As an important carrier of scientific research achievements, scientific and technical journals play an important role in maintaining and promoting research integrity. Upholding high academic quality and rigorous publication integrity, Chinese Livestock and Poultry Breeding has formulated this publication ethics statement in accordance with the Code of Publication Ethics for Scientific and Technical Journals. All authors, editors, and reviewers are requested to strictly comply with it. For more detailed information, please refer to the official website of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) (http://www.publicationethics.org/).
1 Ethical Expectations
1.1 Editorial Responsibilities
Journal editors must conscientiously fulfill their responsibilities and obligations in publishing scientific research achievements, observe academic ethics, safeguard research integrity, and resist academic misconduct.
(1) Handle all submissions promptly and fairly. During initial review, editors should remain objective and impartial and should not hold bias regarding authors’ gender, sexual orientation, religious belief, political views, ethnicity, or nationality. Editors should recuse themselves from handling manuscripts in which they have a conflict of interest. Manuscripts for funded supplements or special issues follow the same processing procedures as other manuscripts; acceptance is based solely on academic merit and is unrelated to commercial interests.
(2) Ensure confidential handling of submissions. Editors must not disclose author information or academic content of manuscripts to anyone other than reviewers and editorial board members.
(3) Strictly select reviewers. Based on an assessment of academic reputation and research achievements, editors should reasonably select experts qualified to review the manuscript and should avoid reviewers from the same institution as the manuscript authors whenever possible.
(4) Strictly follow the three-review system. Ensure transparency at each stage, and allow authors to check manuscript processing progress in the system at any time.
(5) Communicate with authors promptly when substantial revisions are made, and confirm with authors before formal publication.
(6) Properly handle appeals regarding rejected manuscripts and, when appropriate, serve as a communication bridge between authors and reviewers.
(7) Properly respond to complaints involving academic ethics. When a complaint concerning academic ethics arises, editors should handle it according to prescribed procedures and relevant policies. Regardless of when the original publication was published, any author complaint will be properly handled and reasonably answered. All documents related to such complaints will be properly retained.
1.2 Reviewer Responsibilities
Reviewers help the editorial office further screen out low-quality articles by evaluating originality, scientific merit, and innovation, and provide detailed revision suggestions for accepted manuscripts to help authors improve manuscript quality.
(1) Anonymous review system. To avoid subjective influence on reviewers and authors, Chinese Livestock and Poultry Breeding adopts a double-blind review system. During external review, author names, institutions, acknowledgments, and other identifying information are concealed so that reviewers can make more objective evaluations. During manuscript revision, reviewer information is also removed from review comments.
(2) Timeliness of review. Reviewers should complete review comments on time and return them to the editorial office within the specified period. If they cannot complete the review on time, they should explain the situation and return the manuscript.
(3) Reviewer confidentiality. Reviewers must keep reviewed manuscripts strictly confidential, must not circulate or discuss them with others, and must not use or publish the data, views, or conclusions of the manuscripts they review.
(4) Reviewer recusal. If reviewers may have financial, institutional, collaborative research, or any other conflict of interest with authors, they should inform the relevant editor and recuse themselves from reviewing the manuscript.
1.3 Author Responsibilities
Chinese Livestock and Poultry Breeding is committed to maintaining the integrity of the scientific record. The journal will follow COPE guidelines in handling possible misconduct. Authors should avoid misrepresenting research results, as this may affect the journal’s reputation and ultimately harm scientific work as a whole. To maintain the integrity of research results, authors should follow good scientific practice, including:
(1) Do not submit the same manuscript to multiple journals;
(2) The manuscript has not been published elsewhere, in whole or in part. If the new manuscript extends previous work, reused materials should be accompanied by copyright permission and proper citation to avoid suspected self-plagiarism;
(3) Do not split a complete research project into multiple manuscripts and submit them to multiple journals or to the same journal;
(4) Do not fabricate data, including image manipulation, to support your conclusions;
(5) Do not plagiarize the data, text, or theories of others. For unavoidable repeated text or images, cite the source properly; quoted text should be marked with quotation marks, and images require publication permission from the publisher;
(6) Please note that Chinese Livestock and Poultry Breeding uses CNKI similarity checking software;
(7) Before submission, the manuscript content has been approved by all co-authors and their institutions;
(8) All authors have made sufficient contributions to the manuscript and share collective responsibility for the research results;
(9) For any research involving animal experiments, authors must provide an “Animal Welfare Statement” in the Materials and Methods section or at the end of the manuscript. The statement should indicate that the experiment was approved by the animal ethics committee of the authors’ institution, including the approval number, and that it strictly complied with internationally or nationally/regionally accepted guidelines for the care and use of laboratory animals, such as the Guide for the Care and Use of Laboratory Animals. The journal does not accept animal research manuscripts that fail to comply with ethical principles.
