Guide for Authors

Introduction

About CGPJ

The Chinese General Practice Journal (CGPJ) was founded and operated by the Chinese General Practice Publishing House Co., Ltd. The company also creates and manages 'Chinese General Practice,' which is published in Chinese language and is one of the most renowned academic journals in the field of primary care and general practice in China.

Aligned with the trends of academic and disciplinary development, and to foster more frequent scholarly interactions between researchers, the CGPJ was established in January 2024. It aims to serve as a sister journal of 'Chinese General Practice,' progressing and developing alongside it.

CGPJ is an academic journal targeting a global research audience. Collaborating closely with 'Chinese General Practice', it features the most outstanding and distinguished works in Chinese general practice and related disciplines, showcasing leading developments and innovations from China to the community. Committed to the principles of critical, dialectical, neutral, and pragmatic academic research, CGPJ focuses on presenting the key evidences and insights in the field of general practice of China. Its goal is to foster exchange, learning, and collective advancement among general practice colleagues worldwide.

Publication Scope

CGPJ will focus on publishing research primarily in the fields of general practice (family medicine), primary care, and community health. Additionally, it will feature studies closely aligned with these areas, encompassing evidence-based clinical research, health services research, research in health policy and economics, medical education research, and epidemiology studies and other most relevant disciplines. The journal will also highlight research that supports the development of these fields, including studies on relevant medical and health theories, technologies, research methods and instruments.

Specifically, the topic of articles published by CGPJ can be categorized into the following six categories, all closely related to general practice, primary care and community health:

1. Discipline Development Research:

a. Studies on exploring, enhancing, and applying the functional features of primary care/general practice within specific primary care context.

b. Research closely related to research capacity building of primary care/general practice research.

c. Evaluation, localization, or development of research instruments for primary care/general practice research, such as survey instruments - scales, data collection instruments, computer coding instruments.

d. Development of research infrastructure for primary care/general practice research, such as Practice-Based Research Networks (PBRNs), or multi-disciplinary research team.

e. Methodological studies applicable to solving research questions in general practice/primary care/family medicine.

2. Clinical Research:

a. Studies on clinical issues or pathways in general practice and primary care facilities.

b. Clinical studies on interventions for health risk factors in general practice and primary care facilities.

c. Patient-centered clinical studies aimed at improving health in general practice and primary care facilities.

d. Translational research applying scientific evidence and techniques from other disciplines to clinical work in general practice and primary care facilities.

e. Studies on the clinical scope and disease spectrum of general practice and primary care facilities.

3.Health Services Research:

a. Research on improving specific pathways and provision in general practice and primary care services.

b. Research on improving the implementation environment of health services provided by general practice and primary care facilities.

c. Research on the healthcare choice preferences and doctor-patient relationship between healthcare personnel and patients/residents in local community and general practice/primary care facilities.

d. Translational research applying scientific evidence and techniques from other disciplines to health service in community and primary care facilities.

e. Research on the expansion of health service scope in primary care facilities and enhancing its collaboration with general hospitals.

4.Research in health policy and economics:

a. Research on the macro design and specific construction of primary care system and services. b. Research on the provision and distribution of resources and services within health system and related to primary care section. c. Research on disparities in provision and distribution of resources and services within primary care system, such as cross-regional and urban-rural disparities. d. Research on the provision and distribution of resources and services by primary care to specific population, especially for vulnerable populations. e. Health economics research related to general practice and primary care practice, including health economic evaluations.

5.Medical Education Research:

a. Research on recruiting and retaining medical personnel for general practice and primary care facilities. b. Research on academic education, vocational training, and continuing professional development for medical personnel for general practice and primary care facilities. c. Research on the organization, management, and task distribution of general practitioners/family doctors and other primary care professionals. d. Research on the development of curriculum, courses and materials in general practice, primary care, and community health education and training. e. Rigorous, large-scale population surveys on competencies of medical personnel for general practice and primary care facilities.

