About Journal of Shanghai Ocean University

Journal of Shanghai Ocean University

Overview and identity

Journal of Shanghai Ocean University is the comprehensive academic journal of Shanghai Ocean University in Shanghai, China, identified by ISSN 1674-5566. It is sponsored by Shanghai Ocean University and mainly focuses on ocean sciences and fisheries. The journal was founded in 1992 as the Journal of Shanghai Fisheries University, taking the name of the institution's then-current form, and it was renamed when the university became Shanghai Ocean University in 2008. It has won a China University Science & Technology Journal Award in the national evaluation conducted by the Society of China University Journals.

The journal is the general scholarly record of China's oldest fisheries university — an institution founded in 1912 — and its pages carry the university's work across aquaculture, marine science, fisheries, food science and the engineering and economics that surround them.

The host university: from 1912 fisheries school to ocean university

Shanghai Ocean University began in December 1912 as the Jiangsu Provincial Fisheries School, founded by Zhang Jian and Huang Yanpei — two of the most prominent educational reformers of late-Qing and early-Republican China. In 1952 it was upgraded to Shanghai Fisheries College, the first undergraduate fisheries institution in China; it was renamed Shanghai Fisheries University in 1985 and became Shanghai Ocean University in 2008. The university is today a multidisciplinary applied research university jointly built by the Shanghai Municipal People's Government, the State Oceanic Administration and the Ministry of Agriculture, and it is part of the Double First-Class initiative.

The journal's founding in 1992 falls in the Shanghai Fisheries University period, and its renaming in step with the university in 2008 records a widening of brief: from a fisheries university's journal to an ocean university's journal, in a period when the institution's own scope broadened from fisheries toward the full range of marine science. A researcher tracing the title must therefore search both names — Journal of Shanghai Fisheries University for 1992–2008 and Journal of Shanghai Ocean University thereafter — to recover the complete archive.

Sponsorship, publisher and editorial home

The journal is sponsored by Shanghai Ocean University, which houses its editorial office in Shanghai. The university's own announcement of the China University journal awards describes this title as “the Journal of Shanghai Ocean University sponsored by SHOU,” in the same sentence that names the Journal of Fisheries of China as a title “undertaken by” the university for the Chinese Society of Fisheries — a precise distinction between the university's own journal and a society journal it hosts, which this profile preserves.

Sponsorship by a Double First-Class discipline university gives the journal a defined research base: the university's colleges of fisheries and life sciences, marine science, food science and technology, marine engineering, economics and management, and information technology. The journal's comprehensive character is the publishing expression of that college structure.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal mainly focuses on ocean sciences and fisheries, and as a comprehensive academic journal it ranges across its university's disciplines: aquaculture science and technology; aquatic animal biology, genetics and breeding; fisheries resources and their management; marine ecology and environment; oceanography in its regional-sea applications; aquatic product processing and food science; fishing engineering and equipment; and the economics and management of marine and fisheries industries.

The East China Sea setting matters to the contents. Shanghai sits at the mouth of the Yangtze, beside one of the world's great estuarine and coastal fisheries, and the university's research — on Yangtze estuary ecology, on coastal aquaculture, on the aquatic products that supply China's largest city — gives its journal a regional specificity within its comprehensive breadth. At the same time the university's national role in fisheries education means authorship and readership extend across all of China's coastal and inland aquaculture regions.

Distinguishing the university's other fisheries titles

Shanghai Ocean University is associated with three journals that are easily confused, and a directory profile must separate them. This journal, the Journal of Shanghai Ocean University (ISSN 1674-5566, founded 1992 as Journal of Shanghai Fisheries University), is the university's own comprehensive title. The Journal of Fisheries of China (ISSN 1000-0615) is the flagship journal of the Chinese Society of Fisheries, organised by the society and undertaken by the university; it has the longest history among fisheries journals in China and has been repeatedly selected among China's Most Internationally Influential Academic Journals. And Aquaculture and Fisheries, launched by the university in 2016 in partnership with Elsevier and KeAi, was the first English fisheries science journal published in mainland China.

Each title has its own ISSN, sponsor relationship and audience. The comprehensive university journal is the broadest and most domestic of the three; the society journal is the discipline's national flagship; the English journal is its international venture. Citations to “the Shanghai fisheries journal” are meaningless without the ISSN, and this profile records the comprehensive title's identifiers accordingly.

Recognition: the China University journal awards

The journal's documented honour is its China University Science & Technology Journal Award, presented by the Society of China University Journals in an election that awarded 20 China University Outstanding Science & Technology Journal Awards and 254 China University Excellent Science & Technology Journal Awards. In that election, recorded in the university's own announcement, the Journal of Fisheries of China undertaken by the university won the Outstanding award, and the Journal of Shanghai Ocean University sponsored by the university won a China University Science & Technology Journal Award.

The stated purpose of that election — to improve the academic influence and editing and publishing quality of university science and technology journals, and to evaluate objectively the quality and role of university journals in scientific research and academic exchange — identifies what the award certifies: not citation rank alone, but editorial quality and institutional function. For a comprehensive university journal, whose value lies substantially in serving its institution's whole research community well, that is the apt form of recognition.

History and development

Founded in 1992, the journal has been published through the three decades in which Chinese aquaculture became the largest in the world and marine science rose to national strategic prominence. Its renaming in 2008 tracks the university's own transformation, and its continuation under the ocean-university name coincides with the institution's Double First-Class development in marine and aquatic disciplines.

The university's journal environment has simultaneously internationalised — the society flagship's repeated Most Internationally Influential selections and the 2016 English journal launch bracket this title's period — while the comprehensive journal has maintained the domestic, full-spectrum record. That division of labour among a university's journals is now the standard Chinese pattern, and Shanghai Ocean University's portfolio is a textbook instance of it.

Publication pattern and article character

The journal publishes research articles and reviews in Chinese across its comprehensive scope, with the bilingual bibliographic presentation standard in Chinese university journals. Its article stream reflects a teaching-and-research university's full output: experimental aquaculture and aquatic biology, field and survey work in marine and estuarine systems, food-science and processing studies, and applied engineering — the applied character its host asserts in describing itself as an applied research university.

For the bibliographer, the title's two-era name history is the chief practical fact: the archive is split by name at 2008, united by institutional continuity and by the journal's own account of its founding in 1992.

Readership and use

Readers are the marine and fisheries research community of China: university and academy scientists, aquaculture and fisheries professionals, aquatic-product industry researchers, and postgraduate students. Internationally, the journal is encountered as the comprehensive record of China's founding fisheries university — a useful source for the institutional history of Chinese fisheries science as well as for its research results, particularly where the society flagship's selectivity or the English journal's language would otherwise narrow the visible record.

Cite the journal by its exact current title and ISSN 1674-5566 for post-2008 material, and under its founding title, Journal of Shanghai Fisheries University, for the 1992–2008 archive.

Continuing role

Shanghai Ocean University's second century — it passed its centenary in 2012 — is being built on marine science and aquaculture at Double First-Class level. Its comprehensive journal, founded in 1992, renamed with the university in 2008, honoured in the national university-journal awards, and published from Shanghai under ISSN 1674-5566, continues to record that institution's full research life, standing between its society flagship and its English venture as the general scholarly journal of China's oldest fisheries university.