About Chinese Journal of Medical Education

Chinese Journal of Medical Education

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Medical Education is a monthly academic journal of medical education based in Beijing, China. It carries the international standard serial number ISSN 1673-677X and the Chinese domestic publication number CN 11-5259/R, and it is distributed publicly in China and abroad. The journal holds a distinctive place in Chinese scholarly publishing: it is described by its own publisher as the first academic journal devoted to medical education to be formally published in mainland China, a claim that marks the moment when the study of how doctors are trained became a recognised scholarly field with a journal of its own in the country.

The journal is the official journal of two national bodies: the Medical Education Branch of the Chinese Medical Association and the Medical Education Committee of the China Association of Higher Education. It is supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology, sponsored by the Chinese Medical Association and hosted by Peking University Health Science Center in Beijing. That combination of a national medical association, a higher-education society and one of China's leading medical universities gives the journal a reach across both the medical profession and the university system.

Origins and the Peking University connection

The journal's archive reaches volume 38 in 2018, which places the start of its publication in 1981. That date is significant in its host institution's history as well. Peking University's Institute of Medical Education was also founded in 1981, and the university describes it as the first research institution for medical education in China's medical universities and colleges. The institute develops research on medical education, holds the Chinese Journal of Medical Education, and provides advisory services, acting as the secretariat for both the Society of Medical Education of the Chinese Medical Association and the Medical Education Committee of the China Association of Higher Education.

The pairing of a new institute and a new journal in the same year was not a coincidence of bookkeeping. Together they created the organisational base from which medical education in China could be studied systematically: the institute supplied researchers, conferences and secretariat functions, while the journal supplied a permanent, citable record in which findings, reforms and debates could be published and preserved. Peking University Health Science Center itself is one of China's oldest modern medical institutions, with roots in the government-run medical school founded in Beijing in 1912, and its stewardship anchors the journal in a university with a long record in training reform.

Scope and subject coverage

As its title states, the journal's subject is education rather than clinical medicine itself. Its pages address how medical students, residents and practising doctors are selected, taught, assessed and developed, and how the institutions that train them are organised and governed. That remit covers the full continuum of a medical career, from undergraduate study through postgraduate residency training to the continuing education of established practitioners, and it extends to the teachers, curricula and education policies that shape each stage.

Because medical education sits at the meeting point of medicine, pedagogy and health policy, the journal's coverage is correspondingly broad. Contributions deal with the theory and history of medical education, with education management and reform policy, with teaching methods and learning research, and with the practical experience of medical schools and teaching hospitals across China. For readers outside the field, the journal offers a window onto how the world's largest medical education system thinks about its own development; for readers inside it, the journal is a working forum in which reforms are proposed, tested and argued over.

Curriculum and teaching reform

Curriculum reform is one of the journal's recognised subject areas. Chinese medical schools have repeatedly revised what they teach and how they teach it, moving between discipline-based courses, integrated and organ-system curricula, problem-based learning and competency-based designs, and debates about those choices need a specialist venue in which evidence from different schools can be compared. The journal provides that venue, publishing studies of curriculum design, course integration, teaching materials and classroom and bedside teaching methods from institutions across the country.

Clinical teaching receives particular attention, reflecting the structure of medical training in China, in which much of a student's formation happens in affiliated teaching hospitals. Articles in this area examine how clinical skills are taught and supervised, how students move from classroom knowledge to work with real patients, and how teaching hospitals balance service demands with their educational mission. By publishing work on both curriculum design and the realities of clinical teaching, the journal connects national reform intentions with what actually happens in lecture theatres, laboratories and wards.

Residency, continuing education and assessment

Training after graduation forms another major strand of the journal's coverage, including the standardised training of resident physicians. China built a nationwide system of standardised residency training in the 2010s, under which medical graduates complete a structured period of supervised practice before working independently, and the design, quality and evaluation of that system generated a large research literature. A journal devoted to medical education is the natural home for studies of residency curricula, rotation design, mentor systems and the assessment of residents' competence.

Continuing medical education and the evaluation of medical education complete the picture. Practising doctors in China are expected to keep learning throughout their careers, and the journal publishes work on how continuing education is organised, delivered and credited, as well as research on educational evaluation in the broad sense: examinations, competency assessment, programme accreditation and the measurement of teaching quality. Its comparative medical education coverage adds an international dimension, examining how other countries train their doctors — recent contents, for example, include analysis of the training models of Singapore's three medical schools — so that Chinese readers can judge domestic reforms against foreign experience.

Recognition, indexing and impact

The journal is recognised within China's journal evaluation systems as a Chinese science and technology core journal — a statistical-source journal in the national science and technology paper statistics. Its publisher further notes that it is the only specialist medical education journal to combine that standing with inclusion in the World Journal Clout Index, or WJCI, report, in which it was listed in both 2024 and 2025. Such listings matter in the Chinese academic system, where core-journal status influences where researchers choose to publish and how their work is counted in institutional evaluation.

The journal's citation performance is tracked through the China National Knowledge Infrastructure, CNKI. According to the journal's own report of the CNKI annual citation data, its composite impact factor for 2025 was 1.299. For a specialist journal serving a defined professional field rather than a mass clinical discipline, that figure represents a solid position: the journal is cited within the community it serves, and its publisher describes it as a leading journal in the field of medical education in China.

Readership and role in Chinese medical education

The journal's readers are the people who run and study medical education in China: medical school deans and education administrators, teachers of basic and clinical medicine, residency programme directors, education researchers and the officials in associations and ministries who set training policy. Its dual sponsorship — by the medical education branch of the Chinese Medical Association and the medical education committee of the China Association of Higher Education — mirrors that readership exactly, spanning the profession on one side and the universities on the other.

Its role over more than four decades has been to give that community a shared record. Reforms that might otherwise have remained local experiments in a single medical school could be published, read nationally, criticised and improved. In a system that trains doctors on an exceptionally large scale and has repeatedly reformed how it does so — including the introduction of national accreditation for clinical medicine programmes and the standardisation of residency training — a specialist journal that documents each change is part of the infrastructure of reform itself.

Place among Chinese medical journals

Most Chinese medical journals are organised by clinical specialty: cardiology, surgery, gastroenterology and so on. The Chinese Journal of Medical Education is organised instead by a function that every specialty shares — teaching. That makes its position in the journal landscape unusual, and it explains both its longevity and its institutional backing. It is not in competition with the specialty titles sponsored by the Chinese Medical Association; it complements them, addressing the training questions that arise in all of them at once.

Within Peking University Health Science Center's publishing activity, the journal also reflects the university's broader role in national medical education, which includes housing education research institutes and national centres concerned with health professions education development. A reader tracing how Chinese thinking about doctor training has changed since the early 1980s — from the rebuilding of medical schools after the Cultural Revolution era through competency-based reform and standardised residency — will find the journal's back volumes among the primary sources for that history.

Assessment and continuing relevance

Assessed as a whole, the Chinese Journal of Medical Education is significant less for any single article than for having been, since 1981, the standing specialist forum for a field that China had to build almost from the beginning. Its first-in-mainland-China status, its anchoring in Peking University's Institute of Medical Education — itself the first of its kind — and its continuing core-journal and WJCI recognition together describe a journal that has kept its founding position for over forty years.

The questions within its scope are not becoming less important. Chinese medical education continues to debate curriculum integration, the quality and fairness of residency training, the assessment of clinical competence and the lifelong learning of a very large physician workforce. As long as those debates continue, a monthly journal in Beijing, published under the Chinese Medical Association and hosted by Peking University Health Science Center, will remain the place where much of the argument is conducted and recorded.