The journal conforms to the ICMJE requirement that clinical trials are registered in a WHO-approved public trials registry at or before the time of first participant enrollment as a condition of consideration for publication. The trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract.

Accepted file types

The preferred format for your manuscript is Word. You do not need to follow a template, but please ensure your heading levels are clear, and the sections clearly defined.

The LaTeX files are also accepted. A LaTeX template is available on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.

Your article title, keywords, and abstract all contribute to its position in search engine results, directly affecting the number of people who see your work. For details of what you can do to influence this, visit How to help readers find your article online.

Title

Your manuscript’s title should be concise, descriptive, unambiguous, accurate, and reflect the precise contents of the manuscript. A descriptive title that includes the topic of the manuscript makes an article more findable in the major indexing services.

Abstract

Please include an unstructured abstract of 200 words between the title and main body of your manuscript that concisely states the purpose of the research, major findings, and conclusions. If your research includes clinical trials, the trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract. Submissions that do not meet this requirement will not be considered.

For clinical trials, the trial registry name and URL, and registration number must be included at the end of the abstract.

Keywords

Please include a minimum of 5-6 keywords, listed after the abstract. Keywords should be as specific as possible to the research topic.

Artwork, figures, and other graphics

For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures, and graphs in electronic format, please read Sage’s artwork guidelines.

Figures supplied in color will appear in color online regardless of whether or not these illustrations are reproduced in color in the printed version. If you have requested color reproduction in the print version, we will advise you of the costs on receipt of your accepted article.

Please ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures, or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Frequently Asked Questions page on the Sage Journal Author Gateway.

Title page

To ensure fair and anonymous peer review, your manuscript must be fully anonymized. Please ensure any identifying information is removed from the main manuscript document and included on the Title Page instead. Do not include any author names in the manuscript file name and remove names from headers and footers. This version of the manuscript will be sent to the peer reviewers. The Title Page will not be sent to peer reviewers. See the Sage Journal Author Gateway for detailed guidance on making an anonymous submission.

The Title Page should include:

• Article title
• The full list of authors including names and affiliations of each
• The listed affiliation should be the institution where the research was conducted. If an author has moved to a new institution since completing the research, the new affiliation can be included in a note at the end of the manuscript – please indicate this on the title page.
• All persons eligible for authorship must be included at the time of submission (please see the authorship section for more information).
• Contact information for the corresponding author: name, institutional address, phone, email
• Acknowledgments section
• Declaration of conflicting interest
• Funding statement
• Ethical approval and informed consent statements
• Data availability statement
• Any other identifying information related to the authors and/or their institutions, funders, approval committees, etc, that might compromise anonymity.

Acknowledgments

If you are including an Acknowledgements section, this will be published at the end of your article. The Acknowledgments section should include all contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship. Per ICMJE recommendations, it is best practice to obtain consent from non-author contributors who you are acknowledging in your manuscript.

Writing assistance and third party submissions: if you have received any writing or editing assistance from a third-party, for example a specialist communications company, this must be clearly stated in the Acknowledgements section and in the covering letter. Please see the Sage Author Gateway for what information to include in your Acknowledgements section. If your submission is being made on your behalf by someone who is not listed as an author, for example the third-party who provided writing/editing assistance, you must state this in the Acknowledgements and also in your covering letter. Please note that the journal editor reserves the right to not consider submissions made by a third party rather than by the author/s themselves.

Statements and declarations

To ensure proper anonymization, please include a section with the heading ‘Statements and Declarations’ on your title page, after the Acknowledgements section [and Author Contributions section if applicable] including each of the sub-headings listed below. If a declaration is not applicable to your submission, you must still include the heading and state ‘Not applicable’ underneath. Please note that you may be asked to justify why a declaration was not applicable to your submission by the Editorial Office. This information will be added to the end of your published paper.

Ethical considerations

Please include your ethics approval statements under this heading, even if you have already included ethics approval information in your methods section. If ethical approval was not required, you need to explicitly state this. You can find information on what to say in your ethical statements as well as example statements on our Publication ethics and research integrity policies page.

All papers reporting studies involving human participants, human data or human tissue must state that the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board approved the study, or waived the requirement for approval, providing the full name and institution of the review committee in addition to the approval number. If applicable, please also include this information in the Methods section of your manuscript.

Consent to participate

Please include any participant consent information under this heading and state whether informed consent to participate was written or verbal. If the requirement for informed consent to participate has been waived by the relevant Ethics Committee or Institutional Review Board (i.e. where it has been deemed that consent would be impossible or impracticable to obtain), please state this. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section. More information and example statements can be found on our Publication ethics and research integrity policies page.

