4 . This page explains how to prepare your article for submission to any of our journals.

Note that length limits, article types and other journal specific information are available on the “Author information” page on each journal website.

The submitting author will be required to provide an Open Researcher and Contributor ID (ORCID) via the online submission system. The benefits of registering an ORCID are outlined here. Provision of ORCIDs by co-authors is strongly encouraged, but not a must.

You are permitted to suggest suitably regular reviewers (审稿人), especially if you are from underrepresented groups, such as women, scientists with disabilities, early life researchers. However, we may choose to use other reviewers.

Editorial rules

Please carefully read our rule page before submitting and review our licensing and open access conditions. Papers submitted to our journals are normally peer reviewed in a single-blind fashion (author names are not hidden, but judge names are).

Unless you have selected for publication of peer review information for accepted papers, the review reports and other contact information relating to your paper should not be shared or made publicly available.

Formatting (编排格式) your article

In order to make submission as easy as possible for authors, we have introduced format-free first submission for the majority of our journals, apart from Biology Letters which requires a Word version upon first submission to enable accurate length calculation.

Once an article has been accepted for publication the main contribution must be submitted as an editable file, not a PDF, and the source files of any figures and tables must be provided.

The Palace Museum in Beijing released its calendar for 2022 on September 6 although the Year of the Tiger is still more than four months away. “The calendar has become a new way for many people     1     (record) their life,” Chen Lihua, editor-in-chief of the calendar, says.

Though printed calendars seem to have lost     2     (they) functionality in the digital era, the museum s delicate calendar has become     3     item to collect. On each page of the new calendar, a tiger-themed cultural relic of the Palace Museum is introduced,     4     (range) from a jade ornament (翡翠) in the shape of a tiger dating back some 5,000 years     5     paintings created by modern Chinese masters such as Qi Baishi and Zhang Daqian.

“The tiger is     6     stands for strength and energy in traditional Chinese culture.” Chen says, “We want to reflect tiger-related culture from various     7     (aspect).”

As the 2022 Winter Olympics     8     (schedule) to be held in China in February, a section of the calendar will introduce royal winter sports during the Qing Dynasty through art pieces.

In spite of the established reputation, creativity is still     9     (bad) needed for new editions of the annual calendar. Other than new design of pages, augmented (增广的)reality is now being used, making it     10     (access) for readers to have a better view of the moving pictures of cultural relics by scanning QR codes.

9 . As technology makes communication easier and quicker, handwritten letters are nearly a thing of the past.

But it is making a comeback on Feng Shengji’s desk. The 34-year-old from Chengdu started an online letter-writing business in February last year, writing and mailing hundreds of letters on behalf of others. She has written letters of appreciation, apologies for wrongdoings, love letters and breakup letters. Her story has spread on social media, triggering wide discussion on the lost art of letter writing. It has been viewed more than 14 million times on Sina Weibo.

The idea of writing letters for others came when Feng tried to draw and write on her iPad to beat boredom during COVID-19. Then, she opened an online store for letter writing. Up till last month, she worked for a local design company in the day, and worked on her online business as a letter writer at night.

In mid-March last year, a doctor from Sichuan became her first client. He was assigned to help fight COVID-19 in Wuhan during the 76-day lockdown. The doctor contacted Feng to help him write thank-you letters to the Wuhan Red Cross Hospital and the hotel he stayed in for their care and support during his time in Wuhan. As mailing services were stopped during the lockdown, Feng wrote the letters on her iPad and emailed the letters. “I told him that I wanted to write the letters free of charge, but he insisted on paying.” Feng recounts.

Since then, her business has taken off. As of January, she has written more than 700 letters , with each letter ranging from dozens of words to thousands. Depending on the length of the letters, each letter can cost from dozens of yuan to less than 100 yuan.

“Letter writing is a meaningful thing, and I want to make it into a lifetime career.” says Feng, smiling. She resigned from her design job and became a full-time letter writer from June.

10 . Scientists rely on journal papers to share their scientific results.     1    

Once researchers are confident of their results, they write up a manuscript(手稿)and send it to a joumal. Editors forward the submitted manuscripts to at least two external referees who are expert in the topic. These reviewers can suggest the manuscript be rejected, published as is, or sent back to the scientists for more experiments.     2    

Research published in peer-reviewed journals has undergone strict quality control by experts. Each year, about 2, 800 peer-reviewed journals publish roughly 1.8 million scientific papers. The body of scientific knowledge is constantly evolving and updating, but you can trust that the science these journals describe is sound. Retraction policies help correct the record if mistakes are discovered post-publication.

    3    To get the word out faster, scientists sometimes post research papers on what’s called a preprint server. These often have “RXiv”—pronounced “archive”—in their name:MedRXiv, BioRXiv and so on. These articles have not been peer-reviewed and so are not proven by other scientists. Preprints provide an opportunity for other scientists to evaluate and use the research as building blocks in their own work sooner.

How long has this work been on the preprint server? If it’s been months and it hasn’t yet been published in the peer-reviewed literature, be very skeptical.     4    During the COVID-19 crisis, with researchers hurrying to understand a dangerous new virus and rushing to develop lifesaving treatments, preprint servers have been littered with immature and unproven science. Demanding research standards have been sacrificed for speed.

Be smartly aware of research published in what are called predatory (损人利己的) journals.     5    Papers from any of the thousands of known predatory journals should be treated with strong skepticism.