About Journal of Jilin University (Science Edition)

Journal of Jilin University (Science Edition)

Overview and identity

The Journal of Jilin University (Science Edition) is the comprehensive science journal of Jilin University, based in Changchun, the capital of Jilin province in north-eastern China. Its identifiers are given in its own official guide to authors: ISSN 1671-5489 and the Chinese national serial number CN 22-1340/O. The journal is sponsored by Jilin University and administered by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China. Its official home is the university's journal website at xuebao.jlu.edu.cn, in the section addressed as /lxb, where its issues, author guidance and journal information are published.

The journal's present English title is not its original one. The official guide records its original name as Acta Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Jilinensis — the Latin-style title under which Chinese university science journals of its generation were known. The change from a Latin acta title to the modern “Journal of Jilin University (Science Edition)” form follows the standard evolution of Chinese university journals, but the continuity is real: the volume sequence visible on the journal's site reaches back through that earlier name, with issues from volume 41 in 2003 already archived online under the current presentation, and the sequence continuing through volume 50 in 2012 and volume 54 in 2016.

Scope: seven fields of science in four kinds of article

The journal's official guide defines its scope with unusual completeness. It is, the guide states, a comprehensive academic journal in the fields of science, publishing the latest scientific research results achieved in basic theoretical research and in applied and development research. The fields it names are mathematics, physics, chemistry, life science, computer science, electricity and electronics, and environmental science. That list spans the classic natural sciences, the information sciences and the electrical disciplines — a breadth that reflects the merged, comprehensive character of Jilin University itself, which teaches across twelve academic categories from philosophy to art, with science and engineering at its centre.

The guide also names the journal's columns: theses, reviews, research notes and letters. Those four forms structure what an author may submit and what a reader may expect — full research papers presenting substantial results, review articles surveying a field, shorter research notes for findings of narrower scope, and letters for brief communications. A comprehensive journal with named columns of this kind is organising a large and varied inflow of manuscripts into recognisable genres, each with its own expectations of length and completeness.

A rule that reveals the journal's character

One detail in the official guide tells a reader a great deal about the journal's place in its university. The guide notes that if the first author's institution is not Jilin University, the journal only receives articles supported by provincial or ministerial-level funds. In other words, the journal is open to outside authors, but it sets a funding threshold for them, while serving as a natural home for the work of Jilin University's own researchers. That is the classic posture of a leading Chinese university journal: rooted in its own institution's output, selective toward external submissions, and using public research funding as a quality signal for the work it takes from beyond the university.

The guide's practical instructions reinforce the picture of an established editorial operation. Submissions are handled through the editorial system on the journal's website, with a copy also sent to the editorial email address the guide provides, and authors are asked to supply contact details so the office can reach them promptly. References must be drawn from officially published literature — the guide sets a minimum of eight — and are cited in the standard sequential format, with journal references given by author, article title, journal name, year, volume, issue and page range. Review and publication charges are disclosed openly in the guide, a transparency typical of Chinese university journals of this standing.

Honours recorded in the official guide

The journal's guide lists the distinctions it holds within the Chinese journal system. It is ranked among the Double Hundred Journals of Chinese scientific and technological journals — the “double hundred” designation that recurs in the histories of China's leading university journals — and it is described as an outstanding science and technology journal of China, a Chinese comprehensive core scientific and technological journal, and the best journal of Jilin Province. Each of those descriptions corresponds to a real category in the Chinese system of journal evaluation, in which core-journal lists and provincial and national awards determine a title's standing with authors, librarians and funding bodies.

For a directory profile, the safe and accurate way to present these honours is as the journal itself presents them: as rankings and titles recorded in its official guide to authors, published on the university's own journal site. They establish that the Science Edition is not an obscure house journal but a title that has been repeatedly evaluated and recognised within its national system — the context in which Chinese academics themselves would place it when deciding where to submit a comprehensive-science paper.

Abstracting and database coverage

The guide states that articles published in the journal are accepted for coverage in many well-known scientific and technological literature databases and abstract journals, and it names them. From the United States it lists Mathematical Reviews (“MR”), Chemical Abstracts (“CA”) and CSA: Materials Information (“CSA: MI”); from Germany, Zentralblatt MATH (“Zbl Math”); from Russia, the Referativnyi Zhurnal (“РЖ”); and from England, Science Abstracts (“SA”). Domestically, it lists the China National Knowledge Infrastructure (“China National Knowledge Internet” in the guide's translation), the Wanfang Database, Chinese Science Paper Online and the Longyuan Journal Net.

That list is a map of the journal's intended visibility. Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt MATH serve its mathematics; Chemical Abstracts serves its chemistry; Science Abstracts serves its physics and electrical fields; and the Chinese databases serve its domestic readership in full text. A comprehensive science journal earns its keep precisely by being present in the abstracting services of every discipline it covers, since its readers arrive discipline by discipline. The coverage the guide records matches the journal's stated scope field by field — evidence of a title integrated into the international abstracting system as well as the Chinese one.

