(1)Review Process: The journal adopts a three-round review system, namely the preliminary review by editors, peer review by external experts and final review by the editor-in-chief. The external peer review is under double-blind mode. The specific process is shown in the figure below:

(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 a change of meaning will be sent to authors for confirmation.

(3)Timing: Authors can contact the editorial office for inquiry if there is no reply for more than 45 days after submission. Please contact us before re-submitting the manuscript to another journal. The revision of manuscript should be completed within within 20 days, or it shall be deemed as withdrawn of submission.

(4)Submission by Editors: 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)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 case of the situations described below, corrections or retractions may be carried out if truly necessary.

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 In addition, the superseded version will also be archived.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.

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.