About Journal of Yunnan University (Natural Sciences Edition)

Journal of Yunnan University (Natural Sciences Edition)

Overview and identity

Journal of Yunnan University (Natural Sciences Edition) is a scholarly natural-science journal based in Kunming, Yunnan, China, and published for Yunnan University. It is identified by print ISSN 0258-7971 and domestic number CN 53-1045/N, and its recommended ISO 4 abbreviation is J. Yunnan Univ. Nat. Sci. Ed. Its official site is hosted by Yunnan University at yndxxb.ynu.edu.cn. This profile records the verified bibliographic identity of the journal — its identifiers, its university home in Kunming, its place of publication and the subject range visible in its published issues — and explains the role it plays for its readership, taking care to distinguish it from other Yunnan university journals, including the separate Journal of Yunnan Agricultural University, whose ISSN and publisher are entirely different.

The journal's archive, as carried on its official site, reaches back through the early 2000s: a 2002 article appears in volume 24, issue 5, on pages 398 to 400, carrying the same CN 53-1045/N and ISSN 0258-7971 on its printed page, and a 2005 article appears in volume 27, issue 5. By 2023 the journal had reached volume 45, issue 6, so the volume sequence runs continuously from the early 2000s into the present decade, with one volume per year. Articles in press on the official site are described as peer-reviewed and accepted, not yet assigned to a volume or issue, but citable by Digital Object Identifier.

Yunnan University and the journal's editorial home

Yunnan University, the journal's home institution, was founded in 1922 as Private Donglu University, was renamed Provincial Yunnan University in 1934 and National Yunnan University in 1938, and is described by the university itself as one of the earliest comprehensive universities in Southwest China. In 1937 the well-known mathematician and educationist Xiong Qinglai served as president and a large number of renowned scholars were employed to teach there, laying the foundation for its academic tradition. In the 1940s it developed into a large university with international influence, offering arts, law, science, engineering, agriculture and medical science, and in 1946 it was listed by the Concise Encyclopedia Britannica as one of the fifteen famous universities in China.

In the 1950s, during the national restructuring of faculties, departments such as aeronautics, civil engineering, law and railway were spun off to other institutions, while engineering, medical science and agriculture developed into today's Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming Medical University, Yunnan Agricultural University and Southwest Forestry University. In 1978 the university was ranked by the State Council as one of the 88 national key universities. It now works from the Chenggong and Donglu campuses in Kunming, the provincial capital. A natural-sciences journal edited inside such a university carries the research of its science faculties to a national readership, and its Kunming base places it in a province whose mountains, plateau lakes and exceptional plant diversity repeatedly appear as subjects in its own pages.

Scope: mathematics and computing

Mathematics is a visible part of the journal's contents. Volume 45, issue 6, published in 2023, opens with work on the weak adjacent vertex distinguishing edge colouring of planar graphs without 3-cycles, and on the solvability of fractional Hamiltonian systems — pure-mathematics problems in graph theory and in fractional systems respectively, each carrying a DOI in the journal's 10.7540/j.ynu series. That a general university journal leads an issue with such work reflects the mathematical tradition of a university once led by Xiong Qinglai.

The same 2023 issue shows the journal's computing and information-science coverage: security optimisation of a service incentive algorithm in wireless nodes of blockchain, document-level neural machine translation based on topic information, an improved graph convolution network recommendation model based on knowledge graphs, optimal deployment and selection of boundary coverage in wireless sensor networks, and Chinese font style transfer based on font features and a multi-scale patch generative adversarial network. Recent articles in press extend this line to industrial image anomaly detection, text classification, object detection for intelligent driving, text matching and UAV-assisted data collection for the industrial Internet of Things. Together these papers mark the journal as a home for applied computing research as well as for mathematics.

