About Chinese Journal of Gastroenterology

Chinese Journal of Gastroenterology

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Gastroenterology is a Chinese-language journal of digestive medicine published in Shanghai, China. It carries the international standard serial number ISSN 1008-7125 and is published by the Shanghai Institute of Digestive Diseases, the specialist research institute based at Renji Hospital, which is affiliated with Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine. The journal publishes research articles, review articles and clinical reports covering gastroenterology and digestive endoscopy, and it serves the community of physicians and researchers who diagnose and treat diseases of the digestive system in China.

Its identity needs to be stated carefully, because Shanghai is home to several similarly named digestive journals. This journal is the publication of the Shanghai Institute of Digestive Diseases at Renji Hospital. It is distinct from the Chinese Journal of Digestion, the national specialty journal of the Chinese Medical Association, and from the English-language Journal of Digestive Diseases. Keeping those titles separate matters for librarians, indexers and authors alike, since the three journals have different publishers, different histories and different places in Chinese gastroenterology.

The publishing institute: Shanghai Institute of Digestive Diseases

The journal's publisher, the Shanghai Institute of Digestive Diseases, is itself a landmark institution in Chinese medicine. In 1984 the Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality approved the establishment of the institute at Renji Hospital, and it is described as the first research institute in China dedicated to digestive diseases. Its founding director was Jiang Shaoji (1919–1995), a professor at what is now Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine who was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in 1994 and is remembered as one of the founding figures of Chinese gastroenterology. This institutional history is context for the journal, not the journal's own history, but it explains the scholarly community from which the journal grew.

The institute's standing grew quickly. By 1989 Renji Hospital's department of gastroenterology had become the only national key discipline in the field designated by the State Education Commission, and in 1994 the Ministry of Health authorised the creation at Renji of the nation's sole Key Laboratory of Gastroenterology. Renji's gastroenterology tradition reaches back further still: in the 1950s Jiang Shaoji and his colleague Xiao Shudong began digestive research at the hospital with minimal equipment, including a single laparoscope and a semi-flexible gastroscope, pioneering early endoscopic and diagnostic work. A journal published by an institute with that lineage speaks to — and largely from — one of China's strongest digestive-disease centres.

Scope: gastroenterology in the Chinese clinical setting

The journal's scope is the full field of gastroenterology: diseases of the oesophagus, stomach, intestines and related digestive organs, together with the diagnostic and therapeutic techniques used to investigate them. Its stated coverage pairs the medical specialty of gastroenterology with digestive endoscopy, reflecting how the discipline actually works in Chinese hospitals, where endoscopic examination and intervention are central to both diagnosis and treatment. Research articles report original investigations, reviews synthesise established and emerging topics for practising specialists, and clinical reports present experience from everyday hospital practice.

That mixture of article types is deliberate. A national specialist readership needs original data from Chinese patient populations and Chinese practice conditions, because disease patterns, treatment availability and clinical pathways differ from those described in Western journals. Chronic gastritis and gastric cancer, for example, have long been central concerns of Shanghai digestive research — they were among the founding research themes of the Renji school — and Helicobacter pylori infection, inflammatory bowel disease, functional gastrointestinal disorders and digestive cancers all carry particular weight in Chinese clinical practice. A Chinese-language journal anchored in a major institute is well placed to publish work addressed to those realities.

Digestive endoscopy coverage

Digestive endoscopy deserves separate mention because the journal names it explicitly within its scope. Endoscopy transformed gastroenterology from a specialty that inferred disease from symptoms and X-ray images into one that sees, biopsies and increasingly treats lesions directly. Chinese gastroenterology's own history is intertwined with that transformation: the Renji group's early work with a semi-flexible gastroscope in the 1950s belongs to the first chapter of endoscopic practice in China, and the decades since have brought fibreoptic and video endoscopy, endoscopic ultrasound and therapeutic procedures into routine use in major Chinese centres.

By covering endoscopy alongside medical gastroenterology, the journal follows its clinical community rather than an artificial division between diagnostic technique and disease specialty. Papers in this area can address new endoscopic techniques and their evaluation, the endoscopic diagnosis of early gastrointestinal cancers — a priority in a country with a high burden of gastric and colorectal cancer — and the training and quality questions that surround endoscopic practice. For readers, the benefit is a single Chinese-language venue in which the medical and endoscopic halves of their working lives are treated together.

