About Journal of Nanjing Forestry University (Natural Sciences Edition)

Journal of Nanjing Forestry University (Natural Sciences Edition)

Overview and identity

Journal of Nanjing Forestry University (Natural Sciences Edition) is the natural sciences journal of Nanjing Forestry University in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. It is identified by ISSN 1000-2006 and published by Nanjing Forestry University. Its official site is nldxb.njfu.edu.cn, and its Guide for Authors states its fields precisely: biology, soil science, basic theory of forestry, forest genetics and tree breeding, forest management, forest protection, water and soil conservation and desertification control, ornamental plants and landscape architecture, and related research. Scopus-derived directories record its coverage as including 1988 and a continuous recent run from 2019 to 2026, with a CiteScore of 2.1 and an SJR of 0.294.

The parenthetical in the title is functional: it distinguishes this natural sciences edition from the university's other journal editions, and it should be retained in citation. Within China's forestry publishing, the journal — abbreviated in its own guidance as JNFU — is one of the three principal Chinese-language university forestry journals, alongside those of Beijing and Northeast Forestry Universities.

The host university and its journal tradition

Nanjing Forestry University occupies a historic site northeast of Nanjing, east of Purple Mountain and west of Xuanwu Lake, on ground that was the agriculture-forestry experimental field of Jinling University. The university's history records that it was formed from the former Department of Forestry of Central University combined with the Forestry Department of Jinling University, established as Nanjing Forestry College, moved to its present site in September 1955, and renamed Nanjing Forestry University in 1985. In 1941 the forestry faculty at Central University began recruiting graduate students in forest science, pioneering China's graduate education in the discipline, under the forest scientist Liang Xi.

The university's own timeline records the journal lineage directly: in October of the college era the first issue of the Journal of Nanjing Forestry College was published, and in 1979 the Journal of Nanjing Technological College of Forest Products was reissued for domestic and international distribution. The present Natural Sciences Edition is the continuation of that college-journal tradition under the university's current name — a publishing lineage reaching back to the 1950s, which makes the journal one of the older continuously rooted university journals in Chinese forestry.

Sponsorship, publisher and editorial home

The journal is published by Nanjing Forestry University, which sponsors the title and houses its editorial operation in Nanjing; manuscripts are submitted through the web-based submission system on the journal's own site, and submissions by email are not accepted — a small operational detail from its Guide for Authors that documents a fully online editorial workflow. In the Chinese system, the sponsoring university supervises the journal's editorial direction and stands behind the title, and the editorial office's location inside one of China's two oldest forestry faculties gives the journal direct access to its discipline's senior scholars as editors and referees.

The university's forestry standing underwrites the journal's authority. Nanjing Forestry University is a Double First-Class university in forestry, and its journal is the Chinese-language venue of record for its research schools — including its nationally known work on poplar and other fast-growing plantation trees, on bamboo, and on forest products engineering.

Scope: the Guide for Authors statement

Unusually among the journals in this batch, this title's scope can be quoted from its own English Guide for Authors. The journal “publishes original research articles and reviews in the fields of Biology, Soil Science, Basic Theory of Forestry, Forest Genetics and Tree Breeding, Forest Management, Forest Protection, Water and Soil Conservation and Desertification Control, Ornamental Plants and Landscape Architecture, and related research results.” Submitted material must not have been published previously or be under consideration elsewhere — the standard originality condition of a peer-reviewed journal.

The scope list is a faithful map of a comprehensive forestry university: basic forestry theory and biology at one end, applied protection and management in the middle, and the designed landscape — ornamental plants and landscape architecture — at the other. Recent issue contents confirm the map in practice: a 2025 article studied the population dynamics and habitat characteristics of the endangered black-faced spoonbill in the Yuhuan Xuanmen Bay Wetland of Zhejiang across six wintering periods; another evaluated fruit characteristics of 46 blueberry cultivars; another assessed excellent provenances of Korean pine by stem-form characteristics. Wildlife ecology, horticultural science and tree breeding share an issue without strain, because all three are the university's business.

Publication pattern and article character

The journal's articles appear in numbered volumes — volume 49 was reached in 2025 — with DOIs registered under the journal's ISSN-based prefix (for example, 10.12302/j.issn.1000-2006.202310001). Articles follow the structured objective–method–result format standard in Chinese science journals, presented bilingually so that each paper's design and findings are legible to international readers from its English abstract alone. The journal's Guide for Authors prescribes its reference format in the standard journal-article and book forms, and notes that the journal has been included in a number of databases.

The 2025 contents also show the journal's review and evaluation functions at work: provenance evaluation for Korean pine, cultivar evaluation for blueberry, habitat assessment for an endangered waterbird. Forestry and horticultural science advance substantially through such comparative evaluation studies, and a university journal with access to trial plantations and field stations is their natural home.

Indexing, evaluation and metrics

International directories record the journal in Scopus with coverage including 1988 and 2019–2026, a CiteScore of 2.1, an SJR of 0.294, and third-quartile (Q3) placement in food science, nature and landscape conservation, and soil science categories; one metrics service records a 2025 impact figure of 1.110 against 1.260 in 2024. These are respectable mid-field figures for a Chinese-language disciplinary journal, and the inclusion of a 1988 coverage year in the Scopus record testifies to the journal's depth of archive.

Domestically, the journal belongs to the Chinese core-journal environment for forestry and agricultural sciences. As with all journals in this cohort, the domestic evaluation frame — university journal quality selections and the Chinese citation databases — is the one its authors and its sponsoring university principally cite.

Place among China's forestry university journals

The three comprehensive Chinese-language forestry university journals — Beijing, Nanjing and Northeast — form a natural comparison set, similar in genre, sponsorship and scale. The Nanjing title is distinguished by its Yangtze-region setting: its forestry is the forestry of China's humid south, of poplar and bamboo plantations, of subtropical evergreen broadleaf forest, of the Xuanmen Bay wetlands and the blueberry and ornamental-plant industries of Jiangsu and Zhejiang. The spoonbill habitat study and the Castanopsis community research visible in its pages are southern forestry science, complementary to the northern shelterbelt science of the Beijing journal and the boreal and temperate forest science of the Harbin journal.

The journal also sits within its own university's wider output: Nanjing Forestry University's researchers publish extensively in the English-language Journal of Forestry Research and other international titles, but the Natural Sciences Edition remains the institution's comprehensive domestic record, carrying the applied and regional work that international journals seldom accept.

Readership and use

Readers are forestry and horticultural researchers, soil and conservation scientists, landscape architects and the professional forestry community of the Yangtze region and beyond. For international users, the journal's Scopus presence and bilingual article presentation make it a usable source on Chinese plantation forestry, tree breeding and wetland ecology; its DOI-registered recent archive is directly citable.

Citation should use the full title including the edition marker — Journal of Nanjing Forestry University (Natural Sciences Edition) — with ISSN 1000-2006, distinguishing it from the university's humanities and social sciences edition and from the similarly named journals of other Nanjing universities.

Continuing role

From the first issue of the Journal of Nanjing Forestry College in the 1950s to volume 49 in 2025, this journal has carried the research of one of China's founding forestry institutions without a break in identity that its own university history does not document. Published by Nanjing Forestry University under ISSN 1000-2006, scoped by its own Guide for Authors across the full range of forestry science, and indexed internationally with an archive reaching back to 1988 in Scopus, the Journal of Nanjing Forestry University (Natural Sciences Edition) remains a core title of Chinese forestry publishing.