About Food Science

Food Science

Overview and identity

Food Science, known in Chinese as Shipin Kexue, is a Chinese academic journal of food science and technology published in Beijing. Its official website is spkx.net.cn, where it presents itself simply under the English title FOOD SCIENCE and where its articles carry DOIs built on its ISSN. The journal carries the ISSN 1002-6630. It is a semimonthly journal — twenty-four issues a year — published by China Food Publishing Co., hosted by the Beijing Academy of Food Sciences, and supervised by the China General Chamber of Commerce. It was launched in 1980. Scopus-derived listings describe it as a semimonthly academic journal publishing research advances in agricultural and biological sciences, releasing approximately 1,200 papers annually.

That output figure is the key to the journal's character. Twelve hundred papers a year, in twenty-four issues, is roughly fifty papers per issue — the scale of a broad national disciplinary journal serving an entire industry, not of a selective quarterly. Food Science is the general journal of Chinese food research: the place where food chemists, microbiologists, nutrition researchers, processing engineers and analytical scientists from universities, institutes and enterprises across China publish the ordinary, cumulative work of the field, alongside reviews and method papers. Its generic English title, identical to the name of the discipline itself, is therefore best read as a claim of comprehensiveness by the country's food publishing house, and readers should take care to identify it by its ISSN, its Chinese title Shipin Kexue, its Beijing publisher and its website, rather than by title alone.

Distinguishing this journal from similarly named titles

Because "Food Science" is also the name of a discipline and of other journals, precise identification matters. This journal is not the American Journal of Food Science, published by Wiley for the Institute of Food Technologists, and it is not either of two newer Beijing-linked English-language titles with similar names: Food Science and Human Wellness, and Food Science of Animal Products, the latter recorded in SCImago listings as a separate journal published by Tsinghua University Press. Shipin Kexue is the older, Chinese-language, semimonthly journal of 1980, published by China Food Publishing Co. under ISSN 1002-6630, with its archive at spkx.net.cn and its article DOIs in the form 10.7506/spkx1002-6630 followed by the year, issue and article number — the DOI prefix string itself embedding the journal's ISSN, so that any citation in that form belongs unambiguously to this title.

History: launched in 1980

Food Science published its first issue in 1980. A history of the Beijing food research institution associated with the journal records that China Food Publishing Co. had published its first issue of a food magazine in 1972 — described as China's first food magazine, welcomed by the general public — and that Food Science followed as its scientific journal in 1980, at the beginning of China's reform-era expansion of food research and of the modern food industry. In 1982, within two years of launch, Chemical Abstracts, the authoritative American abstracting periodical, started to carry abstracts derived from Food Science — an early sign that the new journal's contents were being noticed by the international chemical literature, which is the literature through which food chemistry is largely indexed.

In 1992, 1996 and 2000 the journal was successively chosen as one of the core periodicals for the food industry by the China State Commission of Science and Technology, according to the same institutional history. Core-periodical selection in those years was the mechanism by which Chinese science authorities identified the journals that libraries should hold and researchers should follow in each field, and three successive selections across a decade indicate that Food Science held its position as the food industry's core scientific journal through the 1990s, the decade in which China's food industry and its research base grew fastest.

Publisher, host and supervisor

The journal's governance is a three-part arrangement typical of Chinese industry science publishing. It is published by China Food Publishing Co., the specialist food publishing house whose periodical history reaches back to 1972. It is hosted by the Beijing Academy of Food Sciences — the Beijing food research institution founded, in its research-institute form, in 1963, which carried out state-level key scientific and technological projects in successive Five-Year Plan periods and built research strengths in techniques such as membrane separation, biofermentation, microencapsulation, supercritical fluid extraction and extrusion. And it is supervised by the China General Chamber of Commerce, the national commerce body under which the food publishing house sits, which appears as the supervising authority in the journal's bibliographic listings.

That structure places the journal at the meeting point of research, publishing and industry. The host institute supplies the scientific community and the subject expertise; the publishing company supplies professional editing, production and distribution at the very large scale the journal requires; and the chamber of commerce connects both to the food enterprises that are among the journal's readers and authors. A university journal answers to a university; Food Science answers to an industry, and its breadth and volume follow from that.

Scale and frequency

Food Science is semimonthly and releases approximately 1,200 papers annually. Sustaining that rate for a peer-reviewed scientific journal requires an editorial operation of a different order from that of a monthly or quarterly: a continuous flow of submissions from across China, large referee pools in every sub-field of food science, and production systems able to turn around fifty-paper issues twice a month. The journal's long back run illustrates the accumulated result. Its online archive at spkx.net.cn reaches back through decades of volumes — the 1997 volume, for example, is the journal's eighteenth, consistent with a 1980 launch, and its issues from that era already show the pattern of dense, method-rich contents that still characterises the journal.