6.Epidemiological Research:

a. Epidemiological research on community health closely related to general practice and primary care in specific region.

b. Population epidemiology studies on the natural history and social determinant of health of community residents.

c. Nationwide representative epidemiological research on the prevalence and disease burden of infectious and non-infectious diseases related to the practice scope of general practice and primary care.

Types of paper

In 2024, aside from a small number of invited Commentaries and Editorials, Chinese General Practice Journal (CGPJ) will only accept two types of articles: Original Research and Systematic Review.

The format requirements for these two types of articles in CGPJ are entirely consistent with those of 'Chinese General Practice.'

For more specific details, please refer to the submission format guide of 'Chinese General Practice': https://www.chinagp.net/EN/1007-9572/home.shtml

Submission checklist

You can use this list to carry out a final check of your submission before you send it to the journal for review. Please check the relevant section in this Guide for Authors for more details:

• Manuscripts can be submitted in either Chinese or English. If the manuscript is in Chinese, CGPJ, upon accepting the manuscript, can provide translation services free of charge to translate the Chinese manuscript into English for publication.

• The title should not exceed 25 Chinese words or 30 English words.

• In the author information section, all authors' names, academic degrees, titles, institutions, departments, and email addresses should be clearly reported. The corresponding authors should be clearly indicated and their full postal address should be provided.

• Use a five-part abstract, including: Background, Objectives, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. The total word count of the abstract should not exceed 300 English words.

• After the abstract, list five or more keywords that reflect the key information of the study such as the theme, research question, context, methods, etc. The first keyword should ideally reflect the main issue of the research, the second should reflect the main method used, and the third should reflect the category of the study (see Sec 2.2).

• We recommend the main text does not exceed 3000-5000 Chinese or English words, divided into five sections: Background, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusions. Other content related to the research but not core information should be submitted in the form of supplementary material.

• In the related information section after the main text, the following eight items need to be specified: (1) Ethical Approval; (2) Author Contributions; (3) Consent to Publish; (4) Availability of Data and Materials; (5) Conflict of Interest; (6) Funding and Grant Information; (7) Acknowledgments; (8) Other Information of Authors, such as ORCID. If this section is not applicable to certain papers, please write 'Not Applicable.'

• There is no limit on the number of references, but all references should be closely related to the relevant contents of the article. We recommend that authors use GB/T 7714 reference style in Chinese manuscript. When producing its English manuscript, the editor will convert it to Vancouver reference style.

• Figures (include relevant captions) and tables (including titles, description, footnotes) can be placed in the corresponding sections of the main text, or appended at the end of the manuscript. The corresponding caption should be placed directly below the figure or table.

• Define abbreviations that are unavoidable in this field must be defined at their first mention, ensure consistency of abbreviations throughout the article.

• Footnotes should not be included in the main text and will be removed.

• Permission has been obtained for use of copyrighted material from other sources (including the Internet).

Examining and reporting different types of research

We recommend that authors use the appropriate Equator Network reporting guidelines prior to submission, such as:

We recommend authors use the appropriate equator network reporting guidelines prior to submission such as:

Randomized trials: CONSORT Checklists

Observational studies: STROBE Checklists

Qualitative studies: COREQ Checklist

Mixed methods research: MMAT VERSION 2018

Quality improvement studies: SQUIRE 2.0 Checklist

Implementation studies: StaRI checklist

Systematic review: PRISMA2020 checklist

CGPJ also encourages authors using SAMPL Guidelines to check basic statistical reporting.

For further information, visit our Support Center.

Before you begin

Ethics in publishing

Please see our information pages on Ethics in publishing and Ethical guidelines for journal publication.

Submissions to KeAi journals are automatically screened using iThenticate's CrossCheck within the editorial system to detect plagiarism issues including instances of overlapping and similar text in submitted manuscripts. Details can be found here. High similarity papers will be desk rejected.

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Manuscripts reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must:

• include a statement on ethics approval and consent (even where the need for approval was waived)

• include the name of the ethics committee that approved the study and the committee's reference number if appropriate

CGPJ does not publish research on animals.

