1. Aims & Scope
Guihaia is an academic journal focusing on botany. It is sponsored by Guangxi Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and Guangxi Society of Botany. With the aim of “Developing Botany from Regional to National & Global”, the journal mainly publishes new technologies, methods and discoveries in botanical research, and original research results with innovation and high academic level that focus on the basic and applied research in the field of botany. The journal also publishes review articles that combines the authors' own research results and provide unique insights and theoretical contributions to the major frontier issues in botany. However, the journal does not accept general review articles, or articles that have already been published in other languages.
2. Requirements for Manuscript in Certain Columns
Requirements for manuscripts on New Plant Species: (1) The new species should include line drawings and English descriptions (as required by the international nomenclature regulations). (2) Authors are encouraged to include content on morphological anatomy, individual development, microscopic morphology comparisons, or molecular biology experiments. These innovative forms are essential for papers on new plant species; however, the research content must be original and novel.
Plant Karyotype Articles: (1) Simple karyotype research articles are generally not accepted. (2) Research papers on karyotypes of a single genus can be accepted if they are well-developed or offer significant novelty.
New Plant Species Records: (1) In principle, only national-level records or records of two or more species (unless of significant importance) are accepted. (2) New records of species occurring within large regional areas, such as new records in China, or between major geographic units (typically separated by mountain systems with unique topography and climate characteristics, such as the Loess Plateau, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, the Qinling Mountains, etc.) that show geographical isolation but appear in another location, hold significance in the field of plant geography. (3) Provincial distribution records found in taxonomic revision articles focused on a particular group can be accepted for submission. (4) It is encouraged to include content on morphological anatomy, individual development, microscopic morphology comparisons, or molecular biology experiments. These innovative forms are essential for papers on new plant species records; however, the research content must be original and novel. (5) It is inappropriate to consider artificially introduced exotic species that have escaped into the wild or were initially introduced in small areas as new record species. In principle, such cases will not be accepted by this journal.
Plant Chemistry: (1) The manuscript should present new compounds. (2) If known compounds are described, they should demonstrate new biological activities. (3) If no new compounds are discovered, but there is a lack of research on its chemical constituents by previous researchers, the manuscript can be accepted.
Plant Floristics: (1) A plant checklist of the studied area must be provided for reference during the review process. (2) Floristic studies should cover a large administrative region, such as a country, province (autonomous region), or a natural region, such as the Hengduan Mountains or a specific peak. Manuscripts focusing on a single species in a plant floristics study will not be accepted.
Bioinformatics: Due to the rapid development of bioinformatics, individual gene cloning and sequencing studies can no longer be published as standalone research work.
Codon analysis: Codon analysis represents only a small part of genomic variation. Similar articles were published frequently in the past two years, and it is no longer suitable to publish them independently. It is recommended to analyze which segments contain variant information that can be used as molecular markers for species identification and subsequently assist in breeding programs.
3. Instructions on Submission
3.1 Please visit the official website of Guihaia (http://www.guihaia-journal.com), enter the "Author Center" page, and then submit or check the status of your manuscript following the instructions. New users need to create an author account first.
3.2 During submission, please fill in the author information in detail, and inform the Editorial Office of any changes in the author's contact information. Authors can offer a list of experts who may need to be avoided as reviewers, or recommend peer reviewers (at least Ph.D. degree, and associate professor title).
3.3 During submission, authors must make sure that the English/Chinese titles of the article, the information on authors and funding are accurate (once the article is published online, change of the above information is not allowed), and make sure that the article does not involve any political issues. The journal takes academic misconduct seriously, any forms of plagiarism, falsification of data, multiple submissions or redundant publication will not be tolerated. Authors are responsible for the consequences of not following the requirements.
3.4 Once the manuscript is submitted successfully, the author will receive a receipt of submission in the submission system on the website, as well as in their e-mail inbox. The subsequent notifications will be sent to the first author or the corresponding author. If the manuscript does not reach the required standards of this journal, the Editorial Office will return the manuscript for revision until accepted. The “Receive Date” of the manuscript will be the day the Editorial Office receives the manuscript that meets the criteria. Authors must return the revised manuscript and reply to the review comments within 1 month. If a revision is not received by the given deadline, the manuscript will be considered withdrawn.
