About Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology

Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology

The Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology (中国临床心理学杂志) is a Chinese-language academic journal devoted to clinical psychology, published in Changsha, Hunan Province. Founded in 1993, it is sponsored by Central South University together with the Chinese Mental Health Association, and it carries the print ISSN 1005-3611. For more than three decades the journal has provided a national platform for research on psychological assessment, psychopathology, psychotherapy and mental health in Chinese populations, and it is recognised in China as a core journal in psychology. Its articles are written in Chinese and are cited internationally under the abbreviation Chin J Clin Psychol, with DOIs registered in the form 10.16128/j.cnki.1005-3611.

Clinical psychology in China developed as a distinct professional and academic field comparatively late, and a specialist journal founded in the early 1990s arrived at an important moment. Universities were expanding psychology programmes, hospitals were building psychological assessment and counselling services, and researchers needed validated Chinese-language instruments before imported tests could be used responsibly with Chinese respondents. The Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology grew up alongside that professionalisation, publishing the scale validations, normative studies and clinical investigations on which Chinese practitioners could base their work.

History and Founding

The journal was founded in 1993 in Changsha. Its volume numbering confirms the continuity of that run: volume 15 appeared in 2007, volume 22 in 2014 and volume 31 in 2023, a sequence consistent with one volume per year since the founding year. Through those volumes the journal has documented the transformation of Chinese clinical psychology from a small, largely hospital-based activity into a broad research field spanning universities, medical schools, schools and community mental-health services.

The journal's home in Changsha is significant. Central South University, formed around institutions including the former Hunan Medical University, has a long tradition in psychiatry and medical psychology, and the university's researchers in psychiatry and psychology have been ranked among the world's top one per cent by citation in the Essential Science Indicators. A journal edited in that environment sits close to both clinical practice and academic research, and its pages reflect that dual orientation: many contributions come from medical psychology institutes and hospital departments as well as from university psychology departments.

Sponsors and Institutional Home

The journal is sponsored by Central South University and the Chinese Mental Health Association. That pairing combines an academic publisher's base — a major comprehensive university in Hunan — with a national professional association concerned with mental health. The association link helps explain the journal's reach beyond a single campus: its authors and readers are distributed across China's medical universities, psychiatric hospitals, normal universities and counselling services.

Central South University's own strength in the field underpins the title. The university reported in 2017 that its psychiatry and psychology research had entered the top one per cent of the Essential Science Indicators for the first time, based on several hundred cited studies. A specialist journal sponsored by an institution with that research profile is well placed to attract submissions in psychopathology, assessment and intervention research.

Scope and Subject Coverage

As described in its directory record, the journal publishes research on psychological assessment, psychopathology, psychotherapy and mental health in Chinese populations. Those four pillars organise most of its content. Assessment research includes the translation, adaptation and psychometric validation of scales and questionnaires for Chinese respondents. Psychopathology research examines the structure, causes and correlates of psychological disorders. Psychotherapy and counselling research reports intervention studies and investigations of therapeutic practice. Mental-health research addresses well-being, stress and psychological functioning in community, student, occupational and clinical samples.

The published record illustrates each pillar. The journal has carried the reliability and validity studies of the Chinese version of the Self-Compassion Scale and of the short form of the Cognitive Style Questionnaire in Chinese college students — classic examples of the instrument-validation work for which it is known. It published research applying interpersonal circumplex theory to the understanding of psychopathology following the release of DSM-5, work on adult attachment and personality traits among Chinese college students, and studies of the working characteristics of counsellors and psychotherapists in different types of organisations in China.

Psychological Assessment and Instrument Validation

Assessment is arguably the journal's most distinctive contribution. Psychological tests developed in English-speaking populations cannot simply be assumed to work in China: item wording, response styles, norms and factor structures all require local evidence. The Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology has been a principal outlet for that evidence. Studies in its pages have examined Chinese versions of measures of perceived stress, depression, anxiety and stress symptoms, hopelessness, self-compassion and cognitive style, reporting reliability coefficients, factor analyses and validity correlations for student, worker and clinical samples.