The host university: founded in 1946, built by merger

Jilin University was founded in 1946 as the Northeast College of Administration in Harbin. It merged with Harbin University in 1948 to form the Northeast Academy of Science, was renamed Northeast People's University in 1950, relocated to Changchun, and took the name Jilin University in 1958. In 1952, through the national adjustment of colleges and departments, it became the first comprehensive university established by the Communist Party of China in the new higher-education order, and in 1960 it was listed as a national key university. It was among the first universities approved to establish a graduate school, entered Project 211 in 1995 and Project 985 in 2001, and is a Double First-Class university under the direct administration of the Ministry of Education.

The present university took shape on 12 June 2000, when the former Jilin University merged with Jilin University of Technology, the Norman Bethune University of Medical Sciences, Changchun University of Science and Technology and the Changchun Institute of Posts and Telecommunications; the former People's Liberation Army Quartermaster University was incorporated in 2004. That merger history illuminates the journal's scope list: a science edition serving a university that had absorbed a technology university and a posts-and-telecommunications institute would naturally cover electricity, electronics and computer science alongside mathematics, physics, chemistry and life science. The journal's breadth is the merger's breadth, expressed in print.

Changchun and the journal's editorial base

The journal's information page places its editorial office in Changchun, at 5372 Nanhu Road, with the postcode 130012, a telephone number on the Changchun 0431 code, and the editorial email at the university's jlu.edu.cn domain; it also maintains a WeChat presence under the name JLDXXBLXB for manuscript-status queries and academic news. Changchun is the capital of Jilin province and one of China's historic centres of the automobile industry and of scientific instrumentation, and Jilin University — with campuses across the city, thousands of teaching staff, and professors numbering in the thousands — is one of the largest comprehensive universities in the country. A science journal edited from within that institution sits at the centre of a very large research community.

Scale matters to a comprehensive journal's survival. A title that must fill issues across seven fields needs a deep bench of authors, referees and readers, and a university of Jilin's size — tens of thousands of students and more than six thousand teaching staff, including members of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Engineering among its professors — supplies that bench from its own departments before a single external manuscript is considered. The funding rule for external authors, described above, completes the model: institutional depth first, selective openness second.

Publication record visible in the archive

The journal's online archive displays the regularity of its publication across decades. Volume 41 appeared in 2003 with issues dated across the year — the archive shows issue 1 in January, issue 2 in April, issue 3 in July — and the sequence runs onward through volume 42 in 2004, volume 48 in 2010, volume 50 in 2012 and volume 54 in 2016, each issue carrying papers whose citation form the archive displays in the journal's standard format. The sample titles in those archives confirm the scope in practice: operator algebras and boundary-value problems in mathematics, pseudo-spectral methods for the Cahn–Hilliard equation, wavelet methods for image edge detection, and fractional differential equations all appear under this one title.

The archive also demonstrates a detail the guide states only in general terms: this is a journal whose centre of gravity is mathematical and physical science, with computing and electronics woven through it. A reader sampling random issues will meet more equations than test tubes — a profile worth recording honestly, since “comprehensive science” at Jilin University means, in practice, a journal led by its mathematics, physics and computing communities, serving chemistry, life science and environmental science within the same covers.

How to cite and identify the journal correctly

The identifying set for this journal is: Journal of Jilin University (Science Edition); original name Acta Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Jilinensis; ISSN 1671-5489; CN 22-1340/O; sponsor Jilin University; administrator the Ministry of Education; official site xuebao.jlu.edu.cn/lxb, in Changchun, Jilin. The CN number is a useful additional check, since it is unique to this edition within China's domestic registration system. Jilin University publishes other editions of its journal — for engineering and other fields — and each carries its own ISSN and CN number, so a citation should always specify the Science Edition and, ideally, the ISSN.

Citations generated from the journal's archive follow the pattern the guide prescribes: author names, article title, the journal title in its cited form, then year, volume and issue with page numbers. Researchers verifying a reference to this journal can match the volume-year correspondence visible in the archive — volume 41 to 2003, volume 50 to 2012, volume 54 to 2016 — as a quick internal consistency check before consulting the article itself.

Standing and significance

The Journal of Jilin University (Science Edition) is the comprehensive science journal of one of China's largest and oldest comprehensive universities in the north-east. Its verified record combines an official scope spanning mathematics, physics, chemistry, life science, computer science, electricity and electronics and environmental science; national recognition as a Double Hundred and core science journal and as Jilin Province's best journal; abstracting coverage from Mathematical Reviews and Chemical Abstracts to the major Chinese databases; and a volume sequence running unbroken from its years as Acta Scientiarum Naturalium Universitatis Jilinensis into the present century. For directory users, its essentials are its Science Edition title, ISSN 1671-5489, CN 22-1340/O, its Ministry of Education administration and Jilin University sponsorship, and its editorial home in Changchun — the fixed identity of the scientific voice of Jilin University.