3.5 The Editorial Office will notify authors the decisions within the first 3 months after submission, so please do not re-submit the manuscript to other journals during this period. If authors need to withdraw their manuscripts for some reason, or do not receive response from the Editorial Office in 3 months after submission, please contact the Editorial Office by e-mail.
3.6 After a manuscript is accepted, the authors shall download and fill out the document of “Copyright Transfer Agreement & Author Statement” from the "Download Center" on the journal website, so as to transfer the copyright of the article to the Editorial Office, and to make a statement about the important issues such as academic misconduct, authors' contributions, etc. Please follow the requirements from the editors to complete other follow-up procedures.
3.7 The accepted manuscript will be published on the journal's website first in the form of "Online First". The author's remuneration will be paid in full, and the first author and corresponding author will be presented with 2 volumes of the issue respectively.
3.8 The journal is indexed in the databases of CNKI, China Journal Network, Wanfang Data, and Chongqing VIP Chinese Science and Technology Journal Database, Superstar Journals Database, etc. The remuneration paid to the authors includes the fee of publishing the article in the journal in print, CD-ROM, online and digital formats, as well as the fee of publishing the article in various domestic and international databases.
4. Review Process
Review process: The journal implements a double-blind peer review system and strictly follows the three-round review process, which includes preliminary review, peer review, and final review. The Editorial Office will first conduct a preliminary review to submitted manuscripts. In this procedure, manuscripts with insufficient originality, serious scientific or technical flaws, lack of a significant message or outside the journal's scope will be rejected. After the preliminary review, the manuscript will be sent to 3~5 experts in the corresponding fields for peer review. Finally, the final review will be conducted to ensure the academic quality of each article.
Review time: 3-5 days on average for preliminary review; about 14 days for peer review.
Submissions from the EBMs and editors: For manuscripts submitted by the Editorial Board Members (EBMs) or editors of this journal, they must also follow all the review and editing procedures of Guihaia. All EBMs and editors are not allowed to participate in the review, editing and employment decisions of the manuscripts written by themselves, their families or colleagues. Peer review will be conducted independently of the relevant EBMs, editors and their research teams.
5. Fees
The journal charges publication fee and review fee for accepted manuscripts at the following rates:
Publication fee: 300 CNY/page for plain text; 350 CNY/page for pages with black and white illustrations; for articles with colored illustrations, the first page with colored illustrations charges RMB 1200 RMB/page, and 350 RMB/page for other pages with colored illustrations.
Review fee: 150 CNY/article.
6. Appeals
If authors have any disagreement about the review comments or review results, they can submit a written appeal to the Editorial Office via email (guihaia@vip.163.com, guihaia03@163.com or guihaia@126.com). The author who submits appeal needs to make detailed explanation for each review comment. After receiving the appeal, the Editorial Office will investigate and deal with it as soon as possible, and the result of the appeal will be fed back to the author.
7. Correction & Retraction
Articles published online or in print by Guihaia are considered the final version, and we generally do not accept requests for correction or retraction. However, the Editorial Office would adopt corrections or retractions on published articles in the following cases:
Correction: If there appears to be an unintended scientific error in a published article, which would not lead to significant impacts on the results and conclusions of the article, the Editorial Office will publish corrections in the journal as soon as possible, detailing 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 changes to the original article and the date of the 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.
Retraction: In following cases, the Editorial Office would retract published articles and issue retraction statements:
(1) If an article is found to have severe scientific errors, which makes the results and conclusions of the article unreliable;
(2) For article suspected of academic misconduct, such as plagiarism and data falsification, redundant publication, etc., the Editorial Office will initiate an investigation and issue a statement to inform readers of the risks associated with the article. After completion of the investigation, the results of the investigation will be made public. If it is confirmed that the article involves academic misconduct, the Editorial Office will retract the article, issue a retraction statement, and notify the authors' institutions and other relevant journals. Meanwhile, all manuscripts from the first author will not be accepted in the next two years.