As a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE), Virologica Sinica abides by its Code of Conduct and adheres to its Best Practice Guidelines. Any academic misconduct in any form, including plagiarism, fabrication, manipulation, and falsification of data, will not be accepted by Virologica Sinica. 

Virologica Sinica is devoted itself to help creating rigorous and fair academic environment. All authors are expected to adhere to the highest ethical standards. The originality of all submissions will be vigorously checked in the first quality control. Besides, the editorial board wishes to point out the following in particular:

1) All of the authors should have made direct and meaningful contribution to the submission such as designing or carrying out the experiment, collecting or analyzing the data. And this will be declared in the Author Contributions section. 

2) The submission should be solely submitted to Virologica Sinica. If duplicate submission was found, the manuscript will be immediately rejected and the related authors will be registered in the blacklist of the journal and will be shared with other peer journals.

3) The manuscripts submitted to Virologica Sinica should be the author’s own work and not the work of others. This includes text, figures and tables. If a published method is used in your work, precise description following with correct citation is suggested. Paragraph repeat with the published work in Materials and Methods section will be obligated to revise. All published figures and tables should explicitly cite the original source and the authors are responsible to get the reuse permission. Furthermore, proper references must always be explicitly cited.

4) Reported results in any journals, websites or books in any form, cannot be accepted by Virologica Sinica. The authors should guarantee authenticity of the submissions. Any manipulated data or fraudulent information is denied to be published. Direct translation between different languages is not acceptable for the journal.

Repeatedly, a zero tolerance policy is approved to academic misconduct by Virologica Sinica. Even the paper has already been published, a retraction by authors or by the Editorial Office will be made public. Severe misconduct may result in a ban from future submission to Virologica Sinica and the affiliations of all authors will be informed.

Upon request authors should be prepared to send relevant documentation or data in order to verify the validity of the results. This could be in the form of raw data, samples, records, etc.

5) Changes of authorship or in the order of authors are not accepted after acceptance of a manuscript. Requesting to add or delete authors at revision stage, proof stage, or after publication is a serious matter and may be considered when justifiably warranted. Justification for changes in authorship must be compelling and may be considered only after receipt of written approval from all authors and a convincing, detailed explanation about the role/deletion of the new/deleted author. In case of changes at revision stage, a letter must accompany the revised manuscript. In case of changes after acceptance or publication, the request and documentation must be sent to the Editorial Office. In all cases, further documentation may be required to support your request. The decision on accepting the change rests with the Editor-in-Chief of the journal and may be turned down. Therefore authors are strongly advised to ensure the correct author group, corresponding author, and order of authors at submission.