Policies and Ethics
Section 1 Ethics
Section 2 Peer Review and Editing
Section 3 Correction and Retraction
Section 4 Open Access, Copyright and Archive
Section 1 Ethics
For Authors
Authors are obliged to indicate that the submitted article is an original research work (except for review articles) and does not contain any forged, deceptive and plagiarized content. All manuscripts will be tested by the plagiarism detection system of CNKI. The duplicate rate (total amount) should be less than 10%. The submitted article does not involve confidential issues, infringement related to intellectual property rights, multiple submission or redundant publication. Author shall promise that they will not re-submit the article to another journal unless it is rejected by this journal. Proper credit shall be given to references cited in text. Institutes, projects and individuals that provide any contribution to the article shall be acknowledged. Comments from reviewers and editors should be respected. The copyright of the article should be transferred to Xi’an Jiaotong University after publishing.
Authors shall follow the guidelines below.
1. Multiple Submission
(1) "Multiple submission" in this statement is defined as: although there may be some differences in diction or structure of two articles involved, the theories, main experimental data and figures involved are identical, or the core content of the article is identical. By “article”, we refer to those published in conference proceedings or journals in any language. However, if a brief report or preliminary report published in a journal and then the full text of further research submitted to another journal, it will not be regarded as multiple submission, whereas authors shall make a statement to the editorial office for such cases.
(2) For a manuscript under review, authors should obtain the consent of the editorial office before re-submitting it to another journal.
(3) If a manuscript is suspected to involve multiple submission, authors will be notified in time and have opportunity to provide an explanation. The governing body of the journal will make judgement if there is any dispute between authors and the journal.
(4) Once multiple submission is verified, a statement shall be published in the journal including the names and institutes of authors. The article will be removed. The institutes of authors and other journals within the field will be notified.
2. Plagiarism
Plagiarism refers to the deliberate use of others' works without consent of the original authors, or without proper citation or acknowledgement. Plagiarism includes direct duplicating or rewriting of others' works, which may involve data, words, sentences, paragraphs, ideas and concepts. Plagiarism is strictly prohibited.
3. Authors Contribution and Competing Interests
An author should be a person who participates in topic selection, study design, data analysis and manuscript drafting. The order of authors shall be determined before submission and shall not be changed thereafter. The change of order could be made only if a consent letter from all authors is provided. Other contributors for the manuscript should be listed in acknowledgement. “Gift author” is strictly prohibited. Manipulation of authorship is an academic misconduct and will damage the reliability of the article. The Authors Contribution Form should be signed and provided when making submission.
All authors must disclose all potential conflicts of interest, i.e., when the financing / personal status / affiliation of the authors (or the authors' organization / employer) may affect the authors' decision, work or manuscript. When a product is involved, the author should also disclose whether there is a conflict of interest against competitive products. Authors should also submit Statement of Competing Interests along with the manuscript.
4. Forgery
Forgery refers to data or conclusions that are not obtained from experiments or research, but are forged and tampered by authors. Date forgery is strictly prohibited.
5. Medical Ethics and Trial Registration
The ethical issue of the study must comply with common principles of medical ethics. When research participants are humans, the author should explain whether its procedure complied with the ethical standards formulated by relevant committee (institutional, regional or national) responsible for human trials. The approval document of the committee should be submitted (the approval number should be included in the article). Consent letter from research participants or their relatives must be obtained but not submitted to the editorial office. When reporting animal experiments, the source of the animals should be provided, indicating whether the experimental procedures comply with animal protection principles.
Clinical trials must include the Universal Trial Number (UTN) obtained from one of the Primary Registries in the WHO Registry Network. The UTN shall be included in the abstract or the main body of the full text.
For Reviewers
1. Reviewers shall guarantee that they review the manuscripts accurately, objective and fairly on the basis of scientific quality. They should use their professional knowledge and ability to review the innovation, scientificity and practicability of manuscripts, and give a fair evaluation on whether the research method is appropriate, whether the scientific research design is reasonable, whether the results and conclusions are accurate, and whether confidential issues is involved, so as to help the editors select manuscripts. They should put forward detailed comments for problems of manuscripts to help authors make revision.