Volume on this scale also shapes the journal's scholarly function. Bibliometric studies of Chinese food science routinely treat the domestic journal literature as a population to be analysed, and a journal publishing 1,200 papers a year forms a significant share of that population. Food Science is, in effect, a running census of what Chinese food laboratories are working on: which raw materials, which functional components, which contaminants and which processes are occupying the field in any given year can be read from its tables of contents.

Scope as shown in its published contents

The journal describes itself as a Chinese academic journal to broadcast comprehensive research advances on food science, and Scopus-derived listings place it in agricultural and biological sciences. Its published contents show what comprehensiveness means in practice. A single issue from its archive, volume 29, issue 6 of 2008, contains, among many other papers: a study of the extraction, purification and hydroxyl-radical scavenging activity of polysaccharides from the leaves of Ilex kudincha, a Chinese tea plant; a real-time PCR method, built on a modified CTAB DNA extraction, for detecting genetically modified ingredients in vermicelli, aimed at export supervision of GM food; a study of the antimicrobial activity of Lactobacillus casei subsp. rhamnosus and the optimisation of its fermentation conditions; a highly sensitive GC-MS method for the simultaneous determination of twenty sex hormones in swamp eel muscle; and a high-performance anion-exchange chromatography method with pulsed amperometric detection for determining sugars and sugar alcohols in sugar-free and low-sugar foods.

Those five papers alone span functional food components and antioxidant activity, food safety and authenticity testing, fermentation microbiology, contaminant and residue analysis in animal foods, and analytical chemistry for formulated products. Extended across twenty-four issues a year, the same range covers the discipline's standard territory: food chemistry and biochemistry, food microbiology and fermentation, nutrition and functional foods, food processing and preservation, food safety, toxicology and rapid detection, and the analytical methods — chromatography, mass spectrometry, molecular biology — on which all of them depend. The journal is comprehensive not by editorial slogan but by accumulation: almost any laboratory topic in Chinese food science can find a neighbouring paper in its pages.

Author standards and editorial practice

The journal's published submitting template gives a detailed picture of its editorial expectations. Titles must be accurate and concise; Chinese titles usually consist of no more than twenty words, with subtitles suggested when necessary; English titles should be consistent with Chinese titles, with the first letter of content words capitalised; and technical terms, abbreviations, symbols, codes, commodity names, active verbs and mathematical and chemical formulas are all to be avoided in titles, so that titles remain suitable for bibliography, indexing and retrieval. Foreign authors are to use full names rather than abbreviations.

The template further requires that quantities and units follow the Chinese national standards GB 3100 to 3102 strictly, with SI symbols in roman type in formulas, figures, tables and text, and abandoned quantities and symbols excluded; that names of chemical compounds follow the systematic rules of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry and the terms approved by China's national terminology authorities; and that mathematical and chemical formulas be prepared with tools such as MathType and ChemDraw. Such requirements are the unglamorous infrastructure of a high-volume journal: when fifty papers an issue pass through one editorial office, standardised titles, units and nomenclature are what keep the whole searchable, consistent and citable.

Indexing and bibliometric presence

Scopus-derived journal services catalogue Shipin Kexue/Food Science with ISSN 10026630, country China, publisher in the China Food Publishing and Chamber of Commerce system, subject area agricultural and biological sciences, and active years including 2016, 2018 and 2020 to 2026 in recent listings. Its abstracting history is older than those listings: as noted above, Chemical Abstracts began carrying abstracts from the journal in 1982, and its successive selection as a core periodical for the food industry in 1992, 1996 and 2000 placed it in the core of the domestic system.

The journal's presence in the scholarly record is also visible in the literature about the field itself. Its own pages have carried bibliometric analyses — for example, a 2013 study in Food Science analysing SCI-cited research papers in food science published from China during 2000 to 2011, examining their years, languages, source journals, disciplines, institutes and citation patterns, and finding that China's food science output grew rapidly in that period, with the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry and Food Chemistry as the most important international journals and the Chinese Academy of Sciences as the most publishing organisation. A journal that both publishes a field's research and publishes analyses of that field's publication behaviour is performing the full role of a national disciplinary journal.

Readership and place in Chinese food research

The journal's readers are the researchers, teachers, graduate students and industry technologists of Chinese food science — in food colleges and agricultural universities, in academy and provincial food institutes, and in the quality, safety and product-development laboratories of food enterprises. For that readership the journal's virtues are currency and coverage: twice-monthly issues, very large numbers of papers, Chinese-language full text with the standardised presentation described above, and an archive, freely browsable by volume and issue on its website, that runs back to the beginning of the reform era.

In summary, Food Science (Shipin Kexue; ISSN 1002-6630) is a semimonthly Chinese journal launched in Beijing in 1980, published by China Food Publishing Co., hosted by the Beijing Academy of Food Sciences and supervised by the China General Chamber of Commerce, publishing about 1,200 papers a year across the whole of food science and technology. Abstracted by Chemical Abstracts from 1982 and repeatedly selected as a core periodical for the food industry, and distinct from both Food Science and Human Wellness and Food Science of Animal Products, it is the high-volume general journal of record for food research in China.