Consent for publication

If your research or manuscript contains any individual person's data in any form (including any individual details, images or videos), consent for publication must be obtained from that person, or in the case of children, their parent or legal guardian. All presentations of case reports must have consent for publication.

Studies in humans

If the work involves the use of human subjects, the author should ensure that the work described has been carried out in accordance with The Code of Ethics of the World Medical Association (Declaration of Helsinki) for experiments involving humans. The manuscript should be in line with the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals and aim for the inclusion of representative human populations (sex, age and ethnicity) as per those recommendations. The terms sex and gender should be used correctly. Authors should include a statement in the manuscript that informed consent was obtained for experimentation with human subjects. The privacy rights of human subjects must always be observed.

Clinical trial results

In line with the position of the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors, the journal will not consider results posted in the same clinical trials registry in which primary registration resides to be prior publication if the results posted are presented in the form of a brief structured (less than 500 words) abstract or table. However, divulging results in other circumstances (e.g., investors' meetings) is discouraged and may jeopardise consideration of the manuscript. Authors should fully disclose all posting in registries of results of the same or closely related work.

Registration of clinical trials

Registration in a public trials registry is a condition for publication of clinical trials in this journal in accordance with International Committee of Medical Journal Editors recommendations. Trials must register at or before the onset of patient enrolment. A clinical trial is defined as any research study that prospectively assigns human participants or groups of humans to one or more health-related interventions to evaluate the effects of health outcomes. Health-related interventions include any intervention used to modify a biomedical or health-related outcome (for example drugs, surgical procedures, devices, behavioural treatments, dietary interventions, and process-of-care changes). Health outcomes include any biomedical or health-related measures obtained in patients or participants, including pharmacokinetic measures and adverse events. Purely observational studies (those in which the assignment of the medical intervention is not at the discretion of the investigator) will not require registration.

Declaration of interests

All authors must disclose any financial and personal relationships with other people or organizations that could inappropriately influence (bias) their work. Examples of potential conflicts of interest include employment, consultancies, stock ownership, honoraria, paid expert testimony, patent applications/registrations, and grants or other funding. Authors should complete the declaration of competing interest statement using this template and upload to the submission system at the Attach/Upload Files step. Note: Please do not convert the .docx template to another file type. Author signatures are not required. If there are no interests to declare, please choose the first option in the template. This statement will be published within the article if accepted. More information.

Role of the funding source

You are requested to identify who provided financial support for the conduct of the research and/or preparation of the article and to briefly describe the role of the sponsor(s), if any, in study design; in the collection, analysis and interpretation of data; in the writing of the report; and in the decision to submit the article for publication. If the funding source(s) had no such involvement then this should be stated. Please see https://www.elsevier.com/open-access/agreements.

Submission declaration and verification

Submission of an article implies that the work described has not been published previously (except in the form of an abstract or as part of a published lecture or academic thesis or as an electronic preprint, see 'Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication' section of our ethics policy for more information), that it is not under consideration for publication elsewhere, that its publication is approved by all authors and tacitly or explicitly by the responsible authorities where the work was carried out, and that, if accepted, it will not be published elsewhere in the same form, in English or in any other language, including electronically without the written consent of the copyright-holder. To verify originality, your article automatically screened by the originality detection service CrossCheck.

Use of inclusive language

Inclusive language acknowledges diversity, conveys respect to all people, is sensitive to differences, and promotes equal opportunities. Content should make no assumptions about the beliefs or commitments of any reader; contain nothing which might imply that one individual is superior to another on the grounds of age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition; and use inclusive language throughout. Authors should ensure that writing is free from bias, stereotypes, slang, reference to dominant culture and/or cultural assumptions. We advise to seek gender neutrality by using plural nouns ("clinicians, patients/clients") as default/wherever possible to avoid using "he, she," or "he/she." We recommend avoiding the use of descriptors that refer to personal attributes such as age, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, sexual orientation, disability or health condition unless they are relevant and valid. These guidelines are meant as a point of reference to help identify appropriate language but are by no means exhaustive or definitive.

