Publishing Scope
Journal of Forensic Medicine (Fayixue Zazhi, CN 31-1472 / R, ISSN 1004-5619), founded in July 1985, is a bimonthly academic journal governed by the Ministry of Justice of the People's Republic of China and sponsored by the Academy of Forensic Science. The journal welcomes original research articles, case studies, reviews, newsletters, comments written in Chinese in forensic pathology, forensic clinical science, forensic material evidence, forensic psychiatry, forensic toxicology, environmental damage and forensic identification. Articles funded by national key research projects or foundations will be given priority for publishing after peer review.
Writing Standard
Please download theWriting Requirementfor detailed guidelines of manuscripts at the bottom of this page.
Submission and Fees
(1) The journal only accepts submission from the online system (www.fyxzz.cn). The author can check the status of the submission processing through the system at any time. Detailed contact method of authors should be provided for submission. Any change of contact information should be notified to the editorial office.
(2) Following documents should be provided upon submission: recommendation letter from author’s institute, Authors Contribution Form, Statement of Competing Interests.
(3) The journal is open access. An APC (RMB 600 yuan / one black-white page) shall be payable once an article is accepted. Color processing fee shall also be charged (200 yuan/picture). After publishing, a remuneration (200 yuan/page, including the remuneration for database inclusion) shall be paid to authors. In addition, one or two copies of the current issue will be posted to authors.
Peer Review and Editing
(1) The journal uses the repetition detection system developed by CNKI and Daya to test all manuscripts. Multiple submission is unacceptable. If multiple submission or plagiarism is found, the editorial office will reject any submission from the author within 2 years, and will notify the author’s institutes and other journals within the field.
(2) The journal adopts double-blind review system. The rate of acceptance is about 30 %. After submission, the editorial office will conduct a preliminary review of the manuscript. Manuscripts that do not conform to the publishing scope of this journal or have major defects will be rejected. Manuscripts which have passed the preliminary review will be anonymously sent to two or more peer reviewers. Authors must make revision to the manuscript in response to each comment of reviewers. The Editor-in-Chief will conduct the final round of review and the editorial office shall impartially select manuscripts on the basis of academic quality and review comment.
(3) The editorial office will notify the author of the review result (accept/revise/reject) within 3 months after submission. Only after receiving the notice of rejection from this journal can the authors re-submit their manuscript to another journal. If authors do not receive any review comments from the journal after three months of submission, they can send an E-mail or make a phone call to the editorial office for inquiry.
(4) According to provisions of theCopyright Law, the journal has right to make revision or deletion to the submitted manuscript. Any revision that changes the original meaning will be sent to authors for confirmation. Authors should notify the editorial office if they do not agree with the revision or deletion.
(5) The editorial staff / editors / editorial board members should not be involved in publishing decisions on papers which they have written themselves or have been written by their family members or colleagues. Any such submission should be strictly subject to the journal’s usual editorial process. Peer review should be handled independently from the relevant author/editor and their research groups.
(6) The authors may make an appeal if they disagree with the comment of the reviewers. The authors need to write an appeal letter (with the manuscript serial number) and send it to fyxzz@ssfjd.cn. Detailed reasons for appealing must be stated, including a comprehensive and reasonable answer to the reviewers’ comment. The appeal letter should also be stamped by the author’s institute. The editorial department will consider whether to change the decision case by case.
Correction and Retraction
(1) General Situation: Articles published online or in print are considered the final and complete version. In principle, the journal does not make corrections or retractions on published articles. However, in case of the situations described below, corrections or retractions may be carried out if truly necessary.
(2) Correction: If there appears to be an unintended scientific mistake in the article which would not lead to significant impacts on the results and conclusion, the editorial office will publish corrections in the journal as soon as possible, detailing the changes made to the original article and indicating the source of the article. The journal will release the corrected new version of the article, and specify the changes to the original article and the date of update. In addition, the superseded version will also be archived. Readers can obtain it directly, but only the latest version of the article should be used for citation.
(3) Retraction: In the following cases, the editorial office would retract published articles and issue retraction statements:a.If an article is found to have severe scientific errors making the results and conclusion of the article unreliable;b.For article suspected of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and data falsification, the editorial office will initiate an investigation and issue a statement to inform readers of the risks associated with the article. Once the investigation is completed, the result will be made public. If the academic misconduct is confirmed, the article will be immediately retracted and a retraction statement will be issued by the editorial office.
Open Access Policy
Journal of Forensic Medicine flipped to open access journal in 2022. After that time, all articles, once published, would be immediately and permanently available online for readers to read and download free of charge. Permitted third party reuse of the articles published by the journal is defined by the following user license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). This license allows reusers to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format. The licensor cannot revoke these freedoms as long as the license terms below are followed: reusers must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. Reusers may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses the use. Reusers may not use the material for commercial purposes. If reusers remix, transform, or build upon the material, they may not distribute the modified material. The authors have right to spread or make use of the article under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. The full details of the license are available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
Copyright Policy
(1) Once the manuscript is accepted, Author should sign theCopyright Transfer Statement(template can be downloaded at the bottom of this page), confirm the layout to be published, and then send the statement back to the editorial office as soon as possible.
(2) Authors shall agree to transfer the copyright (in all kinds of media) and related property rights of the article specified above (hereinafter referred to as "the article") to theJournal of Forensic Medicineworldwide from the date when the article is submitted to the editorial office.Journal of Forensic Medicinehas, but not limited to, the following rights for part or full text of the article: the right of compilation, distribution, reproduction, translation, online publishing and dissemination, etc., and has right to license retrieval systems, network or database systems to include or index the article.
(3) The journal is indexed by a series of databases at home and abroad. All manuscripts accepted by this journal will be published simultaneously in print journal and online. If authors do not agree, please make a written statement upon submission.
Archiving Policy
All journal articles from the 6th issue of 2017 have been digitally archived and can be read and downloaded from this website free of charge. These articles are open access with user’s rights defined by CC By-NC-ND 4.0 License. Articles published from 1985 to the 5th issue of 2017 are not open access, while the abstracts can be searched and read on this website. In order to ensure data security, all information has also been backed up in the editorial office. The hard copy of each issue of the journal had also been kept in the editorial office for archiving. In addition, other relevant materials are also kept by the editorial office, such as supplementary information and forms provided by the authors. The full text of articles published in this journal can also be downloaded from China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI), Wanfang Data, Weipu, Chaoxing and EBSCO Host. In case the journal and the website were closed, archiving data could be retrieved through those full-text databases.
Authors have right to upload the article to author's personal webpage, and to post or update the article on an e-print (publication) server.
Download List
Please click the titles to download files or templates.