Submission Guidelines

Journal of Hunan University of Chinese Medicine was founded in 1979 and renamed to its current title in October 2006. It is an academic publication on traditional Chinese medicine, western medicine, and the combination of Chinese and western medicine, reporting on the latest academic achievements of medical research, treatment, and education in this discipline at home and abroad. This journal is included as a statistical source journal by Institute of Scientific and Technological Information of China for consecutive years and won the National Award of Excellent University Journals, the National Excellent Editing Quality Award for University Journals, and Top Ten Science and Technology Journals in Hunan Province for several times.

Journal of Hunan University of Chinese Medicine changed from a quarterly to a bimonthly journal in 2003, and then changed to a monthly journal in 2010. The columns include Masters of Chinese Medicine, Experimental Research, Clinical Research, Acupuncture and Massage, Digital Medicine, Theoretical Discussion, and Review. Submissions from scholars are welcomed. Articles funded by research projects at all levels, especially those funded by the Natural Science Foundation at the provincial and ministerial levels or above, will be given priority for publication once they pass our review. We also welcome research articles and clinical reports with high theoretical level.

Section 1 Submission Instruction

1. Please read these Submission Guidelines carefully before submitting your manuscript. Once submitted, it is assumed that all authors have read the guidelines, and have understood and accepted the content and requirements of the guidelines.

2. This journal adopts an online submission system and does not accept print or email submissions. Online submission website: http://hnzyydxxb.hnucm.edu.cn 

3. Manuscripts should be with novel topic, clear arguments, authentic materials, reliable data, concise wording, and accurate conclusions. Please refer to the Paper Template for specific requirements.

4. If a manuscript is accepted, according to the Copyright Law, the editorial office has right to make deletion and modification to it. If authors do not approve of any deletion or modification, they should state it in advance. Manuscripts will be reviewed by peer experts. If authors have not received a response within 3 months after submitting the manuscript, they can contact the editorial office to apply for withdrawal. After publishing, two sample issues will be posted to the first author or the corresponding author.

5. This journal will conduct plagiarism checks on all articles using Academic Misconduct Document Detection System for Scientific Journals (AMLC), and any articles that do not meet the requirements will be rejected. Authors can conduct pre-test for plagiarism through the following URL (detection link: https://check.cnki.net/amlc/). The test results are for reference only. The official result shall be based on the detection results of this journal

6. This journal does not charge review fee. An APC shall be payable for accepted manuscripts. The charging standard is: Layout fee=1200 yuan+200 yuan x number of characters/1000+black and white/color image fee.

Section 2 Requirement for Manuscripts

1 Manuscripts should be with innovative content, clear arguments, authentic materials, smooth writing, and all responsibilities for the article shall be borne by the authors.

2 Please adopt the simplified Chinese characters and the national legal units of measurement in accordance with national standards. Please provide a soft copy of your manuscript and make submission through the official website of Journal of Hunan University of Chinese Medicine.

3 For clinical reports and scientific experiment reports, please attach a recommendation letter from the author’s affiliation for the review of authenticity and confidentiality. Authors should guarantee that there are no multiple submissions, no confidential breach, and no disputes over authorship. 

4 If the submitted article is funded by a research project, please indicate the funding organization and the project number at the footer of the title page, and attach a copy of the project certificate. 

5 Article title, author names, author affiliations, abstract, and keywords must be written in both Chinese and English.

6 Please indicate the first author's name, year of birth, gender, ethnicity (Han ethnicity can be omitted), place of origin, education background, degree, and professional title at the footer of the titlepage. The name, phone number, email address, detailed mailing address, affiliation, and postal code of the corresponding author responsible for contacting the editorial office should be indicated at the end of the article.

Section 3 Manuscript Format

1 Title: It is required to be concise, specific, and accurate. The Chinese title generally does not exceed 20 characters, and subtitles may be added if necessary. Uncommon abbreviations, characters, and codes should be avoided in title.

2 Authors and Affiliations: Manuscripts should include author names, affiliations, locations, and postal codes. If there are multiple authors and their affiliations are different, Arabic numerals should be used as markers at the upper right corner of the author names, with the affiliations written under the author names and separated by semicolons.     

3 Abstract and Keywords: Clinical articles, experimental research, and basic research articles should be accompanied by a Chinese and English abstract of no more than 300 Chinese characters. The abstract should be structured in for sections: objective, methods, results, and conclusion. Each article should be labeled with 2-8 keywords. Abbreviations in keywords should be written in full terminologies according to the MeSH table. For example, HbsAg should be written as "hepatitis B surface antigen".

4 Figures and Tables: Each level of headings should be numbered consecutively with Arabic numerals, such as 1, 1.1, 1.1.1. Intext tables and Figures should follow the words that refer to them. Figures and tables should be concise and precise, and accompanied with headings and numbers. Where content could be expressed by words, figures and tables should be avoided. Three-line style should be adopted for tables and auxiliary lines can be added if necessary. Units of quantities should be indicated in the upper right corner of tables or in columns. The symbols of quantities and units in coordinate diagrams should be complete. 

5 Units of Measurement: The year, month, day, and numbers in articles are all represented in Arabic numerals. It should comply with the "Legal Measurement Units of the People's Republic of China" promulgated in 1984. Two diagonal lines in combination units should be avoided, such as using mg/(kg·d) instead of mg/kg/d.

6 Statistics: For statistical content, authors should indicate the statistical method appropriately in the text. Statistical values should be presented in Arabic numerals and statistical symbols are all in italics.

