About Chinese Journal of Medical Imaging Technology

Chinese Journal of Medical Imaging Technology

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Medical Imaging Technology, abbreviated CJMIT, is a Beijing-based monthly journal of medical imaging established in 1985. Its sponsor is the Institute of Acoustics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and its competent authority is the Chinese Academy of Sciences itself. The journal carries the standard serial numbers CN 11-1881/R and ISSN 1003-3289, a domestic post office subscription code of 82-509 and an international code of M1344. Its editorial address, as given by the Institute of Acoustics, is in the Dayou Building on North Fourth Ring Road in Haidian District, Beijing, the capital district that concentrates many of China's national research institutes and university hospitals.

What sets the title apart in Chinese medical publishing is stated plainly in the institute's own description: it is described as the only academic journal at national level in China combining theory research in clinical medical imaging with medical imaging engineering and technology. Most imaging journals are written by clinicians for clinicians, or by engineers for engineers. CJMIT was deliberately positioned at the junction between the two, publishing clinical findings alongside the physics, instrumentation and engineering work that makes those findings possible. That dual identity shapes everything else about the journal, from its sponsorship by an acoustics institute rather than a hospital, to the range of modalities and article types it accepts.

Foundation in 1985 and the Institute of Acoustics

The journal was established in 1985, a period when medical imaging in China was changing rapidly. Computed tomography and magnetic resonance were entering major hospitals, ultrasound was spreading far beyond them, and domestic researchers were both evaluating imported equipment and developing instruments of their own. A national journal that treated clinical imaging and imaging technology as a single field answered a real need of that moment: radiologists and sonographers needed evaluated clinical experience, while physicists and engineers needed to know which technical problems actually mattered at the scanner and the bedside.

The sponsor explains the engineering half of that mission. The Institute of Acoustics was formally established on 1 July 1964, with approval signed by Vice Premier Nie Rongzhen, at a time when China had no research institute devoted specifically to acoustics. It grew out of existing laboratories in the Chinese Academy of Sciences system, with Wang Dezhao as its first director and Ma Dayou as deputy director. The institute describes itself as a comprehensive research organisation for basic and applied acoustics and information processing, working on underwater acoustics, environmental acoustics and noise control, ultrasonics and acoustical micro-electromechanical systems, communication acoustics and speech processing, and network new media technologies. By the end of 2018 it reported a staff of 852, including about 794 scientific and technical personnel and four academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Ultrasonics is the bridge between that institute and a medical imaging journal. Ultrasound imaging is applied acoustics: the generation, propagation, scattering and detection of high-frequency sound in tissue. The institute's own history in medical ultrasonics is substantial. Accounts of its work record that a first domestically developed medical B-mode ultrasound instrument prototype was successfully developed in 1981, that the achievement received a third prize of the National Science and Technology Progress Award in 1985, the journal's founding year, and that a colour Doppler instrument followed in 1988. A journal sponsored by an institute with that record could credibly judge papers on transducer design, signal processing and image formation as well as papers on diagnosis.

Scope across imaging modalities

The institute's description lists the journal's coverage as the newest findings in fundamental and clinical research in medical imaging, naming radiology, ultrasound and nuclear imaging, together with imaging technology, interventional imaging, imaging physics and engineering. The candidate scope for the journal extends that list to computed tomography, magnetic resonance imaging and endoscopic imaging, which in practice sit inside the radiology and imaging-technology headings. Taken together, the scope is deliberately modality-wide rather than organ-specific: the unifying subject is how images of the body are produced, processed, interpreted and acted upon.

That breadth matters for readers. A single issue can in principle move from a CT or MRI diagnostic study, to an ultrasound technique paper grounded in acoustics, to nuclear medicine imaging, to interventional work in which imaging guides a procedure in real time. Papers on imaging physics and engineering address questions the clinical papers depend on but rarely answer themselves: dose, resolution, artefacts, reconstruction, quantification and quality control. By keeping those literatures in one journal, CJMIT lets a clinical reader see the technical basis of a method and lets an engineering reader see its clinical test, instead of forcing each group to search the other's journals.

Article types and editorial character

The journal publishes several established forms, listed by its sponsor as treatises, reviews, clinical experiences and case reports. In Chinese medical journal usage, treatises are substantial original research articles, clinical experiences are practice-based reports that distil what a department has learned from a series of cases or a technique in routine use, and case reports document individual instructive presentations. Reviews synthesise a fast-moving technique or application for readers who need orientation rather than another primary dataset. The sponsor also notes that the journal contains a high volume of information and has a short publishing period, and that its editorial board is composed of experts from inside and outside China in the medical imaging field.

