Guide for Authors

Guide for Authors (2024 version)

• Conflict of Interest

  China Oncology complies with the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' uniform requirements on Conflict of Interest statement.
  
  

  Conflict of Interest exists when an author (or the author’s institution), reviewer, or editor has financial or personal relationships with other persons or organizations that inappropriately influence (bias) his or her actions. The existence of such relationships does not necessarily represent true conflict of interest. The potential for conflict of interest can exist whether or not an individual believes that the relationship affects their judgment. Financial relationships (such as employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patents) are the most easily identifiable conflicts of interest and the most likely to undermine the credibility of the journal, the authors, and of science itself (http://www.icmje.org/index.html).

  Ⅰ. Participants

  All participants in the peer-review and publication process—not only authors but also peer reviewers, editors, and editorial board members of journals—must consider their conflicts of interest when fulfilling their roles in the process of article review and publication and must disclose all relationships that could be viewed as potential conflicts of interest.
  a. Authors
  When authors submit a manuscript of any type or format they are responsible for disclosing all financial and personal relationships that might bias or be seen to bias their work. All authors listed in a manuscript submitted to China Oncology must have contributed substantially to the work. Upon submission of the manuscript, the corresponding author must indicate, in the online submission and in the Authorship section of the manuscript, the specific contribution of each author.  An author may list more than one type of contribution and more than one author may have contributed to the same aspect of the work. The corresponding author assumes responsibility for obtaining permission from all coauthors for the submission of any/all version(s) of the manuscript and for any changes in authorship.
  b. Peer Reviewers
  (More details see Guidelines for Reviewers)
  c. Editors and Journal Staff
  (More details see Guidelines for Reviewers)

  Ⅱ. Reporting Conflicts of Interest

  Articles should be published with statements or supporting documents, declaring:
  ● Authors’ conflicts of interest; 
  ● Sources of support for the work, including sponsor names along with explanations of the role of those sources if any in study design; collection, analysis, and interpretation of data; writing of the report; the decision to submit the report for publication; or a statement declaring that the supporting source had no such involvement; 
  ● Whether the authors had access to the study data, with an explanation of the nature and extent of access, including whether access is on-going.
  
  

  To support the above statements, editors may request that authors of a study sponsored by a funder with a proprietary or financial interest in the outcome sign a statement, such as “I had full access to all of the data in this study and I take complete responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.”
  
  Human and Animal Rights
  Ⅰ. Research involving human subjects
  

  When reporting experiments on human subjects, authors should indicate whether the procedures followed were in accordance with the ethical standards of the responsible committee on human experimentation (institutional and national). If doubt exists whether the research was conducted in accordance with the ethical standards, the authors must explain the rationale for their approach, and demonstrate that the institutional review body explicitly approved the doubtful aspects of the study. 

  
  

  All studies that involve human subjects must abide by the rules of the appropriate institutional review board (or equivalent organization) of the institution in which the research was conducted and by the tenets of the World Medical Association’s most recently revised Declaration of Helsinki. A statement regarding ethical approval and Helsinki compliance must be included in the Methods section of the paper.

  Published studies that involve human subjects should not provide subjects’ identifying information (e.g., names, true initials, recognizable images) unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or the patient’s parent/guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. If your study requires the appropriate written consent, please send a statement to zgazzz@china-oncology.com affirming that you possess the patient’s informed consent. See the Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals for further information.

  
  

  Ⅱ. Research involving animal subjects

  When reporting experiments on animals, authors should be asked to indicate whether the institutional and national guide for the care and use of laboratory animals was followed.

  
  

  All studies referring animals should follow the ARRIVE guidelines for reporting in vivo experiments in animal research. A statement regarding institutional animal care and use committee approval (or equivalent) must be included in the Methods section of the article.

  
  

  
  

  Ⅲ. Clinical trial reporting and registry

  China Oncology welcomes submission of manuscripts reporting on clinical trials whether phase 1, 2, 3 or 4. Reports should include a full description of the study design, patient population, methodology and conduct, and statistical plan. In all cases, the report will undergo peer review and will be evaluated for technical merit, novelty, clinical and scientific impact, and other measures to determine suitability for publication.

  As defined by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), a clinical trial is ‘any research project that prospectively assigns human subjects to intervention and comparison groups to study the cause-and-effect relationship between a medical intervention and a health outcome’.

  China Oncology follows the trial registration policy of the ICMJE and considers only trials that have been registered before submission, and before the onset of patient enrollment. Acceptable registries must be ICMJE-approved (see more information in the section below).

