1. Encyclopedia Platform

The Encyclopedia Platform aims to highlight the latest research results and provide benchmark information for researchers and the general public interested in accurate and advanced knowledge on specific topics. We welcome both summaries of published papers and original content to be published on the Encyclopedia Platform as entries or short videos. Authors should include a comprehensive description for professional nouns and noun phrases or share and show their latest findings or developments. All entries announced should be objective and should not include subjective, immature, illegal, violent, pornographic, or advertising content.

1.1. What Can Be Published?

Topic Review:

(1) Introduce new discoveries or concepts, or introduce the main concepts and ideas, which may also include the origin, development history, milestones, leading figures or related people, current status, predictions, future directions, and any other relevant information;

(2) Present the conclusions of one or several research projects on a single, specific topic, or a general review of a research field. Results can be related to a single field, a research group, or a collective of researchers;

(3) Provide research project proposals and expected results in the format of a research plan for studies to be undertaken in the near future. The aim is to collect feedback from other researchers in the field and to inform them of ongoing research in order to build collaborations and prevent duplicate work.

Biography:

Present the narrative of a person’s career and experience. The point of a biographical essay is to reveal who that person was and what contribution they made to the world. That person could be a historical figure, a famous actor, politician, artist, writer, or inventor.

Science Video:

(1) A certain scientific research topic, an experimental/surgery operation record, or other interesting and worthwhile simulation videos;

(2) A theory or social phenomenon;

(3) An excellent teaching course or speech for reference;

(4) A conference video for academic discussion and communication;

(5) An interview video of professional scholars on a certain research topic;

(6) Other interesting and worthwhile simulation videos.

Science Image:

Images taken or produced in the process of scientific research, in order to popularize knowledge in different fields and understand scientific research results faster. Meanwhile, we encourage users to create galleries to collect images within a topic.

1.2. Content Preparation

1.2.1. Topic Review

Title: The title of the topic review should be concise, specific, precise, and unique on this platform. It should usually be no longer than eight words.

Description: A brief overview of the title. A description should focus on the most essential facts of the topic being described from an objective perspective.

Content: The entry content can be written following Encyclopedia’s style with more than two sections to express the mature knowledge about this topic, such as introduction, history, new discoveries or concepts, milestones, leading figures, influences, applications, current status, and any other relevant well-known information.

Keywords: Three to ten pertinent keywords need to be added after the content. We recommend that the keywords are specific to the topic review, yet reasonably common within the subject discipline.

Length: A comprehensive topic review is encouraged to contain at least 1000 words or longer.

1.2.2. Biography

Brief introduction: In this part, we encourage you to make a brief introduction of the character, including, but not limited to, family, education, career, short and direct synthesis of the contribution to science/humanities.

Story about notable contributions: In this part, we encourage you to mention the stories behind this notable contribution in a timeline.

Principal publications/works: In this part, we encourage you to introduce his/her most outstanding achievements in a detailed and professional way, such as his/her mostly cited paper, his/her most interesting work, his/her most well-known experiment, etc.

Implications for sciences, and humanities: In this part, we encourage you to write the implications for sciences or humanities that are brought by the character.

Length: A minimum of 500 words is recommended.

1.2.3. Science Video

Title: It should usually be no longer than eight words.

Introduction: A brief overview of the video.

Suggested video duration: The ideal duration is 3–10 min (no special limit for operation, simulation, or teaching course videos).

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1.2.4. Science Image

Title: It should usually be no longer than ten words.

Suggested image size: 100 KB–6 MB.

Suggested image dimension: A minimum of 300 × 300 pixels.

Note: Encyclopedia does not currently support any language other than English.

1.3. Online Submission

(1) Log in: Before submitting, you need to log in to the Encyclopedia platform. You can log in directly with your account on other MDPI platforms (such as MDPI, SuSy, SciProfile, Sciforum, Preprints, MDPI Books and Scilit), or you can register here;

(2) Search: Before creating a new Topic Review or Biography, please check existing entries by the “Search” function on the homepage to see whether there are any similar entries;

(3) Submit: Click “Submit” in the upper right corner of the webpage to start submitting. User needs to select the type of submission. Once the type is selected, a template will be shown automatically in the content part;

(4) Editing Tool: This is an online editing tool for adding and editing text, formats, figures, tables, and references. Here is a short video to introduce some special functions of the editing tool:

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Notes: (1) Inserted references can be edited or deleted directly from the Reference section; (2) Figures could be pasted to the editing window directly; (3) For more details, you may refer to the User Manual.

(5) Post Online: Click "Submit" at the bottom of the page to post online.