Please write your text in good English (American or British usage is accepted, but not a mixture of these). Authors who feel their English language manuscript may require editing to eliminate possible grammatical or spelling errors and to conform to correct scientific English may wish to use the English Language Editing service available from Elsevier's WebShop.

Preprints

Please note that preprints can be shared anywhere at any time, in line with Elsevier's sharing policy. Sharing your preprints e.g. on a preprint server will not count as prior publication (see 'Multiple, redundant or concurrent publication' for more information).

Copyright

This journal is a peer-reviewed, fully open access journal owned by Chinese General Practice Publishing House Co., Ltd, who retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and the compiled issues. For the single article, Authors will transfer copyright to Chinese General Practice Publishing House Co., Ltd, and KeAi Communications Co., Ltd. and Chinese General Practice Publishing House Co., Ltd will be granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights.

Authorship Statement

For transparency, we encourage authors to submit an author statement file outlining their individual contributions to the paper using the relevant CRediT roles: Conceptualization; Data curation; Formal analysis; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Resources; Software; Supervision; Validation; Visualization; Roles/Writing - original draft; Writing - review & editing. Authorship statements should be formatted with the names of authors first and CRediT role(s) following.

Sample CRediT author statement

Zhang San: Conceptualization, Methodology, Software Priya Singh.: Data curation, Writing- Original draft preparation. Wang Wu: Visualization, Investigation. Jan Jansen: Supervision. Ajay Kumar: Software, Validation. Sun Qi: Writing- Reviewing and Editing.

Changes to authorship

This policy concerns the addition, deletion, or rearrangement of author names in the authorship of accepted manuscripts:

Before the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Requests to add or remove an author, or to rearrange the author names, must be sent to the Journal Manager from the corresponding author of the accepted manuscript and must include: (a) the reason the name should be added or removed, or the author names rearranged and (b) written confirmation (e-mail, fax, letter) from all authors that they agree with the addition, removal or rearrangement. In the case of addition or removal of authors, this includes confirmation from the author being added or removed. Requests that are not sent by the corresponding author will be forwarded by the Journal Manager to the corresponding author, who must follow the procedure as described above. Note that: (1) Journal Managers will inform the Journal Editors of any such requests and (2) publication of the accepted manuscript in an online issue is suspended until authorship has been agreed.

After the accepted manuscript is published in an online issue: Any requests to add, delete, or rearrange author names in an article published in an online issue will follow the same policies as noted above and result in a corrigendum.

Open Access

Every peer–reviewed research article appearing in this journal will be published open access. This means that the article is universally and freely accessible via the internet in perpetuity, in an easily readable format immediately after publication. The author does not have any publication charges for open access. Chinese General Practice Publishing House Co., Ltd. will pay to make the article open access.

A CC user license manages the reuse of the article. All articles will be published under one of the following licenses upon author choice, for more details please visit link (https://www.keaipublishing.com/en/journals/chinese-general-practice-journal/open-access-journal/).

Elsevier supports responsible sharing

Find out how you can share your research published in Elsevier journals.

Elsevier Researcher Academy

Researcher Academy is a free e-learning platform designed to support early and mid-career researchers throughout their research journey. The "Learn" environment at Researcher Academy offers several interactive modules, webinars, downloadable guides and resources to guide you through the process of writing for research and going through peer review. Feel free to use these free resources to improve your submission and navigate the publication process with ease.

Preparation

Editorial Policies

For information on Editorial Policies for journal publication refer to https://www.keaipublishing.com/en/editors/editorial-policies/

Use of word processing software

Regardless of the file format of the original submission, at revision you must provide us with an editable file of the entire article. Keep the layout of the text as simple as possible. Most formatting codes will be removed and replaced on processing the article. The electronic text should be prepared in a way very similar to that of conventional manuscripts (see also the Guide to Publishing with Elsevier). See also the section on Electronic artwork. To avoid unnecessary errors you are strongly advised to use the 'spell-check' and 'grammar-check' functions of your word processor.