  For authors reporting phase II and phase III randomized controlled trials it is recommended to consult the CONSORT Statement and CONSORT Checklist on Equator Network to facilitate the complete and transparent reporting of trial findings. In addition, including a Patient Flow Diagram in the manuscript is recommended for randomized studies.

  Registration number and name of the trial registry must be provided at the end of the article abstract.

  In accordance with the guidelines published by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), China Oncology requires, as a condition of consideration for publication, that all clinical trials be registered in any of the primary registers that participate in the WHO International Clinical Trial Registry Platform (ICTRP) or in ClinicalTrials.gov. (See full list here). Trials must be registered at or before the onset of patient enrollment.

  In addition to accepting registration in any of the above five registries, China Oncology will accept registration of clinical trials in any of the primary registers that participate in the WHO International Clinical Trial Registry Platform (ICTRP) or in European Union Drug Regulating Authorities Clinical Trials Database(EudraCT). Registration in a partner register only is insufficient.

  Following ICMJE, China Oncology will not consider results posted in the same clinical trials registry in which the primary registration resides to be previous publication if the results are presented in the form of a brief (< 500 words), structured abstract or table.

  For more information, see the ICMJE Uniform Requirements for Manuscripts Submitted to Biomedical Journals.

  
  

  
  

  Ⅳ. Informed Consent
  Identifying information, including names, initials, or hospital numbers, should not be published in written descriptions, photographs, or pedigrees unless the information is essential for scientific purposes and the patient (or parent or guardian) gives written informed consent for publication. Informed consent is required for Case report, original/research articles and visualized surgery. The statement should be included in the footnote.

  It may be possible to publish without explicit consent if the report is important to public health (or is in some other way important); consent would be unusually burdensome to obtain; and a reasonable individual would be unlikely to object to publication (all three conditions must be met).

  
  

  
  

  Other Ethical issues
  Ⅰ. Authorship
  The manuscript must have been read and approved by all authors and that all authors agree to the submission of the manuscript to China Oncology. All authors should have made substantial contributions to all of the following: 
  

   ● conception and design of the study, acquisition of the data, or analysis and interpretation of the data; 

   ● drafting of the article or critical revision of the article for important intellectual content; 

   ● final approval of the version to be submitted. When authorship is attributed to a group, all authors must meet the listed criteria and must be responsible for the quality, accuracy, and ethics of the work. All authors must participate in determining the order of authorship.
  
  Ⅱ. Conflict of interest and source of funding
  China Oncology requires that all sources of institutional, private, and corporate financial support for the work within the manuscript must be fully acknowledged, and any potential conflicts of interest noted. Grant or contribution numbers may be acknowledged, and principal grant holders should be listed.
   
  Submissions will be considered for publication in China Oncology only if they are submitted solely to China Oncology and do not overlap substantially with a published article. Any manuscript that has similar or near similar hypothesis, sample characteristics, methodology, results, and conclusions to a published article is a duplicate article and is prohibited. 
  

  
  

  
  

  Copyright  

  Ⅰ. Overall 

  ● Once an manuscript has been accepted by China Oncology, the authors will transfer the copyright of the manuscript to the Editorial Department of China Oncology, including but not limited to rights to digitally reproduce, distribute, and compile the article, and the right to disseminate the article to the public over information networks, and the right to translate the article, and the right to act for domestic and foreign literature retrieval system or database collection shall be transferred to the Editorial Office of China Oncology. The copyright royalties of the article and the journal’s manuscript remuneration shall be made as a one-time payment to the authors.

  ● After publication of the article, the authors shall own the right of signature, the right to maintain the integrity of work, and the right of modification. And the first author shall be the representative copyright owner. Any author wanna use the published article must obey the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) License (more information please visit the following content Instructions for obtaining electronic and printed copies) .

  ● Manuscripts that have passed the final review by the editor-in-chief (or editorial board) and are subsequently revised shall first be uploaded to the China National Knowledge Infrastructure publishing platform (www.cnki.net) for online publication and published on the journal’s website (www.china-oncology.com). If the authors do not consent to the electronic dissemination of the article, a statement must be enclosed with the manuscript submission, otherwise they will be deemed to have agreed to electronic publication.

  Ⅱ. Instructions for obtaining electronic and printed copies

    ● China Oncology is an open access journal that operates a single-blind peer-review process. All content in this journal is distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0)License. All articles are published in open access format as defined by the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. Published articles can be made public immediately and are permanently accessible free of charge on the official website (www.china-oncology.com), allowing users to read, download, copy, print, search, or obtain a link to the full text of the articles, or use them for other legitimate purposes.