Article types and editorial character

The journal publishes three broad kinds of material identified in its description: research articles, reviews and clinical reports. Research articles carry original studies, whether laboratory-based investigations of digestive disease mechanisms or clinical studies of diagnosis and treatment. Reviews allow senior specialists to summarise a field — consensus and guideline-related writing in Chinese gastroenterology has appeared under this journal's name, including citation of a Chinese consensus on chronic gastritis published in the journal in 2013 — and clinical reports record the diagnostic and therapeutic experience of hospital departments, including less common presentations that larger studies overlook.

As a Chinese-language journal, its editorial character is oriented towards the domestic profession. Chinese gastroenterologists, endoscopists and digestive researchers form its authorship and readership, and its pages function as part of the continuing professional conversation through which practice standards spread among hospitals. Specialist journals of this kind, published by a leading institute rather than by a commercial house, typically draw heavily on the research networks around their home institution while remaining open to submissions nationally — in this case a network centred on Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine and its affiliated hospitals.

Indexing and international visibility

The journal is covered by Scopus, the international abstract and citation database, with coverage recorded from 2001. Scopus inclusion gives a Chinese-language journal a measurable international footprint: its articles are discoverable in the literature searches run by researchers worldwide, its bibliographic records circulate in English-language indexing systems, and its citation performance can be tracked alongside comparable specialist titles. For a journal whose text is in Chinese, that discoverability abroad depends almost entirely on such indexing and on the English titles and abstracts that travel with its records.

Indexing from 2001 also documents continuity. More than two decades of recorded coverage means the journal has maintained regular publication through a period in which Chinese medical publishing expanded enormously and in which many titles were founded, merged or renamed. Librarians and bibliometricians use exactly this kind of unbroken coverage record to distinguish standing specialist journals from short-lived ones, and the Chinese Journal of Gastroenterology's record places it among the established titles of its field in China.

A note on names and a famous editor

Because several digestive journals share Shanghai roots and similar names, one historical point deserves explicit clarification in any profile of this journal. Jiang Shaoji, the founding director of the publishing institute, was the inaugural editor-in-chief of the Chinese Journal of Digestion — a different journal. That editorship belongs to the biography of Jiang and to the history of the Chinese Journal of Digestion, and it should not be transferred to the Chinese Journal of Gastroenterology merely because Jiang founded the institute that publishes the latter. Accurate attribution of this kind is part of what distinguishes a reliable directory profile from a conflated one.

What can properly be said of this journal is that it comes from the institutional school Jiang built. The Shanghai Institute of Digestive Diseases, founded under his leadership in 1984, created a concentrated research base in digestive medicine at Renji Hospital, and its successors — including Xiao Shudong, who chaired the Chinese Society of Gastroenterology and guided China's formal entry into the World Gastroenterology Organisation, and later Fang Jingyuan, director of the institute and a leader in gut microbiome and cancer research — sustained that base. The journal is one of the publishing expressions of that school.

Readership and place in Chinese gastroenterology

The journal's readers are gastroenterologists, digestive endoscopists, hepatology-adjacent specialists, researchers in digestive disease and the postgraduate trainees entering those fields in China. For them it offers specialist literature in their own language, produced by a publisher embedded in one of the country's leading centres for the discipline. Chinese-language specialist journals remain essential to clinical practice in China even as English-language publishing grows, because the large majority of practising specialists read, learn and discuss new practice most readily in Chinese.

Within the wider ecology of Chinese digestive publishing — which includes the Chinese Medical Association's Chinese Journal of Digestion, English-language titles from Shanghai and elsewhere, and general medical journals — this journal occupies the position of an institute journal with national reach. Its authority derives from its publisher's record: the first Chinese research institute for digestive diseases, a national key discipline and a Ministry of Health key laboratory all stand behind the same Renji Hospital address from which the journal is issued.

Assessment and continuing role

Assessed on the verified record, the Chinese Journal of Gastroenterology is an established, Scopus-covered, Chinese-language specialist journal whose significance lies in its combination of subject and source. Many journals can claim a gastroenterology scope; far fewer are published by an institute of the Shanghai Institute of Digestive Diseases' standing, with its 1984 founding, its national key discipline and laboratory, and its direct descent from the physicians who built modern Chinese gastroenterology at Renji Hospital.

Digestive disease remains a heavy burden in China, from the high incidence of gastric and colorectal cancers to the growing recognition of inflammatory bowel disease and functional disorders, and the specialist community that treats it continues to need domestic journals in which Chinese evidence and Chinese clinical experience are published first. Published from Shanghai by the Shanghai Institute of Digestive Diseases, this journal continues to serve that need, carrying research articles, reviews and clinical reports in gastroenterology and digestive endoscopy to the profession it was created for.