Editing and Peer Review System

Section 1 Review and Editing

The journal adopts three-round review and editing system for all manuscripts. The details are as followed.

(1) Three-round review

Initial review. Editors will review the social and academic value of the manuscript from a professional perspective, and reject the manuscript that clearly does not meet the aim and scope or the basic requirements of the journal. This includes evaluation of academic background and detection of academic misconduct. The preliminary review comments shall be drafted, including the decision for acceptance and suggestion for manuscript revision.

Second Review (External Peer Review). The editors are responsible for sending the manuscripts to two experts in the same field for review by a “double-blind” manner. The reviewers are professors, associate professors, or scientific researchers with doctorate degrees. Reviewers take responsibility for the ideology and the academic content of the manuscript, eliminating major mistakes, and ensures that the content of the journal complies with national laws and regulations.

Final review. The Editor-in-Chief or the full-time Deputy Editors-in-Chief are responsible for the final review and make final decision on accepting manuscripts. Based on opinions of editors and reviewers in preliminary review and external peer review, they will make an overall evaluation of the content of the manuscript, including academic quality, social effects, and whether it complies with national policies and regulations. The manuscript shall be reviewed for the second time before it is published.

(2) Three-round Editing and Final Confirm

First Editing. Three in-house editors shall conduct a comprehensive reading and review of accepted manuscripts, mainly checking whether the format, content arrangement, reference description, text or other items meet the publishing requirements, whether the language expression is clear, and whether the formatting of charts and formulas is correct. The editors shall make corrections, and if necessary, contact the authors for modification or correction.

Second Editing. Editors shall conduct comprehensive proofreading of the revised manuscripts, mainly checking whether the publication standards are observed, whether the textual mistakes are corrected, and whether the paragraph arrangement, figure/table position, formula sequence number, and references meet the publishing requirements.

Third Editing. Editors shall further proofread the manuscript after the second proofreading, mainly checking for possible omissions in the first and second editing, including manuscript format, content arrangement, publication standards, references description, language expression, textual errors, paragraph arrangement, etc.

Final Confirm. The director of the journal editorial office is responsible for checking whether the manuscript meets the publishing standards, and finally signing for confirmation. After modification, the manuscript will be printed and published online.

Section 2 Submission by Editorial Personnel

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.

Section 3 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 edjgg@lzb.ac.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 4 Post-publication Discussions

We warmly welcome authors and readers to participate in discussions on our published articles. Comments can be sent to the journal's email at edjgg@lzb.ac.cn. The editorial department will handle them promptly and provide feedback as necessary. Furthermore, the journal actively encourages readers and authors to engage in mutual supervision and offer feedback on pertinent information, aiming to cultivate a vibrant and positive academic environment.