About Chinese Journal of Ocular Fundus Diseases

Chinese Journal of Ocular Fundus Diseases

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Ocular Fundus Diseases is a bimonthly Chinese journal of ophthalmology devoted to diseases of the ocular fundus, the retina, the vitreous and the intraocular neurovascular tissues, published from Chengdu, Sichuan Province. Its website is www.coretina.com, its ISSN is 1005-1015 and its Chinese serial number is CN 51-1434/R. It was founded in September 1985 under the shorter name Ocular Fundus Diseases, is organised by the Chinese Medical Association and is undertaken by West China Hospital of Sichuan University, where its editorial office remains, at the hospital's Guoxue Alley address in Chengdu, postal code 610041. The hospital's own journal page records a post office subscription code of 61-73, an overseas distribution code of BM4317 and a pagination of 72 pages.

The fundus is where ophthalmology meets the rest of medicine. The retina is nervous tissue and its blood vessels are directly visible in life, so diseases studied in this journal include not only primary retinal and vitreous disorders but also the ocular manifestations of diabetes, hypertension and other systemic conditions. The journal's stated mission, in West China Hospital's wording, is the rapid dissemination of information from correlational studies of eyesight and intraocular nervous and vascular tissue diseases and general diseases, and the exchange of ideas from ocular fundus research and clinical practice, in order to promote the development of ocular fundus studies and academic communication at home and abroad. That mission, subspecialty focus and forty-year continuity define the title.

Foundation in 1985 and transfer to the Chinese Medical Association

The journal's history is documented in unusual detail by its host hospital. It was founded in September 1985 as Ocular Fundus Diseases. Before the name was changed to the present one, it had been supervised by the Ministry of Health and organised by West China Hospital of Sichuan University. In February 1993 it was transferred to the Chinese Medical Association and became one of the journals of the Chinese Medical Association. After the change of name, it has been supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology and organised by the Chinese Medical Association, with West China Hospital of Sichuan University authorised to continue undertaking it. By the time the hospital page was compiled, 41 volumes had been published.

The founding editorial leadership is also recorded. The first editor-in-chief was Professor Luo Chengren, and the first director of the editorial office was Wei Chunyi. The present editor-in-chief named on the hospital page is Xu Xun, and the director of the editorial office is Lu Fang. Those names anchor the journal in the generation that built retinal subspecialty care in China. West China Hospital's ophthalmology department records that its Vitreous and Retina Group was a forerunner of fundus angiography and laser photocoagulation for the diagnosis and treatment of vitreoretinal diseases in China, that in the 1980s it proposed and founded the Vitreous and Retina Committee and acted as its founding chief unit, and that it launched this journal. Journal, clinical group and national committee thus grew up together in the same Chengdu department in the same decade.

West China Hospital and its ophthalmology department

The undertaking hospital gives the journal an exceptional institutional base. West China Hospital of Sichuan University traces its origins to the Renji and Cunren hospitals set up in Chengdu in 1892 by Christian missions from the United States, Britain and Canada, which became teaching hospitals of West China Union University after its medical school was established in 1914. The present hospital was built at the Guoxue Alley site in 1946, passed through successive reorganisations as Sichuan Medical College and West China University of Medical Sciences, and took its present form when that university merged into Sichuan University in October 2000. The hospital describes itself as a national general hospital and a centre for complex and critical illnesses, with, in its current published figures, three directly affiliated campuses, 4,900 beds, 54 clinical departments and 7.64 million outpatient and emergency visits in 2025.

Its Department of Ophthalmology dates back to the Chengdu Cunren Hospital of Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat founded by missionaries from the United States and the United Kingdom in 1894. The department now reports 20 outpatient diagnosis rooms and 84 beds at the main campus, with further day-surgery beds and outpatient services at the Yongning Branch Campus, and subspecialties spanning retina, paediatric ophthalmology, glaucoma, cataract, corneal disease, orbital disease, eye plastic surgery, lacrimal disease and neuro-ophthalmology, plus a refractive surgery centre and an optometry centre. A fundus journal edited inside that department sits within daily retinal clinics, angiography, laser and vitreoretinal surgery, which is reflected in the practical, image-rich and case-aware character of its contents.

Scope: retinal and neurovascular disease

The journal centres on research and clinical practice in ocular fundus diseases. In current practice that includes diabetic retinopathy, retinal vein and artery occlusion, age-related macular degeneration, macular oedema, inherited and inflammatory retinal disease, vitreous disorders, retinal detachment and the fundus changes of systemic disease. Its recent contents show both the clinical and the consensus-setting ends of that scope. In 2024, volume 40, it published an expert consensus on the clinical diagnosis and treatment path for retinal vein occlusion in China, issued by the fundus disease groups of the Chinese Medical Association's ophthalmology branch and the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, and a national consensus on the management of major chronic fundus diseases in China, developed by a modified Delphi approach, which noted the vast and growing population of fundus disease patients in China as the population ages and referred to the national 14th Five-Year Plan for Eye Health for 2021 to 2025.