  Instructions for free access and use:

  All users of articles in this journal should use the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 License as a prerequisite. The License allows users to copy and distribute articles provided that:

        A. This is not done for commercial purposes and further does not permit distribution of the article if it is changed or edited in any way.

        B. The user gives appropriate credit (with a link to the formal publication through the relevant DOI) and provides a link to the license but not in an any way implying that the licensor is endorsing the user or the use of the work.

        C.  No derivatives including remix, transform, or build upon the material was allowed for distribution.

  For more: http://www.china-oncology.com/EN/column/column361.shtml

  
  
  

  Writing

  Ⅰ. Publishing permission of illustrations

  If all or parts of previously published illustrations are used, permission must be obtained from the source publications.
  

  Ⅱ. Preparation of manuscript

  Manuscripts must be written in Chinese with English abstract or in English with Chinese abstract. The manuscripts should be formatted in DOC file with A4 paper size, 1.5-line spacing, single column, and wide margin. All pages should be numbered consecutively in the bottom right-hand corner, beginning with the first page.
  Manuscripts in general should be organized in the following order:
   ●Title (should be clear, descriptive and not too long)
   ●Name(s) of author(s), the correspondence author should be noticed.
   ●The institutions at which the work was carried out and their postal addresses
   ●Abstract followed by keywords, at least 3 items. Abstract should include: Background and purpose；Methods; Results; Conclusion.
   ●When submitting, the author needs to upload the original pictures of cell pictures, pathological pictures and gel electrophoresis pictures together with the manuscript in the form of attachments.
  

   ●Main text

   ●Reference
  

  All the references should be written in English, if the non-English references should be translated into English script; then this should be alongside the original references in non-English script.

  Ⅲ. Reporting Guidelines and Best Practices

  ● Human research: Declaration of Helsinki

  ● Systematic reviews and meta-analyses: PRISMA guidelines (for protocols, see the PRISMA-P guidelines

   We encourage all writers of Systematic reviews and meta-analyses to register your research, either on Cochrane or on PROSPERO. 
  Registration number and name of the trial registry must be provided at the end of the article abstract.
  

  ● Case reports: the CARE case report guidelines

  ● Clinical trials:  CONSORT Statement and CONSORT Checklist on Equator Network  (for protocols, see the SPIRIT guidance)

  ● Animal studies: ARRIVE guidelines and Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals

  Ⅳ. Submission of manuscript

  The manuscript can be submitted online http://www.china-oncology.com

  
  

  Peer Review Process and acceptance
  The acceptance criteria for all articles are the quality and originality of the research and its significance to readership. All manuscripts are peer reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers (i.e. single blind peer review), and the final acceptance or rejection rests with the Editorial Board, who reserves the right to refuse any material for publication. Authors are encouraged to suggest three to five qualified reviewers. Decisions on acceptance, revision, or rejection are made within two to four months of submission commonly. Papers are usually published in chronological order of acceptance. The editors reserve the right to modify typescripts to eliminate ambiguity and repetition. If extensive alterations are required, the manuscript will be returned to the author for revision.

  
  

  Data sharing policy
  China Oncology promotes and allows you to share data that supports the publication of studies when necessary and allows you to interlink the data with your published articles. Research data refers to the results of the observations or experimentation that confirm the research findings. The journal promotes the writers of articles published in our journal to share their research data including, but not limited to raw data, processed data, software, algorithms, protocols, models, methods and other related materials.

  
  To follow the policy, you can link your article directly to the dataset if you have made your study data accessible in a data repository. Meanwhile, China Oncology encourages writers to provide their manuscript with a data statement. Data sharing statements may indicate whether individual de-identified participant data (including data dictionaries) will be shared (“undecided” is not an acceptable answer) or what data, in particular, will be shared. Also it may indicate whether additional, related documents will be available (e.g., study protocol, statistical analysis plan, etc.) as well as when the data will become available and for how long and by what access criteria data will be shared (including with whom, for what types of analyses, and by what mechanism).

  
  
  Publication fee
  For accepted manuscripts from the authors(s), author(s) should pay RMB 500 yuan for each printed page, no additional fee for each color page. For those articles with funded projects, the fee will be discounted.
  

  Papers submitted for the column of the Guideline, Specialist's Commentary and Article, are free of publication fee.  For innovative articles recommended by the reviewers, China Oncology  provides a waiver or discount on publication fees for authors.

  If a manuscript to be published cannot be published normally due to the author's duplicate publication, plagiarism, or copyright dispute, even if a published article is withdrawn due to plagiarism, forgery, or other reasons, the paid publication fee will not be refunded.
  

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