Notes for Users:

(1) You can post the topic reviews and biography entries by clicking the “Submit” button, even if it hasn't been done. The entry can be found via the following path: User Profile-Entry List-Online. You can continue to edit it via the Entry List or by clicking “Edit” on the entry page;

(2) The editing progress of an online entry can be saved as a draft. You can find it in your “User Profile-Revise List. Please make sure your revision is based on the latest online version before submitting;

(3) If the submission is not suitable to be published, i.e., it does not adhere to the MDPI policy or is too short to describe the facts clearly, the Editorial Office has the right to change the status back to “Offline” for authors to re-edit or to delete it directly;

(4) Entries should state the facts objectively and fairly. Please try to avoid first-person expressions such as "we" or "our team" and expressions that do not conform to the current entry, such as "this paper", "this review", and "this article";

(5) We welcome scholars to share their latest findings on our platform in the form of entries. However, we do not encourage or support copying and pasting the full text of published articles or reviews to our platform;

(6) Please quote and cite all references or sources used in this entry and ensure that you have obtained permission for reuse. Without explicit permission to use, copy or modify, it is forbidden to upload any logos, photos; stills or excerpts from TV shows, movies, DVDs; computer code, software, or screenshots of other websites; any pictures published on the internet; or any drawings of characters from TV, comics, or movies; recordings of sounds or music. The author must confirm in the Copyright Transfer Agreement that they have received permission from each participant recorded on the submitted video to announce the video online.

1.4. Screen Process

Topic Review and Biography:

The entry will be online immediately once it has been submitted. Our editor will do a quality check after it is online. If it is unqualified, we will inform you to make necessary edits.

Science Video and Science Image:

The video and image will be shown online until it has been approved by the Editorial Office.

1.5. Update and Versions

Topic Review and Biography:

Any user can revise entry content by clicking “Edit” on the entry page, which will take you to the entry editing tool (for more information about editing tool, see Section 1.3). You can check and compare any previous revisions by clicking “View History”. The changes made to each version are highlighted as follows: texts in red have been removed from the old version, and those in green are newly added.

Note: Peer-reviewed entries are not editable.

Science Video and Science Image:

The video and image will be locked in order to protect contributions.

1.6. Interaction

Any user can like, comment, and favorite a work by clicking on the floating icons. Moreover, users can share interesting topics with friends on different social media platforms. The specified invitation link in your profile can be used for inviting connections to post new works and then you can get corresponding credits.

2. Encyclopedia Journal

The Encyclopedia journal is an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal recording qualified entries of which contents should be reliable, objective and established knowledge, and reviews that offer a comprehensive analysis of the extant literature, identifying current gaps or problems. The section Encyclopedia Studies also accepts original research articles. The Encyclopedia journal is published quarterly online by MDPI, and it is affiliated with the Encyclopedia platform.

2.1. Requirements

The basic conditions of a well-prepared entry should be as follows:

(1) The entry (from Introduction to Conclusion) should be no less than 3000 words;

(2) The content is comprehensive without copyright conflict (citations from a single reference should not exceed 2%).

Besides the basic standards, the reviewers judge the entry mainly on:

(1) Language: English language and style are acceptable with no grammar mistakes or errors;

(2) Content: The content would be judged mainly from the following points: original, significant to the field, scientifically sound and not misleading, with appropriate and adequate citations;

(3) Structure: The entry is well-organized with a clear goal, structure, and logic. The necessary information is clear and integrated.

2.2. Submission and Peer-Review

Authors should edit the entry content in Word or Latex based on the request in journal instructions for authors and submit via the submission system.

Single-blind peer review will be organized by the editorial office.

3. Encyclopedia Book

The primary purpose of the Encyclopedia Books program is to provide authoritative reference for scholars, as information available on the internet is of varying quality and it can take scholars a long time to find trustworthy sources. Encyclopedia Books seek to reflect the broad publication of established knowledge.

Topics of Encyclopedia books range from Social Science, Engineering, and Fungi, which are broader topics with many sub-divisions, to more specific areas, such as COVID-19, Piezoelectrics, and Medieval Royal Iconography.

Authors can choose to contribute to the open books via the Encyclopedia Books section of the Encyclopedia Platform website; these are books that are already open and in progress and have an Editor-in-Chief assigned. Alternatively, Researchers can contact the Encyclopedia Books team with suggestions for new Encyclopedia Books.

The workflow from proposal to publication of Encyclopedia books is outlined below:

(1) Book Project Initiated:

Editors or authors can contact the Encyclopedia Books team via the Encyclopedia office (office@encyclopedia.pub) to propose a book plan. The in-house editors will evaluate the received proposal, and decide how to proceed.

Once approved, an editorial team will be set up and we will work together to set the preliminary structure of the book.

(2) Book Open for Submission:

The Editor-in-Chief for the book will write a brief book description, which will then be posted online to create an official webpage of this book. Authors will then be welcome to submit high-quality entries. For detailed requirements of entry submission, please refer to the instructions for authors.

(3) Editorial Process:

Entries will be sent to peer review for approval. The publisher will be in charge of the peer review process. As with the usual process for peer review, authors may be required to revise the papers based upon the feedback from the peer review process.

The paper will be accepted for publication if the content is improved after essential revision. A DOI will be granted after the publication.

When enough entries are collected, the book will be published with an ISBN.

4. Copyright Policy

For copyright policy, please refer to Terms and Conditions.

5.Withdrawal and Cancellation Policy

It is important that all authors understand that submissions can be offline and deleted from our website but cannot be removed from the internet. Once posted, a number of databases would have collected information about the posted works.

Encyclopedia platform reserve the right to offline the submissions without notice where there is sufficient reason for doing so. The reasons might be as follows:

(1) Misconduct by authors, including plagiarism and data fabrication;

(2) Serious scientific errors that cannot be corrected by updating;

(3) Where leaving the submission online would constitute an illegal act, including copyright violation.