Editorial Policies
I. Introduction
The Editor-in-Chief, deputy Editor-in-Chief, editorial board members, and editors of our journal are all pediatric physicians engaged in different specialties of pediatric clinical medicine, most of whom are doctoral and master's degree supervisors, and all hold senior or intermediate professional titles. The editorial office is located within Xinhua Hospital Affiliated to Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, creating a fair, responsible, and high-quality preliminary screen of manuscripts. To ensure the quality and fairness of the review process, our review team is composed of two sections: the editorial board and the reviewers. Members are recommended by various institutes, who are all accomplished experts and professors in pediatrics from all over the country. Most of them are from renowned medical institutions nationwide. In addition, in order to maintain contact with the community and the whole country, correspondents from secondary hospitals are invited and a network of authors recommended by experts from all over the country are established.
Journal of Clinical Pediatrics, founded in 1983, always adheres to the aim of serving the community medicine, focusing on clinical practice, and integrating fundamental and advanced studies. Each issue includes a special column on a systemic disease, supplemented by reviews and expert discussions written by experts and professors on the content of the column. The journal holds a National Pediatric Disease Diagnosis and Treatment Technology Academic Conference every 2 or 3 years to strengthen academic exchanges between the editorial office, authors, readers, and professors. Each year, the editorial office organizes continuing medical education classes and correspondence courses, awarding Category I and II credits to students. Since its inception, the journal has been welcomed and supported by pediatric physicians nationwide, won a series of excellent journal awards, and indexed by Chinese Core journals and China Science and Technology Paper Statistics Source Journals. The journal mainly publishes original papers and articles, with an acceptance rate of about 25%.
II. What kind of manuscripts can be published in this journal.
1. Scientific rigor: Scientific rigor is the most important characteristic of scientific papers. Submitted manuscripts should be authentic, reproducible, accurate, logical, and fair.
2. Innovation: Submissions must be the independent creations of pediatric clinicians, researchers or graduate students, without adaptation, repetition, or plagiarism of published papers. Whether it is a summary of clinical experience or a report of scientific research, the design, execution, conclusions, and discussion should all be innovative and not be published before. The central content should not be submitted to other public publications. Pediatric medicine is constantly evolving, with new results and concepts emerging one after another. Papers with forward-looking, innovative, and practical content, especially those funded by national and provincial-level natural science foundation or other research funds, will be accepted and published in fast-track. Papers involving interdisciplinary subjects that can be applied to pediatric clinical practice, or pediatric clinical diagnosis and treatment issues are acceptable. Papers from other clinical disciplines that have no direct connection with pediatrics will be advised to be submitted to other journals.
3. Applicational Value: Submissions should be as relevant as possible to clinical diagnosis and treatment issues, with clinical application significance and value. An experimental (in vivo) study should be part of an original article, preferably accompanied by clinical trial results and conclusions.
4. Medical writing should be smooth and concise, in accordance with standard format of papers, without repetition or fabrication of data, avoiding statistical errors, with scientific conclusions, in-depth yet easy-to-understand discussions, and reader friendly contents.
III. Six steps to publish papers in this journal
(1) Before submission
1. Before writing a paper, the authors must summarize the original data and focuses on the viewpoint, which is a prerequisite for the paper to be accepted. The intrinsic academic quality lies in that it provides readers with innovative and excellent academic contents to meet the academic exchange needs among pediatric physicians.
2. Please read the journal's Submission Instruction before writing. Manuscripts should be written in a standardized format. If the submission is a Chinese paper, do not use English abbreviations or words to replace Chinese medical terms in the main body text (except for graphs, tables, and units of measurement in the text).
3. Two copies of manuscript should be mailed to the editorial office.
(2) After submission
1. The editorial office has the right to review and revise the manuscripts. All papers are selected for publication based on fairness, transparency, and academic content, regardless of the location (but with appropriate consideration for authors from the central and western regions), competing interest or reputation of authors. The editorial office follows general procedures of international editorial standard to decide whether to send the paper for peer review.
2. After passing the initial review, each manuscript is sent to two relevant experts or professors for review. If the review opinions are contradictory, a third expert review is invited to make a decision. The peer review is double-blind. Opinions from reviewers are an important basis to decide whether the manuscript shall be accepted.
3. Review opinions will be notified to the authors within 3 months after receiving the manuscript. Each paper must be revised according to the review opinions. The Editor-in-Chief makes final decision on acceptance of manuscripts.
IV. Manuscript Processing
All papers submitted to this journal will either be accepted or rejected. For articles with distinctive features that can meet the needs of readers, after peer review, the editors will decide which part of the article need revision, enrichment, delete, verification, or completion for references. The revision form, along with the original manuscript, will be sent back to the authors, who are required to make revision according to the comments within a time limit and return the original manuscript, revision form, and revised manuscript to the editorial office. The editor decides and confirms whether the revised manuscript complies with the review comments and format requirements. Submissions may go through multiple revisions and may ultimately be rejected. Manuscripts with innovation and advancement will be given priority for publication. The other outcome of submission is rejection. The editorial office is well aware that all submissions are the result of the authors' hard work and summary of clinical experience, all of which have their value. The main reasons for rejection are repeating others' conclusions, purely clinical description without medical research data, too few cases, or the format of the paper is not standardized. The journal requires all submissions to be standardized with 3,000 to 4,000 Chinese characters, concise yet expressive. The journal's acceptance criteria demand innovation and practicality. Therefore, rejection does not mean that the manuscript lacks clinical practical experience or academic significance. It is simply matter of selecting the best among the best, requiring authors to design the study more diligently and further polish their medical writing. For authors, the more they write and submit, the more likely they are to succeed.
The journal appreciates the support from renowned experts and professors nationwide, the emerging young experts and professors, and young physicians working hard on the frontline of medical research and education. Let us work together to promote the development of pediatric medicine in our country.
V. Other Policies
1. The authors are responsible for the content of the manuscript, and the journal has the right to make modification. Any modification that changes the original meaning will be sent to authors for confirmation.
2. 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.
3. Manuscripts submitted to supplementary issues / special topics/ special issues will undergo the same review and editorial procedures as other submissions, and the final acceptance decision will also be made by the Editor-in-Chief. The journal does not have Guest Editor-in-Chief.
4. Errata and Corrections: If significant errors, such as data discrepancies, are discovered after the paper is formally published, the journal will promptly notify the authors for revision and make the necessary corrections or errata. This includes publishing an erratum or correction notice, updating the PDF on the official website, and submitting the correction notice to the full-text dataset. In cases of data falsification, the publication may be retracted.
5. If authors have objections against the review comments, they can file an appeal in writing, quoting the manuscript serial number and stating detailed reasons for the appeal, and the appeal letter must be stamped by the author's institution for validation. The editorial office will decide whether to accept the appeal as appropriate. We warmly welcome authors and readers to participate in discussions on our published articles. Comments can be sent to the editorial office, who 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. Appeal and post-publication discussions shall be sent to jcperke@126.com.
Just Accepted