About Journal of Library Science in China

Journal of Library Science in China

The Journal of Library Science in China is China's flagship library-science journal, published in Beijing and sponsored by the Library Society of China and the National Library of China. Its Chinese title is Zhongguo Tushuguan Xuebao. It started in 1957, carries ISSN 1001-8867, and is published bimonthly, carrying theoretical and practical research on Chinese librarianship with extended English abstracts. Its English-language annual edition presents selected content to international readers, through which much of what is known abroad about the development of Chinese library science has been learned.

China's Flagship Library-Science Journal

The candidate record for this journal describes it without exaggeration as China's flagship library-science journal. Sponsored jointly by the Library Society of China — the national professional society for librarianship — and the National Library of China, the country's national library, it carries the authority of both the profession and its greatest institution. A journal with those two sponsors is the natural place where Chinese librarianship debates its theory, records its history and sets out its direction.

It started in 1957 — one year after its sister title Library and Information Service — in the period when the young People's Republic was organising its library system under national coordination; the State Council's coordinating plans for libraries in China date from the same year, 1957, as the journal's own English edition records in its historical surveys. Journal and national library system have grown up together.

Bibliographic Identity

The journal's Chinese title is Zhongguo Tushuguan Xuebao, its ISSN 1001-8867, and it is published bimonthly — six issues a year — from Beijing. Its editorial office is recorded in directory listings as the journal's publisher of record. SCImago-derived profiles record the journal as active in recent years, in the social sciences, with a two-year impact factor of 1.52, a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.583 and an h-index of 13 in the 2025 metrics quoted by one journal database — respectable figures for a Chinese-language journal in a small, nationally bounded discipline, and evidence of a living, cited publication.

Articles in the journal carry extended English abstracts, as an IFLA survey of Chinese library and information science journals recorded — the mechanism by which its Chinese-language theoretical work is made visible, in summary, to the international profession. Its separately published English edition, from which the historical surveys quoted in this profile are drawn, extends that visibility to full selected papers.

Scope: Theory and Practice of Chinese Librarianship

The journal carries theoretical and practical research on Chinese librarianship. Its English edition's contents show the theory side in depth: foundational debates on the object of library science — a discussion the journal hosted from Liu Guojun's 1957 paper 'What's Library Science' onward — the theoretical foundations of the discipline, library classification, the history of libraries, union catalogues and classical literature, and reviews of the theory of library science in China across sixty years.

The practice side is equally present: reader services and their transformation over the twentieth century, reading promotion, library development models and planning, public-library development under China's Public Library Law, which entered into force on 1 January 2018, and the coordination of the national library system through bodies such as the China Academic Library and Information System (CALIS) and the National Science and Technology Library. A flagship journal must hold both halves — the discipline's self-understanding and its working agenda — and this one's contents do.

A Journal That Records Its Own Discipline's History

A distinctive feature of the Journal of Library Science in China is the extent to which it serves as the archive of Chinese library science itself. Its English edition carries long historical surveys — of reader services in twentieth-century China, of reading promotion, of the theoretical development of Chinese library science from 1956 to 2016 — that are among the fullest accounts of the field's history available in any language, written from within the journal's own community.

Those surveys record the discipline's institutional milestones: the first Chinese library organisation of 1925, the beginnings of the Library Society of China in the 1950s and its establishment in 1979 with its affiliated committees, the national coordination plans of 1957 and 1980, and the library-system building of the reform era. The journal is thus both a participant in and the chronicler of its field.

The Sponsors: Society and National Library

The Library Society of China is the profession's national society: it organises the theoretical and professional life of Chinese librarianship, promotes theoretical studies and training, and counts committees across the field's specialties. The National Library of China is the state's great library — legal-deposit library, guardian of the national collection and coordinator of national library services. Joint sponsorship by the two gives the journal a dual legitimacy, professional and institutional, that no university or academy journal in the field can match.

That sponsorship also explains the journal's contents' national scope: it speaks for and to the whole Chinese library system — national, provincial, city and county public libraries vertically, and public, academic and special libraries horizontally, in the framework its own theoretical papers use.

Relationship to Library and Information Service

The field's other senior journal, Library and Information Service, is the Chinese Academy of Sciences and National Science Library title focused on information resource management. The two are named together in surveys of Chinese library and information journals as the field's recognised quality titles, and they are complementary rather than rival: the society-and-national-library journal leads on library science and librarianship, the academy journal on information services and resource management.

Keeping them distinct is a basic requirement of a correct directory: different sponsors, different ISSNs — 1001-8867 here against 0252-3116 — different Chinese titles and different editorial centres of gravity, within one shared discipline.

Readership

The journal's readers are China's librarians and library-science scholars: the staff of public and academic libraries, the teachers and students of the library-science departments, and the administrators who plan library services. Its theoretical papers shape how the discipline is taught; its practical and policy papers reach the managers of the national system; its historical surveys serve anyone, in China or abroad, studying how Chinese librarianship developed.

Internationally, its extended English abstracts and English edition make it the principal window through which foreign librarians and scholars follow Chinese library science — the IFLA survey that documented those abstracts was itself an exercise in opening Chinese LIS journals to the world.

Access and Identification

The journal is identified by its title, its Chinese title Zhongguo Tushuguan Xuebao, ISSN 1001-8867, its Beijing base, its bimonthly frequency and its joint sponsorship by the Library Society of China and the National Library of China. Its English edition is published through its journal site, from which the contents quoted in this profile are drawn.

In this directory it is recorded as a Beijing, China magazine and academic journal of library science — the flagship of its field — with its 1957 start, its sponsors and its theoretical and practical scope preserved.

Why the Journal Matters

Every national profession has a journal that defines it. For Chinese librarianship, the Journal of Library Science in China — society- and national-library-sponsored since 1957, theoretically ambitious, historically self-aware and still cited and ranked in current journal databases — is that journal. Its inclusion here records the head of China's library-science publishing.