Publishing Ethics
To strengthen the academic integrity of the journal, enhance the professional ethics of authors, reviewers, and editors, regulate the writing, submission, editorial review, and publication process of papers, and prevent academic misconduct, the Chinese Journal of Underground Space and Engineering has established its Publication Ethics Guidelines based on the relevant content of the "Ethical Guidelines for Scientific Journal Publishing" and following the journal’s situation.
I. Author Ethics
1. Authors are responsible for the content of their papers, ensuring the authenticity and credibility of the submitted work, compliance with relevant laws and policies of China, and are obliged to provide original images, raw data, project approval documents, project names, and approval numbers upon request from the editorial office.
2. Upon submission, authors must submit a "Copyright Transfer and Authorization Form," ensuring that the original work does not contain plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, improper attribution, multiple submissions, duplicate publication, or other forms of academic misconduct, and that the content does not involve confidential issues.
(1) Plagiarism: The act of improperly taking others' ideas, data, images, research methods, or textual expressions and publishing them under one's own name. This includes: (a) dea plagiarism, (b) data plagiarism, (c) image and audio/video plagiarism, (d) research (experimental) method plagiarism, (e) textual plagiarism, and (f) plagiarism of unpublished works.
(2) Fabrication: The act of inventing or fabricating data or facts, including: (a) Fabricating data or images not obtained from actual surveys or experiments; (b) Fabricating research methods or conclusions that do not match reality; (c) Fabricating supporting materials, annotations, or references for the paper; (d) Fabricating funding sources related to the research in the paper; (e) Fabricating reviewer information or review comments.
(3) Falsification: The act of deliberately altering data and facts to lose their authenticity, including: (a) Using modified, selected, deleted, or added raw survey records or data, altering the original intent; (b) Piecing together different images to create an unreal image; (c) Removing part of an image or adding fictional elements to change the interpretation; (d) Enhancing, blurring, or moving specific parts of an image to change the interpretation; (e) Altering the original intent of cited literature to benefit oneself.
(4) Attribution: In principle, authorship should be ordered according to the contribution, jointly determined by the authors, and confirmed at the time of submission. Only one corresponding author should be designated in the paper. After submission or publication, changes to authorship and affiliations are generally not permitted. Improper attribution includes: (a) Individuals who have not contributed substantially to the research in the author list; (b) Adding someone to the author list without their consent; (c) Author order not matching their actual contribution to the paper; (d) Providing false information about author titles, affiliations, education, research experience, etc.
(5) Multiple submissions: The act of submitting the same paper or paper with minor differences to two or more journals, or resubmitting to other journals within the agreed period, including: (a) Submitting the same paper to multiple journals simultaneously; (b) Resubmitting the paper to other journals during the agreed response period for the initial submission; (c) Submitting the paper to other journals before receiving a formal notice of rejection from the journal; (d) Submitting paper with minor differences to multiple journals simultaneously; (e) Slightly modifying the paper and submitting it to other journals before receiving a response from the initial submission or within the agreed period; (f) Resubmitting a previously published paper without any explanation or with minor modifications.
(6) Duplicate publication: The act of republishing one's own (or as one of the authors) previously published content without explanation, including: (a) Using content from one's own published literature in the paper without citation or explanation; (b) Extract multiple pieces from one's own published literature and piecing them together into a new paper for republication without explanation; (c) Failing to acknowledge the original publication in permitted secondary publications; (d) Repeatedly using data from a single survey in multiple papers without citation or explanation; (e) Publishing papers with similar or identical methods, conclusions, etc., based on the same research, each time with a small amount of additional data or material; (f) Co-authors publishing papers with significantly similar or identical data, methods, conclusions, etc., based on the same survey, experiment, or results.
(7) Other academic misconduct: Other forms of academic misconduct include: (a) Citing literature that was not actually referenced; (b) Marking citations from other literature as direct quotes; (c) Using copyrighted literature without permission; (d) Commissioning third-party organizations or individuals unrelated to the content of the paper to write, submit, or revise on one's behalf; (e) Publishing papers in violation of confidentiality agreements.