(10) If significant errors are found in a publication, authors should promptly notify the editorial office;
(11) The submitted manuscript does not involve state secrets, intellectual property infringement, or any disputes of interest.
1.4 Copyright
Authorship should be limited to those who have made substantial contributions to the work, and each author should be responsible for the data and arguments presented in the manuscript. The corresponding author must obtain permission from all authors before submitting each version of the manuscript and before making any changes to authorship.
In addition, after a manuscript has been accepted for peer review, changes to authorship or author order are not accepted. Requests to add or remove authors during revision or after publication are serious matters and will be considered only after written permission from all authors has been received and the role of the new or removed author has been explained in detail. The decision to accept such changes rests with the journal editorial office, and authors should submit relevant documentation to verify the legitimacy and validity of the request. Documentation may include original data, samples, or related records.
1.5 Conflict of Interest Statement
Authors must declare all relationships or interests that may influence or bias the manuscript. Although authors may not believe that a conflict exists, disclosure of relationships and interests provides a more transparent process and allows accurate and objective evaluation of the manuscript. Readers have the right to know all interests or conflicts related to the research; this does not mean that financial relationships between the research and relevant organizations are inappropriate. Potential conflicts of interest directly or indirectly related to the research include, but are not limited to:
(1) Funding, including the funding agency and grant number;
(2) Participation in special seminars with honoraria;
(3) Participation in special seminars through financial support;
(4) Education or training received through financial support;
(5) Employment guidance or consulting;
(6) Positions on advisory committees or boards, or other types of management positions;
(7) Employment relationships with multiple organizations;
(8) Financial relationships, such as equity or investment interests;
(9) Intellectual property, such as patents, copyrights, or royalties from such rights;
(10) Spouses and children who have financial interests related to the research work.
In addition, non-financial interests that may be relevant to readers must be declared, including but not limited to personal relationships or competing interests directly or indirectly related to the research, or professional interests or personal beliefs that may influence the author’s research. The interest statement will be placed together with the corresponding author information. See the following examples.
Funding: This study was funded by X (Grant No. X).
Conflict of interest: Author A has received research funding from Company A. Author B has received speaker honoraria from Company X and owns shares in Company Y. Author C is a member of Committee Z.
If no conflict exists, authors should state the following:
Conflict of interest: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.
1.6 Statement on the Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence
The use of generative artificial intelligence technology (GenAI) in manuscript submission and review must follow the following ethical standards:
(1) GenAI cannot assume the responsibilities of a listed author. The journal does not accept GenAI, its products, or teams as named authors of a paper.
(2) GenAI may not be used to write an entire article or important parts of an article, such as research methods, results, and interpretation or analysis of results. All content that constitutes scientific contribution or intellectual labor should be completed by humans. If the main content of an article is generated by GenAI, the editorial office will treat it as academic misconduct.
(3) GenAI may be used for literature retrieval, research topic selection, statistical analysis, language polishing, auxiliary figure preparation, and formatting checks needed in the research process. Authors bear full responsibility for GenAI-generated content and are also responsible for any violation of scientific publication ethics or infringement arising from its use.
(4) To improve efficiency and reduce workload, GenAI may be used to assist the daily work of the editorial office, but it is prohibited from assisting manuscript evaluation or acceptance decisions. Editors must be responsible for manuscript review, acceptance decisions, and communication with authors. To avoid potential infringement, privacy leakage, and confidentiality risks, manuscripts and supplementary materials must not be uploaded to publicly available GenAI platforms during the review process.
