About Journal of Northeast Forestry University

Journal of Northeast Forestry University

Overview and identity

Journal of Northeast Forestry University is the Chinese-language forestry journal of Northeast Forestry University in Harbin, Heilongjiang, China. It is identified by ISSN 1000-5382, published by Northeast Forestry University, and issued monthly. The journal covers forestry, ecology and related agricultural and biological sciences. It is a China Science and Technology Core Journal: the university announced that in both the 2024 and the 2025 editions of the Chinese S&T Journal Citation Reports (Core Edition), compiled by the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China (ISTIC), the Journal of Northeast Forestry University was again listed among China's core scientific journals.

The journal must be distinguished from the university's English-language Journal of Forestry Research, a separate title (ISSN 1007-662X) with its own international profile. This journal is the comprehensive Chinese-language title of the same university — the domestic counterpart in a two-language portfolio.

The host university: forestry in the far northeast

Northeast Forestry University, in Harbin, is China's specialist forestry university for the temperate and cold-temperate forests of the northeast — the great forest regions of the Greater and Lesser Khingan ranges and the Changbai mountains, with their Korean pine, birch, larch and mixed broadleaf-conifer stands. The university's research identity is built on those forests: their ecology, their management, their wildlife, and the wood industries based on them.

The university treats journal publishing as a strategic activity and says so publicly: it “has consistently regarded the development of academic journals as a key lever for enhancing disciplinary influence and advancing international exchange and cooperation, providing its journals with comprehensive resource support and strategic guidance.” It publishes a family of journals — among them this journal, the Journal of Forestry Research, Plant Research and Forest Engineering — four of which were listed together in the 2025 China Science and Technology Core Journal list.

Sponsorship, publisher and editorial home

The journal is published by Northeast Forestry University, which sponsors the title and houses its editorial office in Harbin. The monthly schedule — twelve issues a year — is the most frequent in the Chinese forestry university journal tier, and it implies a large, continuous manuscript flow: the university's own research schools in forestry, wildlife conservation, wood science and engineering and landscape architecture, together with submissions from the forest research institutes and forest farm systems of the northeast and the whole country.

Sponsorship by the university places the journal inside the institution's journal-development strategy quoted above. The same institutional commitment that produced an internationally ranked English title sustains this Chinese monthly; the two titles are managed as a portfolio, not as rivals.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal covers forestry, ecology and related agricultural and biological sciences. Substantively, its pages carry silviculture and forest cultivation; forest ecology and ecosystem processes in temperate and boreal stands; tree genetics and breeding; forest protection, including fire, pests and disease; forest management and resource inventory; wood science and forest engineering in its broad sense; wildlife conservation and nature reserve science — a field in which Harbin's researchers, working on Siberian tiger and Amur leopard habitat among other subjects, are nationally prominent; and the soil, water and environmental sciences of forested regions.

The AGRIS record preserves the journal's earlier decades in detail: FAO's database counts its articles year by year through the 1980s and 1990s — 37 records for 1988, 35 for 1989, 54 for 1990, and continuous coverage through 1998 — including laboratory and field studies such as electrophoretic analysis of lactate dehydrogenase isoenzymes in adult mink, a reminder that the journal's biological breadth has always extended to the wildlife and fur-animal science of the northeast.

Core-journal standing: the ISTIC listings

The journal's evaluation record is documented by its sponsoring university's announcements. In the 2024 Edition of the Chinese Scientific Journal Citation Report (Core Edition), four NEFU journals — Forestry Research (English), Journal of Northeast Forestry University, Plant Research and Forest Engineering — were again listed in China's Core Scientific Journals directory. The university's account of that directory explains its weight: the China Core Scientific Journals Directory, developed by ISTIC, selected 2,572 core journals from over 10,000 journals nationwide, including 2,165 in natural sciences; of 645 new applicants in that cycle, only 56 were admitted, a selection rate of 8.7 percent.

The listing was repeated in the 2025 Core Edition, in which 2,745 journals were designated China Science and Technology Core Journals and only 84 newly submitted journals were selected, an acceptance rate of about 10.6 percent. Continued inclusion across both cycles — the university's announcements stress the word “again” and “continue” — is the operative fact: core status is re-earned, and this journal has re-earned it.

Further recognition: the university journal case library

Beyond the ISTIC listings, the journal was selected into the “2024 Model Case Library of Chinese University Scientific Journals,” announced at the 28th Annual Conference of the Chinese University Scientific Journals Research Association in Haikou in December 2024, where the Journal of Northeast Forestry University was named among the “Top 100 Scientific Journals” in that case library, alongside the university's Forestry Research (English) and Plant Research. The university's English journal has since accumulated further team and editor honours in the 2025 case-library selection, in which the Journal of Forestry Research's editorial team achieved what the university called a “grand slam.”

These selections evaluate journals as publishing operations — editorial quality, development strategy, service to their disciplines — rather than by citation counts alone, and the Chinese journal's inclusion shows it being judged a well-run university journal by its professional peers, not merely a highly cited one.

The English sister title: a necessary distinction

The Journal of Forestry Research, published by the same university since 1990, is an English-language, bimonthly journal (print ISSN 1007-662X, online ISSN 1993-0607) with an international ranking profile — Q1 in forestry by SJR in current directory listings, a CiteScore of 3.9, and repeated selection as one of China's Most Internationally Influential Academic Journals, an honour it won for the eleventh time in the university's most recent announcement. It is frequently the first NEFU journal an international reader meets.

It is not this journal. The Journal of Northeast Forestry University (ISSN 1000-5382) is the Chinese-language monthly: broader in domestic authorship, rooted in the northeast's forest practice, and evaluated in the domestic core-journal system. Confusing the two — easy, because both are “the forestry journal of Northeast Forestry University” — corrupts citations and collection records alike; the ISSN is the reliable separator.

Publication pattern and history

The journal is published monthly, the frequency recorded in international journal directories, and its AGRIS-documented archive runs continuously from the 1980s — with records counted for every year from 1986 through 1998 in the FAO database — into the present. A monthly forestry journal is an operational commitment few university titles attempt; sustaining it across four decades indicates an editorial office of substantial capacity and a discipline with a large domestic research workforce.

Articles are published in Chinese with bilingual bibliographic presentation, following the standard structure of Chinese research journals. The journal's long AGRIS tail, preserving even its 1980s animal-science papers, gives it one of the more completely documented backfiles among Chinese university journals in international services.

Readership and use

Readers are the forestry profession of China, with a centre of gravity in the northeast: university and academy researchers, the staff of state forest farms and nature reserves, wildlife conservation managers, and wood-industry scientists. For international readers the journal documents, in Chinese, the research base behind the management of some of Asia's most important temperate forests — including the natural-forest protection and restoration programmes that followed China's late-1990s logging restrictions in the northeast.

Cite the journal by its exact title with ISSN 1000-5382; where a record shows ISSN 1007-662X or English full text, it belongs to the Journal of Forestry Research instead.

Continuing role

With core-journal listings renewed in 2024 and 2025, a Top 100 place in the university-journal case library, and a sponsoring university publicly committed to journal development as strategy, the Journal of Northeast Forestry University — monthly, Harbin-based, published under ISSN 1000-5382 — continues as the comprehensive Chinese-language forestry journal of China's northeast, and as the domestic foundation of one of the strongest journal portfolios in Chinese forestry.