Consent for publication

Submissions containing any data from an individual person (including individual details, images or videos) must include a statement confirming that informed consent for publication was provided by the participant(s) or a legally authorized representative. Non-essential identifying details should be omitted. Please do not submit the participant’s actual written informed consent with your article, as this in itself breaches the patient’s confidentiality. The Journal requests that you confirm to us, in writing, that you have obtained written informed consent to publish but the written consent itself should be held by the authors/investigators themselves, for example in a patient’s hospital record. The confirmatory letter may be uploaded with your submission as a separate file in addition to the statement confirming that consent to publish was obtained within the manuscript text. If this is not applicable to your manuscript, please state ‘Not applicable’ in this section.

Declaration of conflicting interest

The journal requires a declaration of conflicting interests from all authors so that a statement can be included in your article. For guidance on conflict of interest statements, see our policy on conflicting interest declarations and the ICMJE recommendations.

If no conflict exists, your statement should read: ‘The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article’.

Funding statement

All articles need to include a funding statement, under a separate heading, even if you did not receive funding. You’ll find guidance and examples on our Funding page.

Reference style and citations

To download a copy of the following style guidelines, please click here

Pages should be numbered consecutively. Avoid the following:

• Hard page returns.
• Different fonts, except for Times New Roman 11 pt for main text; Times New Roman 10 pt for endnotes and references.
• Other formatting styles affecting letter size and appearance, including bold and underline.
• Comment, highlighting, tracking features, etc.
• Headers and footers, especially those containing the author’s name should be avoided (see point no. 1).
• Line spacing and margin specifications should only occur ONCE, at the beginning of the document. The use of charts and tables should be kept to a minimum. Please submit all illustrations in a separate file.

Articles approved for publication should be accompanied by an abstract of not more than 200 words as well as five to six keywords or phrases, followed by the author’s affiliation. List authors’ full names (not initials) in the order that they appear on the manuscript, with their affiliations directly following their names. A postal and email address for the first or corresponding author should also be provided. Other personal notes and acknowledgements should be placed in the notes section as the first, unnumbered note. Avoid using more than three levels of headings: use capital letters for A-heads, headline-style capitalization for B-heads, and sentence-style capitalization for C-heads.

Use UK spelling and punctuation. Follow Oxford English Dictionary and use -ize and -yse spellings. Use a comma to separate a series of three or more words, phrases, or clauses (like this), and before a conjunction separating the last two.

Quotations should be continuous within the text unless they exceed 40 words or if there is a special reason for separating them from the text; any quotation of more than 40 words should be indented in its entirety, with no quotation marks at the beginning or end. The text following a block quotation should not, however, be indented. When quoting verbatim, use single quotation marks to enclose quoted matter. Quotes within quotes should be placed between double quotation marks. Question marks and exclamation marks should be placed outside quotation marks unless the question or exclamation occurs within the quotation itself. Omission within a fragment is noted by three ellipsis points. Omission following a sentence is indicated by four dots. The first, placed immediately after the last word, is the period.

One space only after full stops (periods). This paragraph is an illustration. Do not use a double space after a full stop. No space after decimal point.

Parentheses are used throughout; square brackets are used only to enclose parenthetical material already in parentheses and to enclose an author’s comment within a quote, e.g. [sic], [emphasis added].

Chinese characters, not pinyin, are used in the main text of the article, usually after the English translation of a phrase or term. However if a term in pinyin is mentioned several times in the text, then the pinyin term is retained. It is italicized and accompanied by Chinese characters between brackets on first mention, e.g. This article supplements the body of research about the Chinese Party discipline system through an examination of shuanggui (双规), a form of detention used on Party members. For Chinese-language sources in the notes and references, use Chinese characters for all titles followed by the English translation within parentheses and with sentence-style capitalization.

Notes: Kang Xiaoguang 康晓光, 仁政：中国政治发展的第三条道路 (A policy based on the sense of humanity: The third way of Chinese political development), Singapore: 八方文化创作室 (Global Publishing), 2005.

References: Kang, Xiaoguang 康晓光 (2005) 仁政：中国政治发展的第三条道路 (A policy based on the sense of humanity: The third way of Chinese political development). Singapore: 八方文化创作室 (Global Publishing).

Place names: Beijing Municipality, not Peking municipality. Anhui Province, not Anhui province. Note also Taipei (not Taibei or Taipeh). Capital letters: Communist(s) (as member of the Communist Party); otherwise communist (in reference to ideology).

Numbers: Spell out numbers one to nine; use figures for numerals 10 and above. Use the least number of numerals possible in pagination and dates, e.g. 42–5, 2003–4, 1989–92. But use 10–14, 10–11 as these represent single words.