LaTeX

You are recommended to use the latest Elsevier article class to prepare your manuscript and BibTeX to generate your bibliography. Our LaTeX site has detailed submission instructions, templates and other information.

Video

Elsevier accepts video material and animation sequences to support and enhance your scientific research. Authors who have video or animation files that they wish to submit with their article are strongly encouraged to include links to these within the body of the article. This can be done in the same way as a figure or table by referring to the video or animation content and noting in the body text where it should be placed. All submitted files should be properly labeled so that they directly relate to the video file's content. . In order to ensure that your video or animation material is directly usable, please provide the file in one of our recommended file formats with a preferred maximum size of 150 MB per file, 1 GB in total. Video and animation files supplied will be published online in the electronic version of your article in Elsevier Web products, including ScienceDirect. Please supply 'stills' with your files: you can choose any frame from the video or animation or make a separate image. These will be used instead of standard icons and will personalize the link to your video data. For more detailed instructions please visit our video instruction pages. Note: since video and animation cannot be embedded in the print version of the journal, please provide text for both the electronic and the print version for the portions of the article that refer to this content.

Data visualization

Include interactive data visualizations in your publication and let your readers interact and engage more closely with your research. Follow the instructions here to find out about available data visualization options and how to include them with your article.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material such as applications, images and sound clips, can be published with your article to enhance it. Submitted supplementary items are published exactly as they are received (Excel or PowerPoint files will appear as such online). Please submit your material together with the article and supply a concise, descriptive caption for each supplementary file. If you wish to make changes to supplementary material during any stage of the process, please make sure to provide an updated file. Do not annotate any corrections on a previous version. Please switch off the 'Track Changes' option in Microsoft Office files as these will appear in the published version.

Research data

This journal encourages you to share data that supports your research publication where appropriate, and enables you to interlink the data with your published articles. Research data refers to the results of observations or experimentation that validate research findings. To facilitate reproducibility and data reuse, this journal also encourages you to archive all of the unprocessed data and original code that your paper reports in an online repository that meets the criteria for digital longevity, implementation of FAIR standards, and community support as articulated by Fairsharing.org and collaborators.

Below are a number of ways in which you can associate data with your article or make a statement about the availability of your data when submitting your manuscript. If you are sharing data in one of these ways, you are encouraged to cite the data in your manuscript and reference list. Please refer to the "References" section for more information about data citation. For more information on depositing, sharing and using research data and other relevant research materials, visit the research data page.

Data linking

If you have made your research data available in a data repository, you can link your article directly to the dataset. Elsevier collaborates with a number of repositories to link articles on ScienceDirect with relevant repositories, giving readers access to underlying data that gives them a better understanding of the research described.

There are different ways to link your datasets to your article. When available, you can directly link your dataset to your article by providing the relevant information in the submission system. For more information, visit the database linking page.

For supported data repositories a repository banner will automatically appear next to your published article on ScienceDirect.

In addition, you can link to relevant data or entities through identifiers within the text of your manuscript, using the following format: Database: xxxx (e.g., TAIR: AT1G01020; CCDC: 734053; PDB: 1XFN).

Mendeley Data

This journal supports Mendeley Data, enabling you to deposit any research data (including raw and processed data, video, code, software, algorithms, protocols, and methods) associated with your manuscript in a free-to-use, open access repository. Before submitting your article, you can deposit the relevant datasets to Mendeley Data. Please include the DOI of the deposited dataset(s) in your main manuscript file. The datasets will be listed and directly accessible to readers next to your published article online.

For more information, visit the Mendeley Data for journals page.

Data statement

To foster transparency, we encourage you to state the availability of your data in your submission. This may be a requirement of your funding body or institution. If your data is unavailable to access or unsuitable to post, you will have the opportunity to indicate why during the submission process, for example by stating that the research data is confidential. The statement will appear with your published article on ScienceDirect. For more information, visit the Data Statement page.