This validation literature has practical consequences. Clinicians selecting an instrument for a Chinese hospital, school counsellors screening students, and researchers designing national surveys all depend on published psychometric evidence. A 2023 national cross-sectional study protocol on the psychology and behaviour of Chinese residents, published internationally, drew on a body of prior Chinese measurement work of exactly the kind this journal publishes, citing its articles on societal fairness and depression among residents. The journal's assessment archive therefore functions as part of the measurement infrastructure of Chinese psychology.

Psychopathology and Mental Health Research

Alongside measurement, the journal publishes substantive research on psychological disorders and mental health. Articles address depression, anxiety and stress in a wide range of populations, personality and its disorders, and the psychological characteristics of medical patients and caregivers. Research on caregivers of children with autism, for example, has drawn on depression, anxiety and stress measurement work published in the journal, showing how its findings circulate into family and developmental research.

The journal also serves research on the mental health of students, a major theme in Chinese psychology. Studies of college students' cognitive styles, attachment, personality and well-being recur in its volumes, reflecting the central role of universities both as research sites and as providers of counselling services. Occupational mental health appears too: an early study in the journal examined the occupational stress of psychological therapists in China themselves, an indication of the field's growing self-reflection.

Counselling and Psychotherapy

The journal is one of a small number of Chinese professional journals identified in the international literature as publishing research on counselling and psychotherapy. A widely cited review of counselling psychology in Chinese higher education noted that only three professional journals in China were then publishing articles related to counselling and psychotherapy, and named the Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology among them. That scarcity gave the journal an outsized role in building an evidence base for Chinese counselling practice.

Its counselling content includes surveys of counsellors and psychotherapists, studies of group counselling identified through Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index searches, and analyses of the training needs of university counsellors. International scholars writing on the urgent need to expand graduate training in Chinese clinical and counselling psychology cite the journal's investigations of counsellor training and practice, underlining its status as a reference point for the profession's development.

Indexing, Recognition and Citation

The journal is classified as a Chinese core journal in psychology, the national recognition recorded in its directory listing. Core-journal status in China is consequential: it signals that a title has passed national quality evaluations and it influences where Chinese academics choose to publish, since core-journal publications carry weight in institutional assessment.

Internationally, the journal's articles are indexed and abstracted in psychological databases — its studies appear in the American Psychological Association's PsycINFO record system, which reproduces their citations and abstracts in English — and its content is cited in English-language journals across clinical psychology, health psychology and family studies. The DOI prefix 10.16128, visible in citations such as the 2023 article on perceived societal fairness and depression (volume 31, issue 2), gives its articles persistent identifiers that support that international citation traffic.

Readership and Professional Role

The journal's readership spans clinical psychologists, psychiatrists and medical psychologists, university counsellors, psychology lecturers and graduate students, and researchers in related health fields. For practitioners, its assessment studies offer locally validated tools; for researchers, its substantive studies provide Chinese data on questions often studied only in Western samples; for trainers, its counselling surveys document how the profession actually works.

Because it publishes in Chinese, the journal speaks directly to the practitioners who deliver psychological services in China, many of whom do not publish in English. That linguistic role matters in a field where the client population is Chinese-speaking and where cultural adaptation of theory and technique is a live scientific question — a theme the journal's own contributors have explored in work on indigenous counselling psychology in Chinese communities.

How to Cite and Identify the Journal

Readers locating the journal should use its exact identifiers to avoid confusion with similarly named titles. The Chinese title is 中国临床心理学杂志; the standard English title is Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology; the print ISSN is 1005-3611; articles are cited in abbreviated form as Chin J Clin Psychol followed by year, volume, issue and pages, and recent articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.16128/j.cnki.1005-3611. The journal should not be confused with the English-language Journal of Clinical Psychology published in the United States, nor with Chinese journals of psychiatry or health psychology, which are separate titles with different sponsors and ISSNs.

Conclusion

From its founding in Changsha in 1993 under the sponsorship of Central South University and the Chinese Mental Health Association, the Chinese Journal of Clinical Psychology has become one of the foundational periodicals of Chinese clinical psychology. Its combination of instrument validation, psychopathology research, counselling studies and mental-health investigation — recognised by its standing as a Chinese core journal in psychology — makes it an essential source for anyone seeking to understand how clinical psychology is researched and practised in China.