The format reinforces that character. CJMIT is a monthly with 160 pages in a large 16-mo format, printed in colour on coated paper, a specification the institute lists with a cover price of 20 yuan per issue and 240 yuan for a year's subscription. Colour printing is not a cosmetic detail for an imaging journal: diagnostic images, Doppler displays and fused or reconstructed views lose information in poor reproduction, so a colour, coated-paper monthly of that size signals a journal built to carry image-heavy clinical material at volume and on a regular cycle.

Editors and governance

On the Institute of Acoustics page for the journal, the editors-in-chief are listed as Li Kuncheng and Tian Jiawei. That listing is presented here as the institute's published masthead information for the title, rather than as a claim about every later editorial transition, which the page does not date in detail. The pairing is consistent with the journal's dual mission: an editorial leadership drawn from clinical medical imaging, accountable to a sponsor whose own expertise is in acoustics and ultrasonics. Governance runs from the Chinese Academy of Sciences as competent authority, through the Institute of Acoustics as sponsor, to the journal's own editorial board and editorial office in Haidian.

That structure also explains the journal's advertising status, which the institute mentions directly: CJMIT is identified as a national key medium by the State Administration for Industry and Commerce, the Ministry of Health and the China Food and Drug Administration, which allows it to publish relevant medical advertisements. For a technology-facing journal, whose readers buy scanners, probes, workstations and contrast and processing systems, that recognised status made the journal a practical channel between manufacturers and hospital imaging departments as well as a scholarly one.

Indexing and bibliometric record

Internationally, the journal's record is visible through Scopus-based services. SCImago and related journal-ranking services list the Chinese Journal of Medical Imaging Technology under ISSN 10033289, categorised in Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging and in Physiology (medical), with Scopus coverage recorded from 2006 to 2025 and a best quartile of Q4. Recent SCImago-derived listings put its SCImago Journal Rank at about 0.106 to 0.107 and its h-index at 7 to 8, depending on the year and service consulted. Those are modest international citation figures, and they should be read for what they are: the footprint of a primarily Chinese-language, clinically oriented national journal in an English-dominated citation database, not a measure of its use inside Chinese hospitals.

The scale of publication helps explain the pattern. SCImago-derived value listings record 414 documents for the journal in 2025, and an earlier SCImago ranking table recorded 720 documents in a single year, 2008. A monthly that publishes at that volume, much of it clinical experience, technique evaluation and case material for domestic practice, will inevitably show lower average citations per document in Scopus than a small, selective, English-language research title. Its bibliometric profile and its domestic role are two different facts, and a fair profile keeps both in view.

Language, readership and use in practice

CJMIT is a Chinese journal for a Chinese professional readership, published from Beijing for imaging departments across the country. Its natural authors and readers are radiologists, ultrasound physicians, nuclear medicine specialists, interventional practitioners, medical physicists, imaging engineers and technicians, together with the manufacturers and researchers who develop the equipment those departments use. The journal's value to that readership lies in proximity: studies are performed on the patient populations, equipment fleets, staffing models and referral patterns of Chinese hospitals, so a technique evaluation or clinical series published there is directly transferable to a similar department elsewhere in China in a way that a study from a very different health system may not be.

For readers outside China, the journal is best approached through its indexed records and English-language bibliographic traces, which establish its identity, sponsorship, cadence and subject categories, and through translated titles and abstracts where databases provide them. It should not be confused with similarly named imaging titles: its defining identifiers are ISSN 1003-3289, CN 11-1881/R, the Institute of Acoustics sponsorship and the 1985 foundation. Those four facts together distinguish it from other Chinese radiology and interventional imaging journals, including its younger sister field of interventional imaging and therapy publishing in the same Beijing imaging ecosystem.

Place in Chinese medical imaging

Four decades after its foundation, the Chinese Journal of Medical Imaging Technology occupies a specific and durable niche. China built, within one generation, a hospital imaging sector that ranges from county-level ultrasound services to national centres performing advanced MRI, CT, nuclear medicine and image-guided intervention. A literature was needed that could hold the clinical and the technical together as that sector grew, recording not only what a sign or a protocol showed, but how the image was made and how the machine, the physics and the workflow could be improved. CJMIT's founding proposition in 1985 was exactly that combination, and its sponsor's description still presents it in the same terms.

Its continuing monthly publication, its large page volume, its Scopus coverage from 2006 onward and its survival under the same title and ISSN since the 1980s together mark it as an established national journal rather than a transient bulletin. For anyone mapping China's medical journals, it is the clearest example of a clinically read title whose home is not a medical university or a professional medical association, but a Chinese Academy of Sciences institute for acoustics, a reminder that medical imaging begins, in part, as physics and engineering before it becomes diagnosis.