Journal of Hunan University (Natural Sciences) complies with the recognized publication ethics. The editors, authors and reviewers of Journal of Hunan University (Natural Sciences) should perform the following duties.

Duties of Editors 

1. Editors should firmly oppose plagiarism in any form. By making full use of the appropriate software, editors should ensure that each manuscript is of originality. After passing this test made by the software, the manuscript is forwarded to two reviewers for double-blind peer review.

2. Editors should have no conflict of interest with respect to the manuscripts they reject/accept.

3. Editors accept and evaluate manuscripts for their intellectual content at any time without regard to gender, race, religion, citizenship, etc. of the authors. Only based on the review report of the two reviewers, can the editors accept, reject or request modifications to the manuscript.

4. Editors must not share any information about a submitted manuscript with anyone other than the corresponding author, reviewers, and the publisher.

Duties of Authors
1. Authors should affirm that manuscript contents are original and that the writing follows the submission guidelines of the journal.

2. Authors should not submit the same manuscript to more than one journal concurrently. They should also warrant that their manuscript is not under review for publication anywhere, or that their manuscript has published elsewhere in any language fully or partly.

3. Authors should acknowledge all sources of data used in the research and cite publications related to their research work, but should not use unpublished manuscripts or materials in their manuscript.

4. Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the research.

Duties of Reviewers
1. Reviewers should have no conflict of interest due to competition, collaboration, or other relationships with any of the authors, companies, or institutions connected to the papers.

2. Reviewers must ensure the review process objective, impartial and confidential, and should express their views clearly with supporting arguments.

3. Reviewers must ensure that authors have acknowledged all sources of data used in the research. If possible, reviewers should point out relevant published work not yet cited. If the reviewers find plagiarism, they should immediately tell the editor.
4. When a reviewer feels it is impossible to finish the manuscript review within the stipulated time, he/she should forward this information to the editor, so that the manuscript could be sent to another reviewer.