About Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition

Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition is a Beijing-published monthly journal devoted to the nutrition of farm and other production animals, issued under ISSN 1006-267X and presented online at www.chinajan.com. Its Chinese-language contents address how animals digest, metabolise and use feed, and how diets should be formulated to support growth, reproduction, lactation, egg and meat production, and health. The journal's volume numbering traces a long continuous run: volume 31 in 2019, volume 35 in 2023 and volume 38 in 2026, with the current-issue listings on its own site showing, for example, volume 38, issue 3 dated 15 March 2026 and volume 38, issue 5 dated 15 May 2026. A monthly cadence combined with that volume sequence marks it as an established national title, not a new or occasional publication.

Animal nutrition is a practical science with direct economic consequences. Small differences in digestibility, amino-acid balance or rumen fermentation, multiplied across millions of pigs, chickens, cattle and sheep, decide feed costs, production efficiency, animal health and the environmental footprint of livestock farming. China supports some of the world's largest pig, poultry and ruminant sectors, so a national journal that publishes feeding research performed on Chinese breeds, Chinese feed ingredients and Chinese production systems serves a need that foreign journals, however prestigious, cannot fully meet. That domestic grounding is the journal's reason for existence and the key to reading its contents well.

Not the journal Animal Nutrition: a necessary distinction

This journal must be distinguished carefully from Animal Nutrition, the English-language open-access journal launched in 2015 by the Chinese Society of Animal Husbandry and Veterinary Medicine, published with Elsevier and KeAi, and carrying ISSN 2405-6383. The similarity of names causes real bibliographic confusion, and at least one secondary account has even described Animal Nutrition as formerly known as the Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition. They are different journals. The Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition is the older Chinese-language monthly with ISSN 1006-267X, DOI registrations in the 10.3969 and later 10.12418 series visible on its articles, and volume 38 reached in 2026. Animal Nutrition is a younger, English-language, fully open-access international title, whose editors-in-chief are recorded as Mingan Choct and Yulong Yin, with Guangyong Zhao as executive editor.

The distinction matters for citation and for readers. A reference abbreviated as Chin. J. Anim. Nutr. with a 2023 citation such as volume 35, pages 7759 to 7773, and DOI 10.12418/CJAN2023.705, belongs to the Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition. A reference to Animal Nutrition with an Elsevier article number and a 10.1016/j.aninu DOI belongs to the other journal. Checking the ISSN resolves any doubt in seconds: 1006-267X for the journal profiled here, 2405-6383 for its English-language namesake. The two titles coexist because they do different jobs, one serving primarily China's domestic research and production community in Chinese, the other presenting Chinese animal science to an international English-reading audience.

Scope: requirements, digestion and metabolism

The journal's core territory is the fundamental science of feeding: nutrient requirements of animals at different physiological stages, digestion and absorption, and the metabolism of energy, protein, amino acids, fatty acids, minerals and vitamins. Recent contents show that territory clearly. A 2026 review examines how the mammalian target of rapamycin, or mTOR, signalling pathway senses amino acids, growth factors and energy status and thereby regulates metabolism in fish, linking molecular nutrient sensing to feed formulation for aquatic animals. Another review compares endogenous and exogenous lactate in sources, metabolism, energy supply and immune regulation. Work of this kind is not feeding advice in the simple sense; it is the mechanistic research from which reliable feeding standards are eventually built.

Feed evaluation and ingredients form a second pillar. The journal publishes studies of forages, grains, agricultural by-products and novel ingredients, and of additives ranging from probiotics and organic acids to plant extracts and enzymes. In a single recent volume, readers could find work on Leymus chinensis, a principal forage grass for cattle and sheep, prized for its nutrient content and its role in summer and autumn fattening; on straw, a major agricultural by-product in China, as a nutritional source for ruminants; on butyric acid and reproductive performance in sows; and on copper as an essential trace nutrient for aquatic animals. That spread, from grassland forage to trace-element nutrition in fish, is characteristic of the journal's breadth within its discipline.

Ruminant nutrition and rumen fermentation

Ruminant work deserves separate attention because the rumen makes cattle and sheep nutritionally unlike any other farm animal. Microbial fermentation in the rumen converts fibre and even non-protein nitrogen into microbial protein and volatile fatty acids, so ruminant diets must be designed for the microbes as much as for the animal. The journal regularly publishes research on rumen fermentation, rumen microbial ecology and dietary carbohydrate composition. A recent review, for example, examines how the concentrate-to-forage ratio and the ratio of non-fibre carbohydrates to neutral detergent fibre affect rumen microecology, performance, metabolism and health in meat sheep, including the prevention of nutritional metabolic diseases that follow when fermentation is pushed too far.

