About Chinese Journal of Health Management

Chinese Journal of Health Management

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Health Management is a Chinese-language journal of health management and health-examination medicine published in Beijing in the Chinese Medical Association (CMA) journal series. Its Chinese title is Zhonghua Jiankang Guanli Xue Zazhi, the title proper recorded in the international ISSN register, where the English title Chinese Journal of Health Management is the registered title variant. Its print ISSN is 1674-0815, which is also its linking ISSN, and the ISSN Portal record classifies it as a print publication from China. The journal is published by the Chinese Medical Journals Publishing House — the CMA's journal publishing company — and its official website, zgjkglyxyj.org.cn, carries its current and archive issues.

Health management, in the Chinese medical sense this journal serves, is the discipline built around the health examination: the systematic screening of apparently healthy populations, the assessment and stratification of the risks the screening finds, and the structured follow-up — lifestyle intervention, chronic-disease risk management and referral — that turns an examination into managed health. It is a discipline that grew with China's commercial and institutional health-check sector, and this journal, as the candidate description records, is its national CMA title, publishing among other things Chinese national guidelines and consensus statements on health screening and chronic-disease health management.

Founding and publication history

The journal's volume numbering establishes its starting point: volume 15 appeared in 2021, which places its first volume in 2007, as the candidate listing for this profile notes. The numbering since then is consistent with a volume per year — volume 9 in 2015 and volume 18 in 2024 both appear in the journal's published record. A 2007 launch makes the journal a product of the period when health management was being formalised as a recognised discipline in China: the CMA's health management branch community was organising nationally, health-examination centres were expanding across Chinese hospitals, and a dedicated national journal gave the new field its scholarly home.

Articles from the journal's first decade carry CMA digital object identifiers in the older association form that embeds the ISSN itself — for example 10.3760/cma.j.issn.1674-0815.2015.06.003 — while more recent articles use the current CMA form, such as 10.3760/cma.j.cn115624-20240607-00474 for a 2024 guideline, the cn115624 element being the journal's identifier within the association's publishing system. The journal's content is distributed through the CMA's Yiigle journal platform, where its guidelines and consensus documents are presented in full.

Publisher and place in the CMA system

The publisher of record in international listings is the Chinese Medical Journals Publishing House Co. Ltd. of Beijing, the company through which the Chinese Medical Association publishes its journal series. The Zhonghua prefix of the journal's Chinese title places it in the association's core national series, alongside the CMA's clinical specialty titles; its disciplinary partner inside the association is the CMA's Health Management Branch, with which the journal's editorial board is repeatedly associated in its published consensus work.

That partnership is visible on the journal's own pages. The expert consensus on screening and management of cardiovascular disease risk factors in the Chinese health-examination population, published in the journal in 2015, was produced by the CMA Health Management Branch jointly with the journal, and drew in the CMA's cardiovascular and ultrasound societies for its cross-disciplinary content. The journal also co-published, with the Health Management Branch in April 2014, the Chinese expert consensus on the basic items of health examination, which defined cardiovascular risk screening and risk-factor management as recommended components of the health examination and of health management — foundational documents for how Chinese health-check institutions structure their work.

Scope: health examination, screening and chronic-disease management

The journal's territory runs from the examination room to population health policy. Its core subjects are the design and quality of health examinations — which items belong in a basic examination package, how screening for particular diseases should be organised, and what follow-up an abnormal finding should trigger; the assessment and management of chronic-disease risk in examined populations, including cardiovascular risk, metabolic risk and cancer screening; and the organisation of health management services themselves, in hospital health-management centres and dedicated examination institutions.

The 2015 cardiovascular consensus illustrates the journal's characteristic content: addressed to asymptomatic adults attending for health examination, it set out how atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease risk factors should be screened for in that population and how high-risk individuals should be followed up and managed after the examination, grounding its recommendations in Chinese and international guidance and in more than a decade of Chinese health-examination practice. This is guidance written not for cardiologists but for the health-management practitioners who see the screened population first — the journal's defining readership.

Guidelines and consensus statements

Guideline and consensus publication is the journal's most distinctive function, and the candidate description singles it out: the journal publishes Chinese national guidelines and consensus statements on health screening and chronic-disease health management. A recent example is the guideline on the application of quantitative CT in health management, issued in 2024 and published in the journal in volume 18, issue 9, pages 645 to 654. Produced by the CMA Health Management Branch with national orthopaedic, radiology quality-control and geriatric research bodies and the journal's own editorial board, it contains eleven recommendations covering the use of quantitative CT in health-examination practice — for osteoporosis diagnosis within a low-dose CT examination model, and for the measurement of liver fat and abdominal visceral fat relevant to fatty liver and obesity management — standardising examination models, applicable populations, diagnostic criteria, measurement and follow-up.

Documents of this kind give the journal an influence beyond its citation counts: a consensus published in its pages becomes the working standard for examination centres across China. The line from the 2014 basic examination items consensus, through the 2015 cardiovascular risk consensus, to the 2024 quantitative CT guideline shows a journal steadily codifying the practice of a young discipline, in step with the CMA branch that represents that discipline professionally.

Indexing and bibliometric standing

International journal-metric listings record the journal under its ISSN 1674-0815 in the subject areas of medicine and the health professions, with the Chinese Medical Journals Publishing House as publisher. Metric summaries for the title give a 2025 impact factor figure of 0.250, up from 0.180 in 2024, a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.137 and an h-index of 8 as of 2025. Those are the modest international numbers typical of a Chinese-language professional journal whose readership is overwhelmingly domestic and whose most important products — national consensus documents — are used in practice rather than cited in the international literature.

The ISSN Portal record, maintained through the Chinese ISSN centre, confirms the bibliographic fundamentals: title proper Zhonghua Jiankang Guanli Xue Zazhi, title variant Chinese Journal of Health Management, print medium, country of publication China. Librarians and readers should note that the English title is shared in translation by no other CMA title, but is easily confused in casual searching with unrelated English-language publications on healthcare management published outside China; the ISSN and the Zhonghua title are the reliable identifiers.

Readership

The journal is written for China's health management workforce: physicians and directors of hospital health-management and health-examination centres, staff of independent health-check institutions, general practitioners and public-health practitioners engaged in chronic-disease prevention, and researchers studying screening, risk assessment and health services for examined populations. Its mix of original research, practice studies, and authoritative guidelines and consensuses serves readers who need both evidence and operational standards.

Its Beijing base places it at the centre of the system it serves — the CMA's headquarters, its publishing house and the national guideline process are all in the capital — while its subject matter reaches every province in which health examinations are delivered. Among the CMA's Zhonghua titles it is one of the youngest, a 2007 foundation in a series whose flagship journals date to the mid-twentieth century, and its youth mirrors its discipline: health management is itself one of the newest organised fields in Chinese medicine.

Why the journal matters

China operates health examination at a population scale few countries match, and the quality of what happens after an examination — whether risks are found, explained and managed — determines whether that scale produces health. The Chinese Journal of Health Management is the national journal of the discipline responsible for that follow-through: a CMA series title, published from Beijing since 2007, whose consensus statements define basic examination content, cardiovascular risk screening and imaging standards for health management practice across the country. For anyone studying how China organises preventive health care for its examined population, it is a primary source.