3. Conflict of interest declaration. Authors should declare any conflicts of interest upon submission, and if there is a conflict of interest, authors should disclose all financial interests that could potentially affect their research results (e.g., commercial relationships with companies related to the research; any financial sponsorship from companies for experimental design and implementation, data processing, writing, and publication, etc.).
4. Respecting reviewer opinions. If authors disagree with the review comments or results, they may submit a written appeal to the editorial office, providing detailed explanations and justifications for each review comment.
5. After publication, if authors discover significant errors in their work, they should inform the journal's editorial office to coordinate handling and cooperate in retracting the manuscript or issuing an appropriate "Correction" statement.
II. Review Ethics
1. Reviewers should assess manuscripts honestly, objectively, and fairly, upholding academic integrity and respecting academic freedom. They should not discriminate based on the author's country, institution, race, religion, political beliefs, gender, etc., and must maintain confidentiality before the work is publicly published, not disclosing the author's research content.
2. When a reviewer has a conflict of interest with the author (e.g., familial relationship, student-teacher relationship, alumni relationship, colleague relationship, competitive relationship), to ensure the fairness of the review, the reviewer should consult the editorial office for further advice in a timely manner.
3. When reviewers find that the research conducted by the author is similar to their own, the review should not contain unverified or malicious criticism or unfair content, avoiding unfounded accusations.
4. Reviewers should review manuscripts promptly according to the agreement. If they cannot complete the review on time, they should inform the editorial office and return the manuscript for review, recommending other reviewers if necessary. Without the consent of the editorial office, reviewers should not delegate the review to their students, colleagues, etc.
5. Reviewers who encounter manuscripts they have reviewed before should report the situation to the editorial office and provide review comments according to the journal's inclusion standards.
III. Editorial Ethics
1. Editors should handle each manuscript reasonably, impartially, and promptly, making acceptance or rejection decisions based on the paper's importance, originality, scientific nature, timeliness, readability, authenticity of research, and relevance to the journal, selecting outstanding papers that meet the journal's requirements for publication.
2. Editors should check for plagiarism in initial submissions and papers about to be published, and paper with excessive similarity involving academic misconduct should be rejected.
3. Editors must adhere to the principle of confidentiality, strictly keeping reviewer information confidential and maintaining the confidentiality of the author's research content.
4. Editors should not intervene in peer review due to personal interests, striving to ensure the independence of peer reviewers to guarantee the fairness and impartiality of peer review.
5. For reviewer recommendations from authors, editors should verify the authenticity of the reviewer's information and decide whether to use the recommended reviewer based on their research field and expertise, and whether there is a conflict of interest with the author. If an author requests to avoid a specific reviewer and the request is reasonable, the editor should respect it.
6. When selecting paper reviewers, editors should avoid reviewers with conflicts of interest, try to avoid being from the same unit as the author, and should not choose listed authors as reviewers.
7. If editors have a conflict of interest with authors (e.g., familial relationship, student-teacher relationship, alumni relationship, colleague relationship, competitive relationship), they should recuse themselves from handling the manuscript.
8. Editors should take author appeals seriously, organize collective discussions, or request reviewers to re-evaluate the manuscript.
9. Editors should remind authors of potential copyright and intellectual property issues that may arise after changing authorship, affiliations, and their order.
10. The editorial office may make textual modifications and deletions to manuscripts, and any content modifications should be approved by the author, fully respecting the author's viewpoints and writing style; editors should provide detailed revision suggestions or reasons for rejection whenever possible.
11. Editors should objectively state the situation of manuscript reviews and should not make personal evaluations or attacks on reviewers or authors.
IV. Publication Ethics
1. The journal strictly adheres to the objectivity and fairness of the paper review process.
2. For manuscripts that have been finalized and accepted for publication, the journal has the right to retract the manuscript and notify the author's institution and related journals if academic misconduct is discovered.
3. For papers that have been published, if academic misconduct is discovered, the journal will retract the paper and issue a retraction