Publication Ethics Statement

Acta Entomologica Sinica always complies with the recognized publication ethics. The authors, reviewers and journal editors of Acta Entomologica Sinica should fulfil the following responsibilities, and abide by other rules and requirements of this journal.

1 Authorship Responsibilities

(1) The paper must be unpublished original research (except for the review). It must be not published, or submitted elsewhere, and does not contain any content that is forged, deceiving, or plagiarized. The paper does not involve any state secrets or any infringement of intellectual property rights, does not contain any illegalities or any infringement of others’ legal rights.

(2) The citation of others’ work must be clearly indicated in the main text and listed in the references at the end of the paper. Once the submission was accepted, it will be deemed that the authors grant their right of reproduction and dissemination to the journal.

(3) The paper will be submitted for peer review and the authors have the opportunity to recommend or oppose proper reviewers.

(4) Authorship should be limited to those who have made a significant contribution to the conception, design or execution of the reported study. All authors are ordinal listed according to their contributions. Where there are others who have participated in certain substantive aspects of the paper (e.g. language editing), they should be recognized in the acknowledgements section. The corresponding author, who submits the paper for publication, should ensure that all appropriate co-authors and no inappropriate co-authors are included on the paper, and that all co-authors have seen the final version of the paper and have agreed to its submission for publication.

(5) All data of the paper must be real, accurate, and authentic. If mistakes are found in a published paper, the authors must inform editors, and provide an apology, correction, or retraction, as appropriate.

2 Reviewer Responsibilities

(1) Reviewers should ensure scientific and accurate review of manuscripts and make objective and fair evaluations. All comments should be made only considering its scientific value, regardless of the authors’ background, such as race, gender, or religious/political beliefs. Reviewers should avoid conflict of interests with the work or authors.

(2) Reviewers should fill in the review comments in time and feed back to the editorial office within the specified time. If reviewers cannot complete the reviewing process on time, the situation should be stated and the manuscript should be returned.

(3) Reviewers should treat papers under review as confidential materials, forbid to disseminate the data, opinions and conclusions of the paper in any form without permission.

3 Editor Responsibilities

(1) The editor is responsible for all editing procedures of the journal. The editor should abide by the relevant policies set by the journal editorial board and follow the relevant legal norms concerning defamation, infringement and plagiarism when selecting articles.

(2) The editor should maintain the authenticity of the review records, and has the obligation to keep record and keep the materials confidential for reviewing and modifying at each step. The editors and editorial staff shall not disclose any information about the submitted manuscript to others, except for exchanging necessary information among corresponding authors, reviewers, and editorial board members.

(3) The editor should select manuscripts fairly, accept or reject manuscripts only based on originality, importance, clarity, and conformity to the journal’ s aim and scope.

(4) When an edited article needs major revision, it is necessary to communicate with authors in time and obtain authors’ consent.

(5) The editor has the obligation to investigate the academic misconduct. Once the academic misconduct occurs in the submission or the published paper, the editor must take corresponding measures. If necessary, corrections, clarifications, withdrawals or apologies shall be published. The editor is obliged to hold authors and reviewer accountable for misconduct.

 (6) As the journal adopts single-anonymous peer review, the editor has the obligation to keep the information of the reviewers confidential.

4 Statement on GenAI

The policy on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) technology in the submission and review process is as follows:

(1) GenAI cannot assume the corresponding responsibility of an author, and the journal does not accept GenAI, its products or teams listed as authors.

(2) GenAI cannot be used to write entire papers or important parts of papers, such as methods, results, and interpretation and analysis of results. All contents falling within the realm of scientific contribution or intellectual work should be completed by humans. If the main contents of a paper are completed by GenAI, the editorial office will regard the case as academic misconduct.

(3) GenAI can be used for literature search, topic selection, statistical analysis, language polishing, figures production, format checking, etc., if necessary for the research. Authors are fully responsible for the contents produced by GenAI tools, and are thus liable for any breaches of publication ethics or infringement.

(4) In order to improve efficiency and reduce workload, GenAI may be used to assist the daily work of the editorial office, but it is prohibited to assist manuscript evaluation or decision-making process. It must be human editors who are responsible for the manuscript review, decision-making, and communication with authors. To avoid risks of infringement, privacy breach, and confidential breach, it is prohibited to upload manuscripts and supplementary materials to publicly available GenAI platforms during the review process.

(5) If, upon investigation, the editorial office determines that authors have violated GenAI usage policies in their scientific writing, the manuscript will be rejected or retracted. In severe cases, the journal will blacklist the author and report the case to other journals in the field. If reviewers violate our GenAI policies during the review process, which results in information leakage or infringement, they will be prohibited from participating in review work and shall bear consequent responsibilities.

5 Retractions and Corrections

(1) Editors should consider retracting a publication if they have clear evidence that the findings are unreliable, either as a result of misconduct (e.g. data fabrication) or honest error (e.g. miscalculation or experimental error); the findings have previously been published elsewhere without proper cross-referencing, permission or justification (i.e. cases of redundant publication); it constitutes plagiarism; it reports unethical research.

(2) Notices of retraction should be linked to the retracted article wherever possible (i.e. in all electronic versions), clearly identify the retracted article (e.g. by including the title and authors in the retraction heading), and be published promptly to minimize harmful effects from misleading publications.

(3) Editors should consider issuing a correction if a small portion of an otherwise reliable publication proves to be misleading (especially because of honest error); the author / contributor list is incorrect (i.e. a deserving author has been omitted or somebody who does not meet authorship criteria has been included).