For currency, use the common symbol or abbreviation—US$, £, €, etc. For Chinese currency, use RMB.

Anglicized words should be roman with no accents, e.g. ad hoc, vis-a-vis, naive.

Minimize use of abbreviations; retain only the most common ones e.g., CCP, WTO, UN, PLA, US, UK, NGO. Use the full or shortened name rather than abbreviations for those that are less common or nonstandard, e.g., the State-owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission can be referred to as State-owned Assets Commission, not SASAC. Contractions do not take full points, e.g., Dr, Mr, St. However the following abbreviations take full points: no., Co., p., pp., vol., ch. (but use vols and chs), ed. (but use eds).

Use the standard abbreviated form for American states (and territories), e.g. AL (for Alabama), TX (for Texas), MA (for Massachusetts).

Write dates as follows: 30 September 2009. Use figures for centuries, e.g., a 21st-century dilemma.

Reference style

China Information uses endnotes. Endnotes appear at the end of the document. Proper and full citations of works referred to in a particular place in the main text should be made in the endnotes. The name of the author and the title of the work ought to be included in the first note citation to it, even if one or both have been mentioned in the text. In order to reduce the bulk of documentation, subsequent citations to sources already given in full on first mention should be shortened wherever possible. Substantive, or discursive, notes consist of explanations or amplifications of the discussion in the text. These should be used sparingly and kept as short as possible.

Endnotes should be numbered consecutively. In the main text, the note callout number should be placed immediately after the punctuation.

A separate list of references is also required. Please ensure that all sources cited in the endnotes are included in the references. Please note that the style of citation for endnotes and references differs. In the notes, present the names of authors as they appear in publications e.g. M. M. Bakhtin, Suisheng Zhao, and LiYaqing. In the references, the entry begins with the family name, followed by a comma, then the given name and the year of publication between parentheses. Follow this order for all authors and editors. Specific page references may be mentioned in the notes. The following are examples of how sources are cited in endnotes and references (note: no quotation marks for titles of journal and newspaper articles, book chapters, dissertations, and conference papers):

Reference style examples

1. One author/editor as “author”:

Notes:

Minxin Pei, China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006, 20.

Chen Xingliang 陈兴良 (ed.), 中国刑事司法解释检讨 (Examining Chinese judicial interpretation of criminal legislation), Beijing: 中国检察出版社 (China Procuratorate Press), 2003.

References:

Pei, Minxin (2006) China’s Trapped Transition: The Limits of Developmental Autocracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chen, Xingliang 陈兴良 (ed.) (2003) 中国刑事司法解释检讨 (Examining Chinese judicial interpretation of criminal legislation). Beijing: 中国检察出版社 (China Procuratorate Press).

2. Two authors/editors as “authors” etc.:

Notes:

Elizabeth Economy and Michel Oksenberg, China Joins the World: Progress and Prospects,New York: Council on Foreign Relations, 1999.

Kenneth Lieberthal and David M. Lampton (eds), Bureaucracy, Politics and Decision-Making in Post-Mao China, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

References:

Economy, Elizabeth and Oksenberg, Michel (1999) China Joins the World: Progress and Prospects. New York: Council on Foreign Relations.

Lieberthal, Kenneth and Lampton, David M. (eds) (1992) Bureaucracy, Politics and Decision-Making in Post-Mao China. Berkeley: University of California Press.

3. Chapter in book:

Specific page references may be provided in the note entries, while the full page range of the specific chapter should be given in the references.

Notes:

Dali L. Yang, Rationalizing the Chinese state: The political economy of government reform, in Bruce J. Dickson and Chien-Min Chao(eds) Remaking the Chinese State, London: Routledge, 2000, 22.

References:

Yang, Dali L. (2000) Rationalizing the Chinese state: The political economy of government reform. In: Dickson, Bruce J. and Chao, Chien-Min (eds) Remaking the Chinese State. London: Routledge, 19–45.

4. Article in journal:

Use sentence-style capitalization for the title of article. The name of the journal is italicized. Quotes within article titles should be between single quotation marks. Chinese article titles are not italicized. Translations of journals and article titles are given within parentheses; use sentence-style capitalization in the translation. Specific page reference may be provided in the notes, but a full page range is required in the references:

Notes:

Kang Xiaoguang 康晓光 and Han Heng 韩恒, 分类控制：当前中国大陆国家与社会关系研究 (Graduated controls: Research on state–society relations in contemporary mainland China, 开放时代 (Open times), no. 2, 2008: 30–41.

