In accordance with relevant requirements for research integrity management, the journal hereby informs authors and provides standardized guidance on funding acknowledgement in manuscripts as follows: Any funding acknowledged in a manuscript must be a grant that actually supports and is directly relevant to the reported research. The grant number, project title and affiliated institution shall be accurate. Only grants that provide financial support for the research implementation, experimental tests, data analysis and output of the present work may be acknowledged. Projects that are only indirectly related or belong to the same general research platform without direct funding support for this study shall not be listed.
Format requirements: The official project title and grant number shall be transcribed exactly from the grant approval letter; do not abbreviate or revise the project title arbitrarily. Multiple grants shall be listed in descending order of their substantive support for this study, with the primary funding placed first. Funding information entered in the submission system must be identical to that shown on the title page of the manuscript. Inconsistency, omission or incorrect entry of funding information between the system and the manuscript is not allowed.
It is prohibited to acknowledge grants that are irrelevant to this paper, pending approval, expired upon completion, or not supportive of the present research. Fabrication or falsification of funding information and unauthorized affiliation of irrelevant projects are forbidden. A project that has been approved at submission but expires before manuscript acceptance may still be acknowledged. Projects under application without formal approval shall not be acknowledged as funding support. They may be added after grant approval at revision stage.
If false acknowledgement or improper affiliation of grants is verified, the case will be handled as academic misconduct and reported to the project’s affiliated institution. Authors are requested to verify all information carefully and submit it in good faith.
As a general rule, no more than 3 funding items are allowed for one manuscript. For major research outcomes jointly supported by multiple institutions, cross-regional partners and multiple research projects, the maximum limit is 4. If 4 or more funding items are acknowledged, authors must attach a brief statement upon submission, specifying the concrete contribution of each grant to this work (e.g., experimental design, sample preparation, data analysis, theoretical modelling). Multiple overlapping funding acknowledgements are generally not accepted for single-author papers. It is forbidden to list projects without substantial financial support for this study merely to increase the number of grants or fulfil the closing requirements of multiple projects.
