Manuscript Processing Flow

Shanghai Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Shanghai J Tradit Chin Med) uses double-blind peer review process, which means that both the reviewer and author identities are concealed from the reviewers, and vice versa, throughout the review process. The specific manuscript processing system is as follows:

1. Preliminary Review stage 1: The editorial office conducts a pre-screening upon receipt of all incoming manuscripts. The purpose of the pre-screening is to assess the quality of each manuscript, whether it conforms to the journal’s aims and scope, etc. The “Academic Misconduct Literature Check” (AMLC) System is used to detect the plagiarism, and the acceptable repetition percentage is below 15 % for all kinds of articles.

2. Preliminary Review stage 2 (peer-review): After passing the preliminary review stage 1, the manuscripts are assigned to one of the section editors and forwarded to two qualified external experts in the same field of research. If a manuscript receives wildly divergent reviews, the editor will invite one or two more experts to review the manuscript. The reviewers should assess the scientific reliability, significance, innovation and practicality of the manuscript to determine the publication value. To be specific, reviewers mainly check these following aspects before presenting an overall assessment and specific revision comments: (a) Whether the research embodies innovation of the field or significant application value, (b) Whether the research has sufficient experimental evidence or analysis to support the conclusions of the article, and (c) Whether the research involves any ethical issues. Upon comments of reviewers and under editorial consideration, the responsible editor will offer a revision request letter or a rejection letter to the author(s).

3. Secondary Review: After the manuscript has passed external review and modifications to the manuscript have been made upon reviewers’ comments, the editorial director will review the modified manuscript and decide to reject, or return the manuscript for revision, or move toward the final review.

4. Final Review: Manuscripts that pass the secondary review will then be again reviewed by the editor-in-chief (or by the editor-in-chief’s designee), who makes the final decision to return the manuscript for revision, or reject the manuscript, or accept the manuscript. Manuscripts that pass the final review will be accepted.

5. Publication: The accepted articles will go through the process of editing, typesetting, proofreading, etc., and finally complete the online and hard copy publication.