Scope: physics and the physical sciences

Physical-science research also appears in the journal's pages. The 2023 volume includes firing patterns and bifurcation analysis of a neural model under electromagnetic induction, and a study of the Landau level stability coefficient of electrons and its applications to strongly magnetised neutron stars — work that ranges from nonlinear dynamics to astrophysics. Papers of this kind sit alongside the mathematics and computing contributions in the same issues, which is the defining pattern of a comprehensive natural-sciences edition: no single discipline owns the journal, and a physicist, a mathematician and a computer scientist can all appear between the same covers.

Scope: chemistry, atmosphere and environment

Chemistry and environmental science form another strand. The 2023 issue includes an analysis of the differences between the physical and chemical properties of atmospheric dust and soil during oasisisation in the Cele Oasis in Xinjiang, an analysis of the climatic characteristics of cold waves and atmospheric circulations along different routes in Yunnan, the removal of toluene on BiOI and activated carbon through adsorption and photocatalysis, research progress on rhodium-monophosphine catalysts in asymmetric hydrogenation, and the preparation and properties of chromium(III) ion-imprinted polymers. The combination is characteristic: fundamental chemistry, in catalysis and materials, printed beside atmospheric and environmental studies rooted in the landscapes of western China.

Scope: biology, ecology and Yunnan's natural world

Biology and ecology are where the journal's Yunnan setting is most evident. Among its recent articles in press are a study using carbon-flux and microclimate data from different forest layers to estimate diffuse radiation and gross primary productivity in a Pinus armandi plantation in central Yunnan, a review of how rhizosphere microbiomes help plants resist stress, an investigation of plankton communities in farmland ponds around Lake Erhai and their response to nitrogen and phosphorus inputs, and a review of Artemisia annua volatile oil, its extraction, components and applications. Earlier archive papers likewise include entomological work from Yunnan authors, such as a 2002 study of insect pests and mites. Yunnan is renowned for its high plant diversity, and a Kunming-based natural-sciences journal is a natural outlet for the ecological and botanical research that diversity generates.

Publication record, DOIs and access

The journal's publication record can be followed concretely through its identifiers. Articles carry DOIs in the form 10.7540/j.ynu followed by a manuscript number — for example 10.7540/j.ynu.20220349 for the 2023 graph-colouring paper — and the printed article code on archive papers is built from the ISSN itself, as in 0258-7971(2002)05-0398-03 for the 2002 paper cited above. The official site presents current articles in press with their abstracts in English, which makes the journal's recent contents discoverable to readers who do not read Chinese, while the full journal remains a Chinese university periodical catalogued by libraries under ISSN 0258-7971.

For researchers, the practical value of such a record is cumulative. The archive volumes from the early 2000s onward form a searchable account of how natural-science research at a major southwestern university has developed, issue by issue, in the language in which most of that work was first reported.

Readership and audience

The journal's core readership is the Chinese-reading natural-science community: researchers and postgraduate students in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, geography and computing, at Yunnan University itself and at universities and institutes across China. Because authorship is not confined to the home university — the 2002 archive paper, for example, lists authors from institutes in Kunming and Yunnan alongside a co-author abroad — the journal functions as a national rather than a purely institutional outlet. Its English-language abstracts and articles-in-press pages extend a first level of access to international readers tracing work on Yunnan's ecology, climate and biodiversity.

Place in Chinese scholarly publishing

Journal of Yunnan University (Natural Sciences Edition) belongs to the large, structured system of Chinese academic journals in which universities maintain titles for their research communities. Within that system, the natural-sciences edition of a comprehensive university's journal is the generalist counterpart to the same university's social-sciences edition and to specialist institute journals. Understanding an individual title therefore requires the facts assembled here: who publishes it, where it is edited, what identifiers it carries, what its issues actually contain and how far its archive runs. On those measures this journal is an established part of the natural-science literature of Southwest China, edited in Kunming, identified by ISSN 0258-7971 and CN 53-1045/N, and continuing to grow volume by volume from its base at Yunnan University.