Scott Kennedy, China’s porous protectionism: The changing political economy of trade policy, Political Science Quarterly 120(3), 2005: 407–32.

References:

Kang, Xiaoguang 康晓光 and Han, Heng 韩恒 (2008) 分类控制：当前中国大陆国家与社会关系研究 (Graduated controls: Research on state–society relations in contemporary mainland China. 开放时代 (Open times), no. 2: 30–41.

Kennedy, Scott (2005) China’s porous protectionism: The changing political economy of trade policy. Political Science Quarterly 120(3): 407–32.

5. Author’s work translated or edited by another:

Notes:

Su Xiaokang and Wang Luxiang, Deathsong of the River: A Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series He Shang, trans. Richard W. Bodman and Pin P. Wan, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

References:

Su, Xiaokang and Wang, Luxiang (1991) Deathsong of the River: A Reader’s Guide to the Chinese TV Series He Shang. Trans. Bodman, Richard W. and Wan, Pin P. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

6. PhD

Notes:

Alessandra Aresu, Healthy in body and mind: Sex education in contemporary urban China (PhD diss., University of Westminster, 2006).

References:

Aresu, Alessandra (2006) Healthy in body and mind: Sex education in contemporary urban China. PhD diss., University of Westminster.

7. Paper presented at conference:

Notes:

Edward Friedman, The peasantry, village elections, and stable modernization (paper presented at International Symposium on Villager Self-government, Beijing, September 2001).

References:

Friedman, Edward (2001) The peasantry, village elections, and stable modernization. Paper presented at International Symposium on Villager Self-government, Beijing, September.

8. Article in newspapers:

Notes:

Keith B. Richburg, Foreign models flock to China, which embraces a Western vision of beauty, Washington Post, 26 December 2009, C01.

Liu Shifa 柳士发, 实施创意世纪计划，开展创意中国行动 (Implement the creative century programme: Develop a creative China), 中国文化报 (China culture daily), 17 February 2004. 

References:

Richburg, Keith B. (2009) Foreign models flock to China, which embraces a Western vision of beauty. Washington Post, 26 December, C01.

Liu, Shifa 柳士发 (2004) 实施创意世纪计划，开展创意中国行动 (Implement the creative century programme: Develop a creative China). 中国文化报 (China culture daily), 17 February. 

9. Website

Notes:

Keith Bradsher, China’s incinerators loom as a global hazard, New York Times, 11 August 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/business/energy-environment/12incinera..., accessed 16 February 2013.

中共中央关于全面深化改革若干重大问题的决定 (Decisions of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on several important questions concerning the comprehensive deepening of reforms), § 48, 15 November 2013, http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2013/1115/c64094-23559163-13.html, accessed 12 September 2014.

References:

Bradsher, Keith (2009) China’s incinerators loom as a global hazard. New York Times, 11 August. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/12/business/energy-environment/12incinera..., accessed 16 February 2013.

中共中央关于全面深化改革若干重大问题的决定 (Decisions of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on several important questions concerning the comprehensive deepening of reforms) (2013) 15 November. http://cpc.people.com.cn/n/2013/1115/c64094-23559163-13.html, accessed 12 September 2014.

10. References to previously cited work:

Family name, shortened title, (page number) (note: book title is italicized).

Book:

¹ Chen (ed.), 中国刑事司法解释检讨.

² Kang, 仁政, 17.

Article:

¹ Kang and Han, 分类控制, 30–41.

² Ibid., 33.

Ibid. in roman type: ‘in the same work’

This refers to a single work by the same author cited in the note immediately preceding. Ibid. should not be used if more than one work is cited in the preceding note. When moving sentences or sections from one place in the text to another, check whether or not the use of Ibid. in the accompanying notes is still appropriate.

The use of abbreviations op. cit. and loc. cit. should be avoided.

Every in-text citation must have a corresponding citation in the reference list and vice versa. Corresponding citations must have identical spelling and year.

Authors should update any references to preprints when a peer reviewed version is made available, to cite the published research. Citations to preprints are otherwise discouraged.

Supplemental material

This Journal can host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc.) alongside the full text of the article. Your supplemental material must be one of our accepted file types. For that list and more information please refer to our guidelines on submitting supplemental files.

English language editing services

Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using Sage Author Services. Visit Sage Author Services for further information.

The journal will consider submissions of manuscripts that have been posted on preprint servers.

Please enter the preprint DOI in the designated field when submitting your manuscript. We advise that you inform the Journal Editorial office about your posted preprint at submission.

Note that you should not post an updated version of your manuscript on a preprint server while it is being peer reviewed.

Learn more about our preprint policy.

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