: The journal adopts a single-blind peer review system. The acceptance rate of manuscripts is around 20%.
 

2. Editing Policy: All authors shall be responsible for their own writing. For accepted manuscripts, the journal may make some technical or wording amendments. Any amendment involving changes in meaning will be sent to the authors for confirmation.
 

3. Review Process and Timing: After submission, the editorial office will conduct a preliminary review of the manuscript within 7 working days. Manuscripts will be selected by their quality and also in accordance with the journal’s aim and scope. Manuscripts that pass the preliminary review will be sent to two experts for peer review. In case of disagreement between the two experts, the manuscript will be sent to a third expert for review, and the editorial office will determine the final review comments based on the opinions of the experts. The review comments and the result (including Pass, Reject, or Re-review After Revision) will be sent to the corresponding author. If the manuscript is requested to be revised, the authors must respond to the review comments line by line and submit a revised version of the manuscript for re-review. After the manuscript passes the peer review, it will undergo a final review by the Editor-in-Chief of the journal to make a final decision on acceptance. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for the final academic quality control of the articles in the journal and is responsible for the entire content of the journal.

The review turnaround time is about 1 month after submission. In a few cases, the review could be overdue, authors can contact us by phone or E-mail under this circumstance. If the author does not receive any revision or acceptance notice within 2 months after submission, authors can submit their manuscripts to other journals. Once the manuscript is accepted, frequent changes are strictly prohibited. After revision, manuscripts will be published in 4~8 months according to the revision time.
 

4. Fast Track: The journal opens a green channel for articles that focusing on a hot topic or with great significance.
 

5. Submission by Editors and Editorial Board Members: The editors/editorial board members should not be involved in publishing decisions on articles written by themselves, their family members or colleagues. Any such submission should be strictly subject to the journal’s usual editorial and review process. Peer review should be handled independently from the relevant authors/editors and their research groups.
 

6. Appeal: Authors may make an appeal if they disagree with the comment from the reviewers. The authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to bulletin@ms.iswc.ac.cn (the email of the executive editor) or via the submission system. Detailed reasons for appealing must be stated, including a comprehensive and reasonable answer to the reviewers’ comments. The appeal letter should also be stamped by the author’s institute. The editorial office will consider whether to change the decision case by case.
 

7. Correction and Retraction: 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 the case of the situations described below, corrections or retractions may be carried out if truly necessary.

1) 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.

2) Retraction: In the following cases, the editorial office would retract published articles and issue retraction statements:

(i)    If an article is found to have severe scientific errors making the results and conclusion of the article unreliable;

(ii)   For articles 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.