About Scientia Silvae Sinicae

Scientia Silvae Sinicae

Overview and identity

Scientia Silvae Sinicae, known in Chinese as Linye Kexue, is China's leading comprehensive forestry science journal. It is a monthly academic journal published in Beijing by the Chinese Society of Forestry, supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology. Its official website is linyekexue.net. It carries the ISSN 1001-7488 and the Chinese serial number CN 11-1908/S. The journal was founded in 1955, and its own introduction describes it as a leading forestry science journal in China, providing a platform for the dissemination of original research and for facilitating the exchange of ideas in the forestry science community. In Scopus-derived rankings it is classified under Forestry and Plant Science, in the third quartile in both categories.

The Latin title is itself a statement of ambition. Scientia Silvae Sinicae — the science of China's forests — claims the whole of forest science for a single national journal, in the tradition of the great society journals of the twentieth century. The papers and review articles it publishes mainly reflect current research advances in forest sciences in China and internationally, and issues closely concerned with forest, forestry and forestry policy. No other Chinese serial occupies quite this position: it is simultaneously the journal of a national learned society, the archive of a century-old forestry movement, and the monthly record of research on the largest plantation forest estate in the world.

Origins: Forest magazine, 1921

The journal's predecessor can be traced to China's first forestry magazine, Forest, first published by the Chinese Forestry Association in 1921. The journal's official history and introduction both anchor its lineage there: Scientia Silvae Sinicae was founded in 1955 on the basis of Forest, a journal of the Chinese Society of Forestry created in March 1921. That origin matters because it makes the journal's roots older than the People's Republic itself, reaching back to the early Republican-era effort to organise forestry as a modern profession and science in China.

At the onset of the present journal's publication it was co-operated by the Chinese Society of Forestry and the Forestry Science Research Institute under the then Ministry of Forestry, and published by China Forestry Press. This combination — a learned society, a ministry research institute and a specialist press — was the characteristic publishing arrangement for a national scientific journal in 1950s China, and it embedded the journal from the start in both the professional community and the state forestry research system that it still serves.

A history of transfers and restorations

In July 1956 the journal was put under the Chinese Society of Forestry and published by the Science Press. In 1976 it was given the name China Forestry Science, placed under the operation of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, with the Science Press still responsible for publishing. In August 1978 the journal was returned to the Chinese Society of Forestry, and six months later it resumed its former name of Scientia Silvae Sinicae. Since January 1998, the Editorial Department of the journal has itself been responsible for publishing it.

That apparently administrative chronology is in fact a concise history of Chinese scientific institutions through the Cultural Revolution and the reform period: a society journal transferred between academies and ministries, renamed in a period of institutional upheaval, then restored to its society and to its name as academic life normalised after 1978. The resumption of the title Scientia Silvae Sinicae in 1979 signalled continuity with the pre-1976 journal, and the 1998 move to editorial-department publishing gave the society direct control of its flagship. The journal counts its run from 1955 through all of these changes, treating them as episodes in one serial's life rather than as breaks in it.

The digital transition

In January 2009 the Editorial Department adopted and operated an online editing system with the setup of its own journal website. In August 2009 paper and online publication began to be offered simultaneously. At the end of the same year, the full texts of scientific papers from all previous issues since 1955 were made available online for open access.

That last step deserves emphasis. Digitising and opening the complete back run to 1955 converted more than half a century of Chinese forest research — on species such as Chinese fir and poplar, on plantation management, forest soils, pests and wood properties — from paper holdings in specialist libraries into a freely searchable national resource. For a discipline like forestry, where experiments and observation plots run for decades and where a measurement series begun in the 1960s may be the baseline for a climate study today, open access to the deep archive is not a convenience but a scientific necessity. The journal's history records the transition as a single year's work in 2009; its effects are permanent.

Scope: the full breadth of forest science

The journal's stated scope includes silviculture; forest ecology; forest genetics and tree breeding; forest management; forest health; conservation and utilisation of forest gene resources; horticulture; cash tree crops and agroforestry; watershed management and desertification combating; sustainable forestry development; wood science and technology; forest engineering; forest product processing and non-timber forest products; and forestry economy.

Read in sequence, that list follows a tree through its whole existence and beyond. Silviculture and genetics and breeding concern how forests are established and improved; forest ecology and gene-resource conservation concern how they function and persist as ecosystems; forest management and forest health concern how they are planned, inventoried, protected from pests, disease and fire, and kept productive; watershed management and desertification control place forests in the wider landscape, where in China they are planted as much to hold soil and water and to stop the advance of deserts as to produce timber; wood science, forest engineering and product processing follow the harvested tree into materials and industry, including non-timber products such as bamboo, resins and forest foods; and forestry economy and sustainable development address the policy and market framework within which all of it happens. A national journal that holds all of these together gives Chinese forest science a single forum in which a geneticist, an ecologist, a wood technologist and a forestry economist are, at least in print, members of one discipline.

