About Journal of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizers

Journal of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizers

Overview and identity

Journal of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizers is a Chinese national specialist journal of plant nutrition and fertiliser science, published in Beijing and identified by ISSN 1008-505X. It is produced by the editorial department of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences for the Chinese Society of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer Sciences. The journal publishes original research and reviews on farmland fertilizer and crop production, nutrient management, soil–crop interactions and the ecological safety of fertilizer application.

Its title circulates in English in two forms — Journal of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizers, and the earlier rendering Journal of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer (singular), under which its articles of the 2000s and 2010s are widely cited. Both forms denote the same journal; the ISSN is the constant. In a country whose food security rests on the intensive, fertilised agriculture of a limited land base, this is the disciplinary journal of the science that decides how much fertiliser China uses, and how well.

Sponsorship: the academy and the society

The journal is the journal of the Chinese Society of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer Sciences, produced through the editorial department of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing. The society's own history, documented in its published accounts, gives the journal its institutional lineage: the society's predecessor, the Soil and Fertilizer Research Society of the Chinese Agricultural Society, was prepared from 1978 and formally established at the National Soil and Fertilizer Symposium and inaugural meeting held in Beijing on 15–21 February 1982, with academician Chen Huayan as its first chairman and senior soil scientists including Hou Guangjiong, Huang Ruicai and Zhu Lianqing as consultants. In September 1993 it was approved by the Ministry of Civil Affairs as a first-class society and renamed the Chinese Society of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer Sciences, and in November 2010 it became a group member of the China Association for Science and Technology.

The society now works through 14 special committees, and its leadership is drawn from the academy's institutes — its ninth chairman, elected at the 2016 congress in Jinan, was Bai Youlu, a researcher at the Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and director of the National Soil Testing and Fertilization Center's laboratory. A society journal edited inside the academy, led by the same community that runs the national soil-testing and formulated-fertilisation programme, sits as close to national practice as a research journal can.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal's stated scope is the relationship between farmland fertilizers and crop production: it publishes original papers and reviews exploring the interface of fertiliser and crop that advance understanding and improvement of nutrient use. Its own summary enumerates the territory: nutrient management, soil–crop interactions, agrochemistry, and the ecological safety of fertilizer application.

In practice its pages carry the full research economy of Chinese plant nutrition: nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium response trials across the major crops and regions; nutrient-use efficiency and the physiology behind it; slow-release and novel fertiliser products; soil testing and formulated fertilisation — the national programme that translates soil analysis into field recommendations; organic nutrient resources and manure recycling; the soil microbiology of nutrient cycling; and the environmental accounting of fertiliser, from ammonia volatilisation and nitrous oxide emission to nitrate leaching and water eutrophication. A 2001 article in the journal by Li Jiakang, Lin Bao and colleagues, “Dissecting the perspectives of fertilizer application in China,” exemplifies the journal's policy-analytical register: senior figures of the discipline using its pages to assess the nation's fertiliser future.

The field's central problem, as the journal frames it

A review published in the journal on guaranteeing China's food security states the discipline's dilemma with precision: fertilizer use plays an important role in crop production to ensure food security, while relatively low nutrient use efficiency produces negative impacts on environmental quality — so scientific use of nutrient resources and improvement of fertilizer use efficiency is an important scientific issue related to both national food security and environment quality, in a country with a large population, limited arable land, relatively low land productivity and a fragile ecosystem.

The same review proposed the strategy that Chinese nutrient management has since pursued: regional fertilizer rate control with adjustment at field level, regionalised nutrient management for small-scale farm operation, and precision fertilisation for large-scale operation. That a single journal article can articulate the national strategy of its field indicates the journal's function: it is where Chinese plant nutrition thinks in public.

History and development

The journal's documented article record runs from at least 2001 — volume-numbered in the earlier English rendering as Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer Science — through continuous publication in the 2010s, with articles recorded in 2013 and onward in AGRIS and on its own platform at plantnutrifert.org, into the present. Its sponsoring society's timeline (1982 founding, 1993 renaming, 2010 CAST membership) frames the journal's institutional maturation across the same decades in which China's fertiliser consumption rose to the world's highest and then, under national policy, began its managed decline in growth.

The journal's recent bibliometric trajectory reflects its field's rising policy salience: metrics services record its impact figure climbing from 1.540 in 2024 to 1.900 in 2025, with an SJR of 0.363 and second-quartile placement in plant science listings for the Asiatic region. For a Chinese-language specialist journal, those are strong international figures, earned because nutrient management is a globally shared research frontier and China's experience within it is uniquely large-scale.

Publication pattern and article types

The journal publishes original research papers and reviews in Chinese with English titles and abstracts, on its own platform at plantnutrifert.org, where articles carry DOIs in the form 10.11674/zwyf — the zwuf/zwyf stem abbreviating the journal's Chinese title, Zhiwu Yingyang yu Feiliao Xuebao. Its research articles follow the experimental conventions of the field: field trials with treatment structures, soil and plant analyses, and statistical reporting, organised for a readership that will apply the results through recommendation systems.

The journal's citation footprint in the wider literature is instructive: its articles are reference-list staples in Chinese agronomy, cited across the crop and soil journals whenever nutrient questions arise, and its English-rendered title appears in reference lists internationally through the Scopus-indexed Chinese agricultural literature.

Indexing and discovery

Internationally, the journal is carried in Scopus-derived services, which record its publisher as the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences' editorial department of the journal, its subject area as agricultural and biological sciences, and its active years running from 2018 to 2026 in current windows, with its article archive on its own platform reaching much further back. Domestically it belongs to the core stratum of Chinese agricultural journals, as the journal of a CAST-affiliated national society edited within the national academy.

The dual English title forms require a searcher's care: literature searches should use both “Journal of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizers” and “Journal of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer,” together with ISSN 1008-505X, to recover the complete record.

Place among China's agricultural journals

China's plant nutrition community could, in principle, publish entirely in the comprehensive agricultural journals and the soil-science titles. That it sustains a dedicated national journal reflects the discipline's scale and policy weight: fertiliser is China's largest agricultural input, its efficient use a stated national objective — the society's own slogan speaks of promoting the reduction of chemical fertilizers and improving the quality of farming — and its environmental consequences a national concern. The journal is the meeting place of the three communities that share that problem: soil scientists, crop physiologists and the fertiliser industry's researchers.

Within this directory's cohort it stands with the Journal of Agro-Environment Science as one of the two national, institute- and society-based specialist titles among predominantly university journals — a reminder that China's agricultural publishing is a mixed economy of university, academy and society titles.

Readership and use

Readers are plant nutrition and soil fertility researchers, agronomists, the technical staff of the soil-testing and fertilisation recommendation system, fertiliser industry scientists, and agricultural policymakers concerned with input reduction. Internationally, the journal is a key Chinese-language source for the world's largest national experience in fertiliser management — its efficiencies, its excesses and its reforms. Cite it by title and ISSN 1008-505X, searching both English title forms for older material.

Continuing role

China's commitments to reduce chemical fertiliser use while holding food production, and to cut the nutrient losses that burden its waters, guarantee this journal's subject a permanent place in national policy. Sponsored by the Chinese Society of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer Sciences, edited within the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, and published under ISSN 1008-505X, the Journal of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizers continues as the disciplinary journal of the science on which Chinese crop production most directly depends.