About Chinese Journal of New Drugs

Chinese Journal of New Drugs

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of New Drugs, in Chinese Zhongguo Xinyao Zazhi, is a Beijing-based pharmaceutical sciences journal devoted to the research, development, clinical evaluation and regulation of new medicines. It was founded in 1992, is administered by the National Medical Products Administration, China's national drug regulator, and is jointly sponsored by China Pharmaceutical Science Press, the China National Pharmaceutical Group Corporation and the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association. It publishes semimonthly, 24 issues a year, under ISSN 1003-3734, with its official site at www.newdrug.cn. Its volume numbering confirms the founding date arithmetically: volume 35 in 2026, thirty-five years after a first volume in 1992, with current issues on its own site dated, for example, 31 July 2026 for volume 35, issue 14 and 15 October 2026 for volume 35, issue 19.

A journal with that administration and sponsorship occupies a distinctive position. It is a scholarly journal, publishing experimental and clinical research, but it is also the journal closest to China's drug regulatory system, the place where new-drug registration and review, regulatory policy and evaluation science are discussed by the community that operates them. Its own description says that it focuses on new drugs independently developed by China, tracks the frontiers of new-drug research and development in the world, reports the latest advances in new-drug development, research and application in China, promotes national policy on new-drug regulation and review, follows progress in chemical drugs, traditional Chinese medicine and biological medicines, and introduces new drugs marketed in the world. It describes itself, in consequence, as one of the most important academic platforms for international communication in the field of new-drug development and clinical application in China.

Foundation in 1992 and development

The journal was founded in January 1992, as a monthly at that time, in a period when China's pharmaceutical sector and its drug approval system were both being rebuilt on modern lines. The regulatory lineage behind its present administration explains much of its later character. China's drug regulator passed through successive forms, including the State Drug Administration established in 1998, the State Food and Drug Administration from 2003, the China Food and Drug Administration from 2013 and, after the 2018 government reorganisation, the National Medical Products Administration under the State Administration for Market Regulation. The journal's administration followed that lineage to the present National Medical Products Administration, so its pages have accompanied each stage of the modern Chinese drug regulatory system's construction.

Over more than thirty years the journal moved from monthly to semimonthly publication, 24 issues a year, a doubling of cadence that reflects the growth of Chinese drug development itself. When the journal began, independently developed Chinese new drugs were comparatively few, and much of its subject matter concerned evaluation, registration and the introduction of drugs developed elsewhere. By the 2010s and 2020s, Chinese innovative drug research, in oncology, biologics, gene therapy and traditional Chinese medicine modernisation, had become a major international activity, and the journal's own claim to focus on China's independently developed new drugs describes a far larger enterprise than it did in 1992. The continuity of title, ISSN and sponsorship through that transformation is the journal's historical significance.

Governance, sponsorship and editorial board

The joint sponsorship is itself informative. China Pharmaceutical Science Press brings the publishing house of the regulatory and pharmacopoeial tradition. The China National Pharmaceutical Group Corporation, the state pharmaceutical group widely known as Sinopharm, brings the industry. The Chinese Pharmaceutical Association brings the profession, and the journal is a member of the official journals of the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association. Administration by the National Medical Products Administration then adds the regulator. Few journals anywhere assemble regulator, publisher, state industry group and professional association in a single governance structure, and that assembly explains the journal's self-described features of authority, timeliness and practicality alongside academic innovation.

The journal states that its editorial board and academic consultant team are highly acknowledged in the pharmaceutical community in China and abroad, that its editor-in-chief is Professor Chen Kaixian, and that its international editorial board is composed of 130 acknowledged experts and academic leaders engaged in basic and clinical pharmaceutical research, among whom 18 are academicians. Those figures are given here as the journal's own published description of its board. They are consistent with the breadth the journal attempts: a board that must judge chemical drug development, biologics, traditional Chinese medicine, clinical trials, pharmacology, pharmaceutics and regulatory science cannot be drawn from a single department or discipline.

Scope: from discovery to registration and clinical use

The journal's columns, as listed in its own description, include New Drug Review and Forum, Special Tour to Major New Drug Creation, New Drug Registration and Review, Biopharmaceutical Frontier, Review, Clinical Research, Experimental Research, and Drug Safety and Rational Application. Read as a sequence, those columns map the entire life of a new medicine: the forum and review columns debate directions and summarise classes of drugs; the major new-drug creation column follows nationally significant development programmes; registration and review addresses the regulatory pathway directly; experimental and clinical research publish the primary evidence; and drug safety and rational application follows the medicine into real clinical use, where adverse effects, interactions and appropriate prescribing decide its real value.

Recent issues show that scope in action. Volume 35 in 2026 carries, among much else, a cluster of articles interpreting China's 2026 edition of Good Clinical Practice, comparing it with the 2020 edition and with the international ICH E6(R3) guideline, and examining trial protocol responsibilities, safety reporting, data governance, blinding and the direct delivery of investigational drugs to trial participants. The same volume includes a multidimensional value assessment framework for novel lung-cancer drugs, intended to support medical-insurance reimbursement decisions; an interpretation of the drug regulator's Center for Drug Evaluation guidance on clinical research and development of new drugs for osteoarthritis, issued in August 2025; work on nanocrystal technology for improving the druggability of traditional Chinese medicine active ingredients; and a study of excipient risk in intrathecal drugs. Regulatory interpretation, health-technology value, formulation science and safety management in one volume is exactly the mixture the journal's column list promises.