Beef cattle nutrition in China has been summarised in the wider literature as a field of substantial research input and output, covering feed resource development, nutrient requirements and nutritional regulation, and the Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition is one of the primary domestic outlets in which that primary research first appears. Citations in international reviews to Chin. J. Anim. Nutr. studies on heat stress, nutritional regulation of reproductive hormones, antioxidant capacity and fermented feeds in Chinese cattle breeds show the journal's work being used well beyond its immediate readership, as evidence about breeds and production conditions that are documented nowhere else.

Pigs, poultry and other livestock

For monogastric animals, the journal's recent issues offer a representative cross-section of modern pig and poultry nutrition. Pig research includes probiotics combined with acidifiers in growing and finishing animals, liquid feeding systems and their effects on growth performance, intestinal microbiota, carcass and meat quality, and the lifetime reproductive performance of sows, a concept proposed because single measures such as piglets weaned per sow per year no longer capture a herd's real efficiency. A study of probiotics combined with acidifiers in broiler chickens, published in volume 35 in 2023, examined growth performance, antioxidant capacity and intestinal health in 875 male Arbor Acres broilers, and explored mechanisms involving the Nrf2 antioxidant pathway and inflammatory signalling.

Poultry, rabbit and aquatic work extends the same questions to other production systems: intestinal injury and probiotic intervention in weaned rabbits after the withdrawal of antibiotics from feed, functional fatty acids and reproductive physiology across livestock and poultry, tryptophan metabolism and the gut microbiota in livestock and poultry health, and nutrient sensing in fish. The recurring themes are intestinal health without routine antibiotics, precise amino-acid and fatty-acid supply, and the use of probiotics, plant-derived compounds and other green feed additives to replace older growth-promoting practices. Read across several issues, the journal therefore documents a national transition in feeding practice, from maximising growth at any cost toward efficiency, gut health and reduced antibiotic dependence.

Article types and how the journal is used

The journal publishes original research articles and substantial reviews, organised on its website by issue with English titles and structured abstracts accompanying the Chinese texts, and with figures, tables and PDF downloads for individual articles. The review articles are often long, mechanism-focused syntheses, on subjects such as the enteric nervous system as a regulator of intestinal digestion, absorption, barrier function and immunity, or the role of a single probiotic species, Bacillus velezensis, across livestock and poultry production. Original studies, by contrast, report controlled feeding trials with defined animal numbers, diets and measured outcomes, the evidentiary staple of applied nutrition.

That combination makes the journal useful to three audiences at once. Researchers use it to publish and to follow Chinese work in their exact sub-field, from rumen microbiology to sow reproduction. Feed companies and farm nutritionists use its ingredient evaluations and additive trials to judge whether a product or a local feed resource performs under Chinese conditions. Policy and standards work draws on its requirement and metabolism studies when feeding standards are revised. A journal cited in international systematic literature on beef cattle feeding, while also publishing forage and by-product studies of immediate local use, is operating at both levels simultaneously.

Bibliographic record and indexing traces

The journal's international bibliographic traces are modest but real. SCImago's journal rankings for food animals in China list the Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition with an h-index of 15, alongside document and citation counts drawn from Scopus data, and Scopus-indexed journal lists include the title under ISSN 1006-267X. Those listings should be handled with care: they confirm the journal's presence in the international indexing ecosystem, but the journal's principal evaluation, like that of most Chinese-language agricultural titles, takes place within China's own core-journal and citation systems and within the professional judgement of its animal-science community.

Its citation footprint in English-language reviews is another practical indicator. International review articles on beef cattle feeding in China cite its studies repeatedly and specifically, by year, volume and page, because for many Chinese breeds, feeds and climates it is the primary source. That pattern, primary domestic evidence cited abroad, is the opposite of padding: it is what a national disciplinary journal is for. Anyone verifying a citation should use the journal's own site at chinajan.com, where current and past issues are listed by volume and issue with article-level detail, rather than relying on aggregator pages that sometimes merge this title with Animal Nutrition or with unrelated animal journals.

Place in Chinese animal science

By volume 38 in 2026, the Chinese Journal of Animal Nutrition has spent decades as a central record of how China feeds its farm animals. Its pages follow the arc of Chinese livestock production itself: from basic questions of requirements and digestibility, through the intensive growth of pig and poultry production, to present concerns with gut health after antibiotic withdrawal, precision supply of amino acids, use of local forage and by-product resources, and the environmental and health quality of animal products. Each of those shifts is visible in its recent contents alone, in papers on sow lifetime performance, liquid pig feeding, sheep rumen ecology, fish nutrient sensing and probiotic alternatives.

For a directory of the world's news and specialist media, the journal's significance is disciplinary rather than general. It will never be read by a lay audience, and it does not seek one. Within animal science, however, it is one of the established Chinese titles through which feeding research is reported, debated and turned into practice, distinct in identity from its English-language namesake, anchored in Beijing, identified by ISSN 1006-267X, and still publishing monthly research and reviews for the largest livestock-producing nation on earth.