About Journal of Beijing Forestry University

Journal of Beijing Forestry University

Overview and identity

Journal of Beijing Forestry University is the forestry and agricultural and biological sciences journal of Beijing Forestry University in Beijing, China. It is identified by print ISSN 1000-1522, and its standard abbreviation is J. Beijing For. Univ. The journal is published by Beijing Forestry University and covers forestry together with the related agricultural and biological sciences of its host institution. International indexing records its Scopus coverage as running from 1998 to 2025 — a span of more than a quarter-century in the international bibliographic record.

The university also publishes a separate social science edition, the Journal of Beijing Forestry University (Social Science), with its own ISSN and DOI series. The title profiled here is the natural science journal — the forestry title — and in all citation and catalogue work the two editions must be kept apart.

The host university: China's forestry university in the capital

Beijing Forestry University is China's principal specialist university for forestry, seated in the capital and descended from the country's earliest forestry education. A specialist host shapes a specialist journal: where a comprehensive university journal spreads across every discipline on campus, this journal concentrates on the forest sciences — silviculture, forest ecology, tree breeding, forest management, wood science, soil and water conservation, landscape and urban greening — together with the biological and environmental sciences that support them.

That concentration gives the journal a clear identity within China's crowded university-journal landscape. It is read as a forestry journal first, and its sponsoring university's national role in forestry education and research — training much of China's forestry profession and staffing its research institutes — supplies both its authorship and its readership.

Sponsorship, publisher and editorial home

The journal is published by Beijing Forestry University, which sponsors the title and houses its editorial office in Beijing. SCImago-derived listings name Beijing Forestry University as publisher and China as country, under the journal's bilingual title form “Beijing Linye Daxue Xuebao / Journal of Beijing Forestry University,” which records the journal's Chinese title, Beijing Linye Daxue Xuebao, alongside its English one.

The bilingual title form matters practically: databases file the journal under both renderings, and the pinyin form in particular appears throughout the SCImago record. All forms — Journal of Beijing Forestry University, Beijing Linye Daxue Xuebao, and the abbreviation J. Beijing For. Univ. — denote the same journal, identified unambiguously by ISSN 1000-1522.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal's scope, as classified internationally, lies in forestry and in agricultural and biological sciences. In substantive terms that means: forest cultivation and silvicultural systems; forest ecology and ecosystem management; genetics and breeding of forest trees; forest protection against pests, disease and fire; forest management and mensuration; wood science and forest products; soil and water conservation and desertification control — a field of particular weight for a university whose researchers work on China's northern shelterbelt and dryland restoration programmes; wildlife and nature conservation; and landscape architecture and urban forestry, a recognised strength of the Beijing institution.

The journal's document profile in recent SCImago listings — 106 documents recorded for 2025, with 535 documents across the most recent three-year window — shows a title publishing at the steady volume of an established disciplinary journal, neither a thin house organ nor a mega-journal. Its reference density, recorded at over 36 references per document in 2025 listings, is that of a mature research journal whose articles engage fully with their literatures.

Indexing, evaluation and metrics

The journal is indexed in Scopus, with coverage recorded from 1998 to 2025 — among the longer Scopus runs of any Chinese university journal, reflecting both the journal's age and forestry's early inclusion in international abstracting. SCImago records an SJR of 0.254 with a third-quartile (Q3) placement in forestry and an h-index of 23. Those figures describe a solid mid-field disciplinary journal in the international system; its domestic standing, within China's core-journal and Chinese Science Citation Database environment for forestry, is the frame its own community primarily uses.

The journal's longevity in Scopus deserves emphasis. Continuous indexing since the late 1990s means the journal's backfile is part of the internationally searchable forestry literature across the whole period in which Chinese forestry research expanded dramatically — including the great national programmes of shelterbelt construction, natural forest protection and returning farmland to forest, whose scientific record is substantially a Chinese-language record held in journals such as this one.

The social science edition: a necessary distinction

Beijing Forestry University publishes its university journal in two editions. The natural science edition profiled here carries ISSN 1000-1522 and the forestry scope described above. The Journal of Beijing Forestry University (Social Science) is a separate journal — its articles carry DOIs in the bjfuss series, and its contents, visible in its recent issues, address environmental history, ecological civilisation thought, national park governance and scenic byway policy: the humanities and policy face of a forestry university.

The distinction follows the standard Chinese pattern and must be preserved in citation: a reference to ecological-civilisation philosophy belongs to the social science edition; a reference to silviculture, tree breeding or forest ecology belongs to this journal. Directory records that merge the two misrepresent both.

Publication pattern and article character

The journal publishes research articles in Chinese with English bibliographic presentation, in the standard format of China's disciplinary journals: original experimental and observational studies, methodological papers and reviews. Its article stream reflects the structure of forestry research itself — long-term plot studies, breeding trials that run for years before publication, remote-sensing and inventory analyses, and laboratory wood-science work — a literature in which a single study may embody a decade of field measurement.

That character makes the journal's archive cumulatively valuable: forestry is a science of long time series, and a journal publishing continuously since before its 1998 Scopus start holds records — stand growth, provenance trials, soil change under plantations — whose worth increases with every passing decade.

Place among China's forestry journals

China's forestry journal system has three tiers: the academy and society titles of the Chinese Academy of Forestry and the Chinese Society of Forestry; the specialist university journals, of which this journal and the journals of Nanjing Forestry University and Northeast Forestry University are the principal examples; and provincial forestry science and technology journals. The Beijing title's position within the university tier is defined by its capital-city host's national brief: Beijing Forestry University serves the whole country's forestry profession, and its journal is correspondingly national in authorship and readership rather than provincial.

Comparisons within the tier are instructive. The Nanjing and Harbin forestry university journals share this journal's genre and approximate scale; the English-language Journal of Forestry Research, hosted at Northeast Forestry University, occupies the different niche of an international title. The Journal of Beijing Forestry University is the Chinese-language disciplinary record of its institution, and is catalogued and cited as such.

Readership and use

Readers are forestry researchers and professionals across China: university and academy scientists, the staff of forest farms and nature reserves, shelterbelt and restoration programme specialists, and postgraduate students in the forest sciences. Internationally, the journal is used through Scopus by researchers tracing Chinese work on plantation forestry, desertification control and urban greening — fields in which China's experience is globally significant and much of the primary literature is Chinese.

For citation, use the exact title or its ISO abbreviation J. Beijing For. Univ. with ISSN 1000-1522, taking care to exclude the social science edition's separate record.

Continuing role

China's forestry agenda — carbon sequestration in forest sinks, natural forest protection, national park construction, dryland restoration — continues to expand, and Beijing Forestry University remains the discipline's flagship university. Its journal, published from Beijing under print ISSN 1000-1522, indexed in Scopus since 1998 and publishing more than a hundred documents a year in recent listings, continues as the comprehensive Chinese-language research journal of that institution and a core title of Chinese forestry publishing.