Clinical evaluation and regulatory science

Two subjects deserve emphasis because they distinguish this journal from a purely pharmacological title. The first is clinical evaluation: how trials are designed, conducted, governed and judged. The 2026 Good Clinical Practice articles are a clear example, treating questions such as the principal investigator's ultimate responsibility at a trial site, the sponsor's quality management, risk-proportional safety reporting and data governance across the full data life cycle. A journal administered by the regulator is a natural home for that discussion, because its readers include the trialists, ethics and quality staff, sponsors and reviewers who must implement the rules, not merely read about them.

The second is regulatory science itself: registration requirements, review practice, technical guidance and the alignment of Chinese requirements with international standards such as the ICH guidelines. The journal's description explicitly includes promoting national policy on new-drug regulation and review among its purposes, and its contents, from carcinogenicity-study guidance interpretation in earlier years to the 2025 osteoarthritis guidance and 2026 Good Clinical Practice analyses, fulfil that purpose in print. For researchers outside China trying to understand how Chinese drug approval actually works, articles of this kind, written from inside the system and published in its own journal, are primary documentary evidence, not commentary at a distance.

Drug classes covered

Within its new-drugs remit, the journal follows chemical drugs, traditional Chinese medicine and biological medicines, the three great streams its own description names. Recent contents illustrate each. Biological and advanced therapy work appears in a bibliometric and developmental study of gene-therapy drugs in China and internationally, drawing on Chinese and English literature and more than eighteen hundred clinical trial records. Traditional Chinese medicine appears both as subject and as method, in work on nanocrystals of traditional medicine active ingredients, on quality control of clinical trials of new traditional Chinese medicine drugs using artificial intelligence, and on institutional traditional medicine preparations as medical and economic resources. Chemical and targeted drugs appear throughout the clinical and review material, including a systematic review of the bispecific antibody ivonescimab in advanced solid tumours, particularly non-small-cell lung cancer.

That three-stream coverage reflects the structure of Chinese pharmaceutical development, in which a modernised traditional medicine sector, a large chemical generics and innovative-drug industry, and a fast-growing biologics sector all seek registration, evaluation and clinical adoption through the same regulatory system. A journal that covered only one stream would miss the interactions between them, including the shared trial, quality and safety standards that the 2026 articles discuss across drug types.

Indexing, honours and ranking

The journal's own record lists inclusion in the Core Journals of China system, in the Key Magazine of China Technology, known by the initials CSTPCD, and as a source journal of the China Science Citation Database, CSCD, in which it has been included since 2011. Its awards and index timeline is unusually fully documented: selected in 2001 as a double-effect journal in the Chinese journal array of the National Press and Publication Administration; included in Chemical Abstracts of the United States in 2002; included in CSTPCD in 2008 and indexed by the Research Center for Chinese Science Evaluation in the same year; included in Embase and in Scopus in 2009; included in the pharmacy core journals of the Overview of Chinese Core Journals in 2012 and again in the 2023 edition published in 2024; rated among China's top scientific and technological journals in 2014; selected in 2015 among the Top 100 Scientific and Technological Journals by the national press, publication, radio and television administration; and selected in 2017 as a fourth China Quality Science and Technology Journal. It also records funding in 2009 from the China Association for Science and Technology's top journal project, and papers selected for outstanding science and technology journal article honours in 2008, 2014 and 2017.

The journal further states that it ranks fourth in the category of pharmaceutical journals in the Peking University Core Journals of China catalogue. That domestic ranking, together with CSCD source status and Scopus inclusion since 2009, is the appropriate frame for its standing: a leading national pharmaceutical title whose reputation was built primarily inside China's evaluation systems, with an international indexing presence that makes its record verifiable abroad. No Journal Citation Reports impact factor is claimed here, because none is established by the sources used for this profile.

Readership and continuing role

The journal states that its audience has spread to more than 30 countries and regions, in hospitals, colleges and universities, research and development institutions, pharmaceutical enterprises and drug supervision departments. That list is a precise map of the new-drug ecosystem: the universities and institutes that discover, the enterprises that develop and manufacture, the hospitals that trial and prescribe, and the supervision departments that register and oversee. A semimonthly journal reaching all five groups in a shared language of evidence and regulation performs a coordinating function for the whole sector, which is why its forum, guidance-interpretation and consensus-type articles carry weight beyond their citation counts.

At volume 35 in 2026, the Chinese Journal of New Drugs has been publishing for thirty-five years, from the early construction of modern Chinese drug regulation to the present period of Chinese innovative drugs entering global development. Its identifiers are stable and checkable, ISSN 1003-3734, the Zhongguo Xinyao Zazhi title, the newdrug.cn site, administration by the National Medical Products Administration and joint sponsorship by the pharmaceutical press, the state pharmaceutical group and the Chinese Pharmaceutical Association. For anyone seeking to understand how new medicines are developed, evaluated, regulated and used in China, it remains one of the essential primary journals of record.