About Rice Science

Rice Science

Rice Science is an international peer-reviewed bimonthly journal devoted entirely to rice, sponsored by the China National Rice Research Institute (CNRRI) in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and hosted by Elsevier. It is the English edition associated with the Chinese Journal of Rice Science, and it publishes research on rice genetics, breeding, physiology, cultivation and pest management from the world's largest rice-research community. Its stated purpose is to provide a forum for important advances in rice research, to strengthen communication between rice scientists in China and other countries, and to contribute to food security in the world.

A journal for a single crop is less narrow than it sounds. Rice feeds more people than any other staple, and its science runs from molecular biology and genomics through field agronomy to grain chemistry and post-harvest processing. China, home to the China National Rice Research Institute and to pioneering work on hybrid rice, is central to that science. Rice Science exists to carry that research — Chinese and international — to a global English-reading audience.

Overview and identifying details

The journal's print ISSN is 1672-6308 and its online ISSN is 1876-4762. Its standard abbreviation is Rice Sci. It appears bimonthly, six issues a year, in English. Copyright is held by the China National Rice Research Institute, with hosting by Elsevier B.V.; the full texts are available through ScienceDirect and through the journal's own site at ricescience.org. Peer review is conducted under the responsibility of the China National Rice Research Institute.

The journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, according to its listing in the China magazines inventory, giving rice researchers a China-sponsored title whose articles are tracked in the principal international citation databases. Its editorial office sits at the sponsoring institute itself: the China National Rice Research Institute, 359 Tiyuchang Road, Hangzhou 310006, China — the address given in the journal's instructions to contributors.

Origins and the Elsevier partnership

Rice Science was formerly the Chinese Rice Research Newsletter. In May 2007 Elsevier announced a partnership to publish the journal, describing it at the time as an international quarterly journal whose primary purpose was to introduce the advancements and achievements of rice science in China to the world, and which encouraged submissions from outside China to strengthen communication among rice scientists and contribute to the safety of the world's food supply. The journal was sponsored by the China National Rice Research Institute in cooperation with the State Key Laboratory of Rice Biology and the Chinese National Rice Improvement Center.

The journal's Chinese-language sister title provides its institutional lineage. The Chinese Journal of Rice Science (ISSN 1001-7216) was first published in 1986 and is a bimonthly academic journal sponsored by the same institute, publishing original research on rice in Chinese with English abstracts and indexed by more than thirty databases and abstracting services. It has twice been honoured as a National Outstanding Sci-Tech Journal in China, among numerous national and regional awards. Rice Science performs the complementary role: full research articles in English, on the ScienceDirect platform, for readers who do not work in Chinese.

Sponsorship: the China National Rice Research Institute

CNRRI, based in Hangzhou, is China's national institute devoted to rice research, and its sponsorship shapes the journal's character. The institute works across the full span of rice science represented in the journal's scope — breeding and genetics, germplasm, cultivation, plant protection, soil and nutrition — and hosts the State Key Laboratory of Rice Biology. A journal edited within a national crop institute is close to the field programmes, breeding pipelines and germplasm collections that generate much of its subject matter, and to the practical questions of production that fundamental rice research must ultimately answer.

Hangzhou and Zhejiang also place the journal in one of China's historic rice-growing regions, where paddy cultivation, grain quality and farming systems are lived realities rather than abstractions. The inventory record for the journal describes it plainly as publishing from "the world's largest rice-research community" — a description of the Chinese rice science system as a whole, within which CNRRI is the national coordinating institute.

Aims and scope

The journal's guide for authors states its aims directly: Rice Science aims to provide a forum for important advances in rice research, to strengthen the communication of rice scientists between China and other countries, and to contribute more to food security in the world. It publishes high-quality original research articles, reviews, technical reports and letters in the field of rice science.

The topics covered include breeding and genetics, molecular biology, biotechnology, germplasm resources, agronomy, plant physiology, pest management, soil and fertilizer management, ecology, cereal chemistry and post-harvest processing. Read as a map, that list follows the crop from the gene to the table: the inherited material breeders work with, the molecular tools that analyse it, the physiology of the growing plant, the pests, soils and fertilisers that determine yield in the field, the ecology of the paddy system, and finally the chemistry and processing of the harvested grain.

