About Chinese Medicine
This page includes information about the aims and scope of Chinese Medicine, editorial policies, open access and article-processing charges, the peer review process and other information. For details of how to prepare and submit a manuscript through the online submission system, please see the instructions for authors.
Aims & scope
Chinese Medicine is an open access, online journal publishing evidence-based, scientifically justified, and ethical research into all aspects of Chinese medicine.
Areas of interest include recent advances in herbal medicine, clinical nutrition, clinical diagnosis, acupuncture, pharmaceutics, biomedical sciences, epidemiology, education, informatics, sociology, and psychology that are relevant and significant to Chinese medicine. Examples of research approaches include biomedical experimentation, high-throughput technology, clinical trials, systematic reviews, meta-analysis, sampled surveys, simulation, data curation, statistics, omics, translational medicine, and integrative methodologies.
Chinese Medicine is a credible channel to communicate unbiased scientific data, information, and knowledge in Chinese medicine among researchers, clinicians, academics, and students in Chinese medicine and other scientific disciplines of medicine.
Open access
All articles published by Chinese Medicine are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Further information about open access can be found here.
Authors of articles published in Chinese Medicine are the copyright holders of their articles and have granted to any third party, in advance and in perpetuity, the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article, according to the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement.
For authors who are US government employees or are prevented from being copyright holders for similar reasons, BioMed Central can accommodate non-standard copyright lines. Please contact us if further information is needed.
Article-processing charges
The publication costs for Chinese Medicine are covered by the International Society for Chinese Medicine, so authors do not need to pay an article-processing charge.
Indexing services
All articles published in Chinese Medicine are included in PubMed, the most widely used biomedical bibliographic database service, which is run by the US National Library of Medicine. Other bibliographic databases that index articles published in Chinese Medicine include:
- CABI
- CAS
- Cinahl
- Citebase
- DOAJ
- Embase
- EmCare
- Global Health
- Google Scholar
- Index Copernicus
- Journal Citation Reports/Science Edition
- OAIster
- PubMed
- PubMed Central
- Science Citation Index Expanded
- SCImago
- Scirus
- Scopus
- SOCOLAR
- Zetoc
The full text of all research articles is deposited in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature, and other digital archives including e-Depot (The Netherlands).
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Chinese Medicine is tracked by Thomson Reuters (ISI) and has an unofficial Impact Factor of 2.63
Publication and peer review process
Criteria for publication
Commentaries: short, focused and opinionated articles on any subject within the journal's scope. These articles are usually related to a contemporary issue, such as recent research findings, and are often written by opinion leaders invited by the Editorial Board.
Research: reports of data from original research.
Reviews: comprehensive, authoritative, descriptions of any subject within the journal's scope. They should have an educational aim and be between 2000-3000 words. Reviews can cover any topical themes such as basic science and clinical reviews, ethics, pro/con debates, equipment reviews and thematic series to highlight specific topics in the field.
Peer-review policies
Only manuscripts of high relevance and suitability will enter into the peer review process, which will be conducted by at least two internationally known experts in the field, and will aim to ensure that all published manuscripts provide new scientific knowledge.
Authors will be able to check the progress of their manuscript through the submission system at any time by logging into My Chinese Medicine, a personalized section of the site.
Reprints
High-quality, bound reprints can be purchased for all articles published. Please see our reprints website for further information about ordering reprints.
Supplements
Chinese Medicine will consider supplements based on proceedings (full articles or meeting abstracts), reviews or research. All articles submitted for publication in supplements are subject to peer review. Published supplements are fully searchable and freely accessible online and can also be produced in print. All full length articles (proceedings, reviews or research articles) are indexed by PubMed. PubMed displays the title of the supplement only in the case of meeting abstract collections. For further information, please contact us.
Editorial policies
All manuscripts submitted to Chinese Medicine should adhere to BioMed Central's editorial policies.
Citing articles in Chinese Medicine
Articles in Chinese Medicine should be cited in the same way as articles in a traditional journal. Because articles are not printed, they do not have page numbers; instead, they are given a unique article number.
Article citations follow this format:
Authors: Title. Chin Med [year], [volume number]:[article number].
e.g. Roberts LD, Hassall DG, Winegar DA, Haselden JN, Nicholls AW, Griffin JL: Increased hepatic oxidative metabolism distinguishes the action of Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor delta from Peroxisome Proliferator-Activated Receptor gamma in the Ob/Ob mouse. Chin Med 2009, 1:115.
refers to article 115 from Volume 1 of the journal.
Why publish your article in Chinese Medicine?
High visibility
Chinese Medicine's open access policy allows maximum visibility of articles published in the journal as they are available to a wide, global audience. Articles that have been especially highly accessed are highlighted with a 'Highly accessed' graphic, which appears on the journal's contents pages and search results.
Speed of publication
Chinese Medicine offers a fast publication schedule whilst maintaining rigorous peer review; all articles must be submitted online, and peer review is managed fully electronically (articles are distributed in PDF form, which is automatically generated from the submitted files). Articles are published with their final citation immediately upon acceptance in a provisional PDF form. The article will subsequently be published in both fully browsable web form, and as a formatted PDF; the article will then be available through Chinese Medicine, BioMed Central and PubMed Central and will also be included in PubMed.
Flexibility
Online publication in Chinese Medicine gives authors the opportunity to publish large datasets, large numbers of color illustrations and moving pictures, to display data in a form that can be read directly by other software packages so as to allow readers to manipulate the data for themselves, and to create all relevant links (for example, to PubMed, to sequence and other databases, and to other articles).
Promotion and press coverage
Articles published in Chinese Medicine are included in article alerts and regular email updates. Some may be included in abstract books mailed to academics and are highlighted on Chinese Medicine's pages and on the BioMed Central homepage.
In addition, articles published in Chinese Medicine may be promoted by press releases to the general or scientific press. These activities increase the exposure and number of accesses for articles published in Chinese Medicine. A list of articles recently press-released by journals published by BioMed Central is available here.
Copyright
Authors of articles published in Chinese Medicine retain the copyright of their articles and are free to reproduce and disseminate their work (for further details, see the BioMed Central copyright and license agreement).
For further information about the advantages of publishing in a journal from BioMed Central, please click here.