(5) If the editorial office determines that an author has violated GenAI use requirements in manuscript writing, the manuscript will be rejected or retracted. Serious cases will be blacklisted and reported to the author’s institution and other journals in the field. Reviewers who violate the above rules during manuscript review and cause information leakage or infringement will be prohibited from participating in review work and, when necessary, bear corresponding responsibility.
1.7 Informed Consent
Everyone has the right not to be violated. Each participant has the right to know how their personal data or identifiable images will appear in the final paper. Therefore, before data or images are included in a manuscript, all participants should provide written informed consent. Except for information necessary for the research content of the manuscript and information for which participants have given informed consent, detailed identifying information about participants, such as names, dates of birth, ID numbers, and other information, should not appear in the text or images of the final paper.
In some cases, complete anonymity is difficult to achieve. If there is any doubt, informed consent should be obtained. For example, covering the eye area in participant photographs is considered sufficient protection of anonymity. If identifying characteristics, such as genetic characteristics, are altered to protect anonymity, authors should ensure that these changes do not distort the scientific meaning.
The informed consent statement should include the following wording:
Informed consent: “Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the manuscript.”
If the manuscript provides identifying information about participants, the following statement should be included:
“Informed consent has been obtained from all individual participants for all personal identifying information included in this article.”
2 Identification and Handling of Papers Involving Academic Misconduct
To protect readers’ rights and interests and maintain the quality and reputation of the journal, Chinese Livestock and Poultry Breeding strictly checks and screens papers during publication. Papers identified as involving academic misconduct will continue to be rejected and handled seriously. The detection, identification, and handling procedures are as follows:
2.1 The journal uses the CNKI Academic Misconduct Detection System for automatic manuscript checking, with the China Academic Literature Network Publishing Database as the full-text comparison database, to detect plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, improper authorship, duplicate submission, and other forms of academic misconduct.
2.2 Scope of Papers Subject to Checking
(1) All accepted papers or papers proposed for acceptance;
(2) Papers reported by readers as suspected of plagiarism.
2.3 Identification of Papers Involving Academic Misconduct
The CNKI Academic Misconduct Detection System is used for similarity checking. The similarity rate must be below 10%. Once any academic misconduct is found in a manuscript, it will be rejected.
The criteria for identifying a paper as involving academic misconduct are as follows:
(1) The manuscript copies the work of others verbatim or almost verbatim;
(2) The manuscript changes the type of another person’s work and presents it as the author’s own independent work; or, without changing the type of work, uses copyrighted components of another person’s work, changes its form of expression, and presents it as the author’s own independent work;
(3) The manuscript uses protected viewpoints of others as all, core, or main viewpoints of the paper, or uses protected academic achievements of others as the main or substantive part of the author’s academic paper;
(4) The manuscript fabricates or falsifies research results, survey data, experimental data, or literature materials;
(5) The manuscript cites protected viewpoints, plans, materials, data, or similar content of others without annotation or source attribution;
(6) The manuscript is submitted to multiple journals.
2.4 Handling of Papers Identified as Involving Academic Misconduct
(1) For papers finally identified as involving academic misconduct, the editorial office will act prudently, promptly notify the authors, and allow them to explain and appeal before a handling decision is made.
(2) If the paper has been accepted but not formally published, the author will be notified and the paper will be rejected directly.
(3) If the paper has already been formally published, the author will be notified to retract it. If the journal suffers reputational or other losses, the journal reserves the right to seek compensation.
(4) For authors involved in serious cases, the journal will publish their institution and name together with a notice of paper retraction at an appropriate time and report the incident to the author’s institution.
(5) For authors who commit serious plagiarism or duplicate submission/publication, the journal will not accept any papers in which they are the first author for three years.
3 Appeals and Feedback
If authors disagree with the journal’s identification and handling results, they may submit a written appeal to the editorial office by email. The editorial office will review the appeal as soon as possible and provide the result to the author. In addition, if any reader or author has feedback or comments on articles published by the journal, they may send them to the journal’s email address. The editorial office will handle them as soon as possible and provide feedback where appropriate.
5 Online Accessibility
All articles published by the journal are available in full text through this website, CNKI, Wanfang Data, CQVIP, Chaoxing Journals, and other channels.
These measures take effect from the date of publication and are interpreted by the editorial office of Chinese Livestock and Poultry Breeding.