7 References: References in the main text should be marked and numbered in the order of their appearance in text. When the same reference is cited multiple times, the same number should be used, and the page number cited should be indicated outside the cubic parenthesis. Internal materials, unpublished articles, and second-hand literature should not be cited.   

Section 4 Copyright and Open Access

1 Journal of Hunan University of Chinese Medicine flipped to an open access journal since the 1^st issue of 2023. Once published, all articles ever since will be immediately and permanently available for readers to read and download free of charge. Articles published from 2016 to 2022 were turned to open access works. Articles published in 2015 and before are not open access but some of the full text articles can be read on this website free of charge.

2 For all open access articles published by this journal, permitted authors and third-party reuse of the articles 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 full details of the license are available at  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 

3 In accordance with the Copyright Law of the People's Republic of China and to protect the legitimate rights and interests of authors and the editorial office, authors are required to sign the Copyright Transfer Agreement at the same time as submitting your manuscript. The editorial office will only consider starting the review process after receiving the agreement signed by authors. Nonlocal authors can download the agreement template from this website or directly request it from the editorial office. The singed agreement can be mailed or faxed to our editorial office. If delivered via email, the signature must be handwritten.

4 Authors agree to transfer the copyright of manuscript, including but not limited to compilation right, reproduction right of print and electronic versions, distribution right, translation right, and dissemination right of information network versions, to the editorial office of Journal of Hunan University of Chinese Medicine. The editorial office has right to license third-parties to use the aforementioned rights. Authors will no longer transfer the aforementioned rights to others, but are allowed to compile this manuscript in their non-journal collection and cite some of its content in subsequent manuscripts (clearly indicating the title of this journal). Authors agree to the open access policy of this journal. Authors and third-party re-users can reproduce and disseminate this article under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License.

5 All journal articles published by this journal since 2016 have been digitally archived. The hard and soft copy of each issue of the journal had been kept in the editorial office for archiving. In order to ensure data security, all information has also been backed up in the editorial office. Other relevant materials are also kept by the editorial office, such as supplementary information and forms provided by the authors. The journal’s articles can also be downloaded in full text from databases including CNKI, Wanfang and Weipu.

Section 5 Editorial Policy

1. The journal adopts double-blind review system. All manuscripts are subject to three rounds of reviews, namely the preliminary review, external review and final review. After submission, the editorial office will conduct a preliminary review of the manuscript and reject the manuscripts which are insufficient in originality, having serious scientific or technical mistakes, lacking valuable information, or not in the scope of the journal. Manuscripts which have passed the preliminary review will be anonymously sent to two or more peer reviewers or external review. Authors must respond to reviewers' every comment and submit the revised version in time. This process would be repeated until reviewers and editors are satisfied with the manuscript. The Editor-in-Chief decides the acceptance of manuscripts.

2. If the submitted manuscript does not meet the requirements of this journal, the authors shall be required to revised the manuscript and re-submit the revised version within the specified time. If the article is accepted, the editorial office has right to make revisions to the article. If authors do not approve of any deletion or modification, they should state it in advance. Authors should keep a copy by themselves as this journal generally does not return manuscripts. If the author has not received any notification of revisions or acceptance after 30 days of submission, they may handle the manuscript on their own. 

3. Submissions by Editorial Board Members (EBMs)/Editors must adhere to the journal's review and editorial procedures, ensuring independence from the involved individuals and their research groups. They cannot participate in reviews of manuscripts whose authors they have conflicts of interest with.

4. After publishing, 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, and detailing the changes made to the original article. If severe scientific errors are found in published articles, or the article is suspected of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and data falsification, the editorial office will issue a statement to inform readers of the risks, initiate an investigation and announce the final result, or even retract article with a retraction statement if necessary.

5. The above manuscript review process also applies to submissions for special issues. If applicable, manuscripts submitted to special issues undergo the same review and editing process as regular issue manuscripts, and the Editor-in-Chief will decide whether the manuscript will be accepted for publication. The Editor-in-Chief is responsible for the entire content of the journal, including special issues. When organizing a special issue, the editorial office will invite authoritative experts in the field to serve as the Guest Editor for the special issue. The responsibilities of the Guest Editor include proposing the theme of the special issue, soliciting manuscripts, organizing peer reviews, and resolving any issues that arise during the publication of the special issue. The work of the Guest Editor is supervised by the Editor-in-Chief to ensure the fairness of the manuscript review process.

Section 6 Ethics

1. Should any academic misconduct, including multiple submission, redundant publishing, plagiarism or data falsification be found, the editorial office will immediately reject the manuscript. We will send a notice to other relevant journals in this field and to the author’s institutes.

2. Articles involving clinical trials of human studies or animal experiments should comply with national laws and regulations, and international guidelines. Authors are required to provide proof of ethical review of the research proposal. If involved, informed consent letters should be signed by patients (subjects) or their families. Clinical trials should be registered according to relevant standard. If matters described above are involved，authors should make detailed statement in manuscripts.

3. Those who are named as authors should directly participate in the research work, writing the manuscript or have an important guiding role, responsible for the entire content of the article as copyright owners. Other contributors of the article (e.g., laboratory assistant) may be listed in acknowledgement. “Gift author” is strictly prohibited. The order and affiliation of authors should be determined upon submission, and should not be changed thereafter.

4. 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 mentioned, the author should also disclose whether there is a conflict of interest against competitive products.

5. Authors should declare their contribution and conflict of interest in Authors Statement Form, which should be signed and submitted to the journal.