2. Reviewers should respect the research achievements of authors and avoid reviewing manuscripts with competing interests. The review will only be based on academical standards instead of personal reasons. The selection of manuscripts shall not be affected by authors’ race, gender, religion, belief, social status, qualifications and authority. The review result should be clearly stated with sufficient arguments and facts.
3. Reviewers shall complete comments on manuscripts and feed back to the editorial office within the specified time. In case of any difficulty, the editorial office shall be informed in time.
4. Reviewers shall keep confidential the content of the manuscripts strictly, and shall not release or discuss the manuscripts to others, nor use or publish the data, opinions and conclusions of the manuscripts.
5. All review comments and information must be kept confidential and not used for personal purposes.
6.Reviewers should avoid processing manuscripts for which they have competing interests.
For Editors
1. Editors shall strictly implement laws and national regulations, follow academic and publishing ethical standards, and maintain research integrity. Editors should process manuscripts in a timely and fair manner to keep the publishing plan and article quality.
2. Editors shall respect the research results of authors and comments of reviewers, maintain the authentic records of the review, and keep confidential the data in all aspects of review and revision. Editors and editorial staff shall not disclose any information related to the submitted manuscripts except for providing necessary information to correspondence authors, reviewers and editorial committee members as appropriate.
3. Editors shall select articles fairly, and the acceptance or rejection of articles can only be based on originality, significance, clarity of the article and whether it conforms to the aim and scope of the journal.
4. Editors should encourage academic debate and are obliged to answer questions raised by authors against review comments and results.
5. Editors shall have obligation to investigate academic misconduct and communicate with authors. Once there is an appeal from authors, editors shall process the case timely. If necessary, editors shall publish corrections, clarifications, withdrawals or apologies in a timely manner. Editors have right to trace back the responsibility of authors and reviewers for their academic misconduct.
6. Editors shall protect the information submitted by authors and the identity information of reviewers and other relevant personnel in the editorial office during the blind review.
7. Editors should avoid processing manuscripts for which they have competing interests.
Section 2 Peer Review and Editing
1 Peer Review Policy: The journal adopts double-blind and three-rounds review system. For the specific review process, please refer to the Editorial Workflow Chart at the Download Center.
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 the change of meaning will be sent to authors for confirmation.
3 Timing: The review result generally will be returned to the authors within 1 months after submission. If the authors do not receive the notice of revision more than 1 months, the submission can be regarded as rejected.
4 Editor Submission: 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: 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 zgetbjzz@126.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 on a case-by-case basis.
Section 3 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 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.
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 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.
Section 4 Open Access, Copyright and Archive
1 Open Access：Chinese Journal of Child Health Care is an open access journal. Once published, all articles will be immediately and permanently available for readers to read and download free of charge. Permitted third party reuse of the articles published by the journal is defined by the following user license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows reusers to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms below are followed: reusers must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. Reusers may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses the use. Reusers may not use the material for commercial purposes. If reusers remix, transform, or build upon the material, they may not distribute the modified material. The authors have right to spread or make use of the article under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. The full details of the license are available at
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
2 Copyright Policy: Authors are required to sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement. Authors shall agree that, upon publishing, the copyright of the article will be transferred to Xi’an Jiaotong University free of charge, including the right of reproduction, distribution, compilation, online dissemination, etc. Xi’an Jiaotong University has right to make use of the article in form of electronic, multimedia, online or any other edition.
3 Archive: Since 2012, all journal articles have been digitally archived and can be searched and downloaded from the journal website. In order to ensure data security, all information has also been backed up in the editorial office. The hard and soft copy of each issue of the journal had been kept in the editorial office for archiving. In addition, other relevant materials are also kept by the editorial office, such as supplementary information and forms provided by the authors.
4 Open Science and Data Sharing: The editorial office strives to respect the protection of intellectual property and requires editors, authors and reviewers to do so. Any potential infringement should be avoided. Third-party infringement to the intellectual property of the journal is prohibited. On the premise of intellectual property protection, the journal encourages the practice of open science. Authors are encouraged to publish or share their research data whenever appropriate. The data for sharing may include original data, observation records, experimental results, etc. The journal also encourages the sharing of software, code, models, algorithms, protocols, methods and other useful materials. Authors can upload the materials above to an accessible third-party repository and make a proper citation or add a link at the end of the article.