Research areas in depth

Breeding, genetics and germplasm form the journal's first axis. Rice improvement depends on understanding the genetic basis of yield, quality, resistance and adaptation, and on the conserved diversity held in germplasm collections — the raw material from which new varieties are made. Molecular biology and biotechnology, the second axis, supply the methods: gene discovery and characterisation, marker and genomic approaches, and the biotechnological tools that move traits into breeding programmes.

The field sciences form the third axis. Agronomy and plant physiology address how the crop grows and yields under real conditions; pest management addresses the insects, diseases and weeds of the paddy; soil and fertilizer management and ecology address the flooded-field system itself — its nutrient cycles, its water, and its environmental footprint. Cereal chemistry and post-harvest processing close the chain, covering grain quality, storage and the conversion of harvested paddy into food. Few crop journals cover that entire chain under one title; for rice, the crop's importance justifies the breadth.

Article types and authorship

The journal publishes original research papers, review articles, technical reports and letters — described in its author instructions also as original research papers, reviews and short communications, all in English. Original papers report new experimental and field results; reviews consolidate areas such as a gene family's role, a breeding method or a pest problem; technical reports and short communications carry methods, notable observations and concise findings that merit rapid circulation among rice specialists.

Authorship is international by design. The journal was set up to introduce Chinese rice achievements to the world and simultaneously to encourage submissions from outside China, and its contents reflect both directions: Chinese institutes reporting on the world's largest rice research effort, and researchers from other rice-growing and rice-studying countries publishing alongside them. For a crop grown across Asia, Africa and the Americas, that two-way traffic is the point of an English-language title based in Hangzhou.

Relationship to the Chinese Journal of Rice Science

Understanding Rice Science requires distinguishing it from, and connecting it to, its Chinese counterpart. The Chinese Journal of Rice Science serves the domestic research community in Chinese, with the breadth of a national journal — its coverage extends to molecular biology and bioinformatics, agro-meteorology, modelling and remote sensing, ecological engineering, intelligent equipment for rice production and rice industry economics, organised in sections such as Research Reports, Research Notes, Experimental Techniques, Academic Treatises and Reviews, for researchers, educators, production specialists and managers.

Rice Science is not a translation of that journal but its English-edition counterpart in function: a separate, internationally distributed title from the same institute, publishing original English research for the global community. Together the two journals let CNRRI operate in both scholarly worlds at once — the Chinese-language system in which most Chinese rice research is first done and discussed, and the English-language citation system in which it is internationally judged.

Indexing, access and publication pattern

Publication is bimonthly through Elsevier's ScienceDirect, where the journal sits within Elsevier's agricultural sciences portfolio alongside other crop and plant titles, and through ricescience.org. Indexing in SCI-Expanded and Scopus means its articles enter the citation records used for research evaluation internationally — important for Chinese authors, whose work in a domestic English journal must still count in global metrics, and for international authors deciding where a rice paper will be seen.

The journal's author instructions historically noted that there were no page charges for publication in Rice Science in its contributor guidance issued by CNRRI — authors should always confirm current terms in the live guide for authors on ScienceDirect, since publishing arrangements change. What has not changed is the model: institute sponsorship, Elsevier hosting, English language, bimonthly frequency.

Place in rice research and food security

The journal's significance follows from its crop. Rice science underpins the food supply of billions, and the problems in its pages — yield under climate stress, disease resistance, water and fertiliser efficiency, grain quality — are food-security problems. A China-based international journal matters because China is both the largest rice producer and the source of foundational rice innovations, and because its research system produces rice science at a scale no other country matches. Rice Science is the channel built specifically to move that work into world literature.

Within China-based English journals, it is also a specialist among generalists: agricultural titles with broader scope exist, but Rice Science is the international journal of a national rice institute, edited by and for the rice community. Its combination of CNRRI sponsorship, the State Key Laboratory of Rice Biology connection recorded at its Elsevier launch, bimonthly ScienceDirect publication and complete dedication to a single staple crop gives it a clear and durable identity in world agricultural publishing.

Readership

The journal is read by rice breeders and geneticists, molecular biologists and biotechnologists, agronomists and crop physiologists, plant protection specialists, soil and fertiliser scientists, paddy ecologists, and cereal chemists and post-harvest technologists — in universities, national institutes and the seed and grain industries, in China and across the rice-growing world. For all of them, Rice Science offers what its aims promise: a single forum, in English, where advances in the science of the world's most important food crop are reported from the institute at the centre of its largest research community.