Editorial Policies and Peer Review Process of the Journal of Southern Medical University
Authorship Requirements
The order of authors should be determined through joint discussion by all authors prior to submission and should not be altered after submission. If a change is genuinely necessary, a written statement confirming no objection to the change of authorship, signed in person by all authors, must be provided. Authors must meet all four of the following criteria: 1. Participation in the conception and design of the study, or in the analysis and interpretation of data; 2. Drafting or revising key theoretical content or other major components of the manuscript; 3. Making revisions in accordance with the editorial office's suggestions, addressing academic queries, and providing final approval for the publication of the paper; 4. Agreeing to be accountable for the integrity of all aspects of the research, in addition to taking responsibility for their own research contributions. Individuals who have made other contributions to the paper, such as providing laboratory technical support, should be listed in the Acknowledgments section. Individuals who only participated in acquiring funding or collecting data should not be listed as authors, nor should those who merely provided general supervision of the research group. For articles with collective authorship, the credited institution should be listed below the title, and the primary person responsible for the article should be clearly identified. The corresponding author's name, academic degree, professional title, and email address should be indicated in a footnote on the first page of the paper. Generally, only one corresponding author is listed, as determined by the submitting author.
Research Subjects
All animal experiments involving vertebrates or higher-order invertebrates must comply with all institutional and national animal protection laws, guidelines, and policies, and must be stated in the "Methods" section of the article. For clinical studies involving human subjects, an informed consent statement must be obtained from each trial subject. All clinical trials must be conducted in accordance with the provisions of the Declaration of Helsinki.
Manuscript Revision and Rejection/Retraction
If a manuscript contains serious errors or issues of academic misconduct, it will be rejected/retracted at any stage of publication. If a manuscript containing errors has already been published, and the errors are minor and do not affect the overall results and conclusions of the study, a correction notice will be published in the upcoming issue. If the errors were caused by the publishing staff during the editing and publication process, the correction notice will be published on a paginated page in the earliest forthcoming issue, with its title included in that issue's table of contents; the correction notice will clearly and completely describe the content of the correction. If serious errors or academic misconduct are found, the article will be rejected/retracted at any stage of publication or after publication. If the manuscript is suspected of falsification, the journal will conduct a further investigation and inform the author's affiliated institution or supervisory department to assist with the investigation.
Editorial Decisions
The most important criterion for the journal's acceptance of an article is the originality of its content. Editorial decisions are based not only on the academic validity of the article's content, but also on other factors, including but not limited to: the standardization of the manuscript's writing.
Peer Review Process
Peer review and editorial review are the main mechanisms by which the journal ensures the quality of its published articles. The journal's editorial board is composed of researchers and medical experts with extensive research and publication experience. The journal's editorial process is as follows:
?1. Manuscripts are collected through the online submission system;
?2. An initial review is conducted by the editor to check the completeness of the manuscript's content and its compliance with submission requirements; the manuscript is also cross-checked for issues such as duplicate submission and plagiarism. If the manuscript fails to meet the submission requirements, it will be returned to the author for revision and resubmission;
?3. If the manuscript meets the submission requirements, the editor will select 2–3 experts with relevant expertise from the editorial board based on the content and topic of the manuscript, and transmit the manuscript to the experts for review;
?4. If the peer reviewers determine that the quality of the manuscript is suboptimal or its topic does not align with the scope of the journal, the manuscript will be declined without further consideration;
?5. The peer reviewers submit their review comments and recommendations to the editor (Accept; Minor Revision; Major Revision; Reject);
?6. Based on the peer reviewers' comments and recommendations, the journal editor makes an editorial decision;
?7. The peer review is a double-blind process, meaning that the reviewers are unaware of the manuscript's author information, and the manuscript's authors are also unaware of the reviewers' identities.