Submission

Submission to this journal proceeds totally online. Use the following guidelines to prepare your article. Via the homepage of this journal (https://www.keaipublishing.com/en/journals/chinese-general-practice-journal/) you will be guided stepwise through the creation and uploading of the various files. The system automatically converts source files to a single Adobe Acrobat PDF version of the article, which is used in the peer-review process. Please note that even though manuscript source files are converted to PDF at submission for the review process, these source files are needed for further processing after acceptance. All correspondence, including notification of the Editor's decision and requests for revision, takes place by e-mail and via the author's homepage, removing the need for a hard-copy paper trail. If you are unable to provide an electronic version, please contact the editorial office/journal prior to submission: Email:editorialoffice@cgpj.net.cn telephone: 008618501180654

Peer review

This journal operates a double blind review process. All contributions will be initially assessed by the editor for suitability for the journal. Papers deemed suitable are then typically sent to a minimum of two independent expert reviewers to assess the scientific quality of the paper. The Editor is responsible for the final decision regarding acceptance or rejection of articles. The Editor's decision is final. More information on types of peer review.

1. All manuscripts initially undergo a review by the editorial office. Papers that fail to meet the journal's fundamental standards, such as being out of scope, ethical conflicts, high similarity, lack of originality, or flaws in research design or methodology, will be desk rejected. Selected papers are then reassigned to the editor-in-chief.

2. The editor-in-chief will invite an associate editor from the relevant field to review the manuscript. Once the associate editor verifies the manuscript's quality and value, they will invite at least two peer reviewers to assess the paper.

3. After receiving reviews and comments from at least two reviewers, the responsible associate editor will compile this feedback, along with their own comments, and convey it to the authors.

4. Upon submission of the revised manuscript, the associate editor and editor-in-chief collaborate to make the final decision.

5. For submissions from the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editors, Guest Editors, other journal Board members, and authors with conflicts of interest with these individuals, we ensure confidential handling of the paper by an alternative team member.

6. Submissions to Special Issues involving conflicts of interest between Guest Editors and authors are managed by a different editor from the Editorial Board. This editor oversees the peer review process and decides on the paper's acceptance or rejection after the review.

After acceptance

Availability of accepted article

This journal makes articles available online as soon as possible after acceptance. This concerns the accepted article (both in HTML and PDF format), which has not yet been copyedited, typeset or proofread. A Digital Object Identifier (DOI) is allocated, thereby making it fully citable and searchable by title, author name(s) and the full text. The article's PDF also carries a disclaimer stating that it is an unedited article. Subsequent production stages will simply replace this version.

Online proof correction

Corresponding authors will receive an e-mail with a link to our online proofing system, allowing annotation and correction of proofs online. The environment is similar to MS Word: in addition to editing text, you can also comment on figures/tables and answer questions from the Copy Editor. Web-based proofing provides a faster and less error-prone process by allowing you to directly type your corrections, eliminating the potential introduction of errors.

If preferred, you can still choose to annotate and upload your edits on the PDF version. All instructions for proofing will be given in the e-mail we send to authors, including alternative methods to the online version and PDF.

We will do everything possible to get your article published quickly and accurately. Please use this proof only for checking the typesetting, editing, completeness and correctness of the text, tables and figures. Significant changes to the article as accepted for publication will only be considered at this stage with permission from the Editor. It is important to ensure that all corrections are sent back to us in one communication. Please check carefully before replying, as inclusion of any subsequent corrections cannot be guaranteed. Proofreading is solely your responsibility.

Post-publication amendments

Errata and Corrigenda

We will publish a correction of your article if a significant error is discovered after publication. An Erratum will be published if we introduced the error; a Corrigendum if the author introduced the error.

Retractions

Articles may be withdrawn, retracted, removed or replaced after publication if they contain substantial errors that cannot be corrected by publishing an Erratum or a Corrigendum, or if ethical violations come to light after publication.

Author inquiries

Author Inquiries

Visit the Elsevier Support Center to find the answers you need.  Here you will find everything from Frequently Asked Questions to ways to get in touch.

You can also check the status of your submitted article or find out when your accepted article will be published.