Individual case and clinical material appears alongside those national documents. A 2023 article in volume 39 reported a case of multiple evanescent white dot syndrome accompanying novel coronavirus infection, cited with the journal's current DOI pattern, 10.3760/cma.j.cn511434-20230103-00682, and carrying the copyright line of the editorial department of the journal at West China. The juxtaposition is the journal in miniature: rare-case observation, departmental clinical series, imaging studies and nationally authored guidance, all addressed to the same community of retinal specialists who must recognise the rare case, manage the common diseases and follow the national pathway.

Columns and article types

West China Hospital lists the journal's main columns as expert reviews, original articles, brief reports, case reports, picture reports, literature reviews and similar forms. Picture reports deserve emphasis in a fundus journal: retinal photography, fluorescein angiography, optical coherence tomography and ultrawidefield imaging are diagnostic evidence in themselves, and a column that presents images as the primary teaching content suits a specialty in which pattern recognition is a core clinical skill. Expert reviews and consensus articles, often authored by the national fundus disease groups, give the journal a standard-setting function beyond that of a passive research archive.

Its stated readership follows from those columns: medical schools, senior and intermediate ophthalmologists and research staff in scientific institutes, and medical workers at all levels who pay attention to ocular fundus diseases. In other words, the journal addresses the whole referral chain, from the general ophthalmologist who must detect diabetic retinopathy or a retinal occlusion and refer appropriately, to the vitreoretinal specialist who performs the surgery and writes the guidance. Bimonthly publication, six issues a year at 72 pages, is a measured cadence for that purpose, favouring curated clinical and consensus material over sheer volume.

Indexing, impact and awards

The hospital page lists an extensive inclusion record for the journal: Chemical Abstracts, the Abstract Journal, the Chinese Biological Medical Disc, Chinese science and technology paper and citation databases, the Chinese Science Citation Database, Chinese journal citation and full-text databases, Chinese biomedical periodical and literature databases, and the Scopus database, among many others. West China Hospital's ophthalmology page likewise describes the journal as a Chinese core journal and a statistical source journal, included by Chemical Abstracts of the United States, the JICSI database and the Chinese Science Citation Database. That layered record, international abstracting plus the main Chinese citation systems, is typical of an established Chinese Medical Association specialty title.

The same hospital source gives a specific domestic metric: according to the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China in 2023, the journal's impact factor was 0.669, ranking sixth among ophthalmology and otorhinolaryngology journals and 248th among 1,652 statistical-source journals of Chinese technological papers. The journal's awards list is long and regional as well as national, including prizes for excellent periodicals from Sichuan higher education and provincial periodical competitions, a silver award and an excellent periodical prize in Chinese Medical Association periodical competitions, and a prize in a China Association for Science and Technology periodical competition. Those details are quoted here as the host institution's published record, and they are the right scale for judging a Chinese-language subspecialty journal whose influence runs through Chinese clinical practice.

Language and international visibility

The journal publishes in Chinese for China's ophthalmologists, while its articles circulate internationally through indexed records, English titles and abstracts and DOI registration in the Chinese Medical Association's publishing system, visible in the 10.3760/cma.j.cn511434 pattern of its recent articles. Its English-language journal site presents citations in a form international readers can follow, as with the 2024 consensus articles whose full English titles, group authorship, volume, pages and DOIs are given. For a systematic reviewer or a retinal specialist outside China, that means Chinese national guidance on retinal vein occlusion or chronic fundus disease can be found, identified and cited accurately, even though the full text is addressed to a domestic readership.

Care is needed not to confuse this title with China's other ophthalmology journals. The Chinese Journal of Ophthalmology is the broader national ophthalmology title, and the Chinese Journal of Experimental Ophthalmology publishes experimental work, citing fundus articles in its references. The journal profiled here is identified by its fundus-specific title, ISSN 1005-1015, CN 51-1434/R, the coretina.com website, the Chengdu editorial office and the 1985 foundation as Ocular Fundus Diseases. Those identifiers together are unambiguous.

Continuing role in Chinese retinal medicine

Four decades after its foundation, the Chinese Journal of Ocular Fundus Diseases remains the dedicated national forum for its subspecialty. The clinical need behind it has only grown: diabetes, hypertension, ageing and myopia all drive retinal disease, and West China's own 2024 consensus work in the journal begins from the scale and continued growth of China's fundus disease population. A journal that can publish a department's imaging study, a rare inflammatory case, a picture-based teaching report and a national Delphi consensus within the same volume is performing several kinds of work for that community at once.

Its history also records how Chinese specialty medicine organised itself. Founded by a great regional teaching hospital in 1985, carried into the Chinese Medical Association's journal system in 1993, and still undertaken by the same hospital and edited at the same Guoxue Alley campus, it links the missionary-founded eye hospital tradition of 1894, the vitreoretinal pioneers of the 1980s and the present national fundus disease groups in one continuous publication. That continuity, verifiable in its volume count, its masthead history and its current consensus articles, is the strongest evidence of its standing.