The sponsor: the Chinese Society of Forestry

The journal is operated by the Chinese Society of Forestry and supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology, the national federation of Chinese scientific and technical societies. The society is the professional home of China's foresters and forest scientists, and it is the same body whose predecessor published Forest in 1921. Society publishing of this kind gives the journal a particular character: it belongs to a discipline rather than to a single university or research institute, so its authors and readers are drawn from the whole national system — the Chinese Academy of Forestry, forestry universities such as those in Beijing and Nanjing, provincial academies, and the state forestry administration's research and planning bodies.

That breadth is visible in the journal's citation record. Bibliographic systems such as FAO's AGRIS hold hundreds of its articles across decades, on subjects from the adaptability of indigenous poplars in Inner Mongolia and gene-transformed poplar clones, to nutrient characteristics of loblolly pine plantations, site-quality evaluation on the Mu Us sandy land, and the vertical distribution of fungi on Mount Taibai — a fair sample of a journal whose parish is every forest type in a very large and ecologically varied country.

Peer review and publication ethics

The journal states that all manuscripts submitted to it are peer reviewed by at least two anonymous reviewers. Its published ethics guidance sets out the duties that follow from that system. Reviewers are to assist the editor in making editorial decisions and, through editorial communication, may assist authors in improving manuscripts; they must decline or promptly report assignments they are unqualified for or cannot complete in time; manuscripts received for review are confidential documents; reviews should be conducted objectively, with views expressed clearly and supported by argument, without personal criticism of authors; relevant published work that authors have not cited should be identified; and privileged information obtained through review must be kept confidential and not used for personal advantage, with conflicts of interest disclosed.

Parallel duties are stated for editors — to evaluate manuscripts only for intellectual content, to protect the identities of reviewers and the confidentiality of submissions, to preclude business needs or private interests from compromising standards, and to publish corrections, clarifications and retractions when needed — and for authors, who must present original work, report results accurately with sufficient detail and references to permit replication, avoid concurrent publication of essentially the same research, and promptly notify the editors on discovering a significant error in their own published work. The presence of a full, explicit ethics code of this kind is part of the journal's modern professional apparatus, aligning a society journal founded in the 1950s with contemporary international publishing practice.

Indexing and abstracting

Scientia Silvae Sinicae is included in leading international index publications and database systems, including EI, Scopus, Chemical Abstracts, the Abstract Journal, CAB Abstracts, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, Zoological Record, Index Copernicus, Japan Science and Technology Agency databases, Ulrich's Periodicals Directory, AGRIS and AGRICOLA. Domestically it is included in the Chinese Science Citation Database, the Chinese Scientific and Technical Papers and Citation Database, and the China Journals Full-text Database, among others.

The composition of that list reflects the journal's dual audience. EI and Scopus place it in the international engineering and science record; CAB Abstracts, AGRIS and AGRICOLA — the agricultural and forestry abstracting systems of CABI, the FAO and the United States National Agricultural Library — place it where the world's forestry researchers actually search; and Zoological Record captures its forest entomology and wildlife content. Scopus-derived rankings record coverage from 2016 to 2025 in recent data, third-quartile placement in Forestry and Plant Science, and several hundred documents over recent three-year periods — 580 citable documents in the three years counted in one recent SCImago table, with 246 documents in 2025 alone — the output expected of a monthly national journal of its size.

Honours

The journal won the First and Second National Journal Prizes of China in 1999 and 2003, and the Nominated Award of the Third National Journal Prize of China in 2005. It was named among the 100 Outstanding Academic Journals of China from 2001 to 2012, received the award of Most Influential Periodical in the Past 60 Years in China in 2009, was named an Excellent International Impact Academic Journal of China by CNKI from 2012 to 2014, and was listed among the Top 100 Newspapers and Journals by the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television of China in 2013.

Taken together, those honours span the journal's modern era, from the last years of the twentieth century to the years after its digital transition, and they include both domestic quality prizes and recognition of international impact. For a Chinese-language disciplinary journal, that combination — national prizes, a sixty-year influence award, and international-impact recognition — is the standard evidence of flagship status within its field.

Publishing details and significance

Scientia Silvae Sinicae (ISSN 1001-7488; CN 11-1908/S; Chinese title Linye Kexue) is published monthly in Beijing by the Chinese Society of Forestry under the supervision of the China Association for Science and Technology, through its own editorial department, with its archive from 1955 available in full text online at linyekexue.net. It has appeared under its present name since its restoration in 1979, counts its foundation to 1955, and traces its ancestry to Forest of 1921.

In summary, Scientia Silvae Sinicae is the central journal of Chinese forest science: a monthly society journal covering silviculture, ecology, genetics, management, forest health, wood science, engineering, products and forestry economics; peer reviewed by at least two anonymous referees; indexed in EI, Scopus, CAB, AGRIS and the principal Chinese citation databases; and repeatedly honoured at national level. Anyone seeking the published record of how China has studied, planted, protected and used its forests over the past seventy years will find that this journal is where much of that record lives.