About Chinese Journal of Disease Control & Prevention

Chinese Journal of Disease Control & Prevention

The Chinese Journal of Disease Control & Prevention is a Chinese-language public health journal published in Hefei, the capital of Anhui Province, by Anhui Medical University. Known in Chinese as 中华疾病控制杂志 (Zhonghua Jibing Kongzhi Zazhi), it is one of the specialist periodicals through which China's disease prevention and control workforce — epidemiologists, public health physicians, statisticians and staff of the nationwide network of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — reports its research and field experience. The journal carries ISSN 1674-3679 and is recognised as a Chinese core journal in preventive medicine.

Origins and founding in 1997

The journal was founded in 1997 under the title Disease Control Journal. Its creation came at a formative moment for organised disease control in China: the country was consolidating its epidemic prevention station system, expanding planned immunisation, and confronting a shifting burden of disease in which chronic, non-communicable conditions were rising alongside the infectious diseases that had historically dominated public health work. A dedicated periodical gave practitioners and researchers in this system a venue of their own, distinct from general medical journals and from the older national titles in epidemiology and preventive medicine. The journal's early identity is visible in the bibliographic record: a 2008 guide to Chinese journals for epidemiologists, published in an international open-access journal, listed the title with its original ISSN 1008-6013 and the domestic registration CN 34-1188/R, the "34" prefix marking its Anhui registration.

The 2007 renaming

In 2007 the journal was renamed the Chinese Journal of Disease Control & Prevention, taking its present title and the ISSN 1674-3679 under which it is cited today. The new name aligned the journal with the language of the China CDC system itself — "disease control and prevention" being the standard rendering of the mission of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention at national, provincial, municipal and county level. Bibliographic traces of the mature journal confirm its steady run: the Western Pacific Region Index Medicus, maintained through the World Health Organization's regional structures, records articles from volume 24, issue 3, published in 2020 — a volume count consistent with an unbroken annual sequence from the 1997 founding — and later citations, such as a 2022 article on the influencing factors and perinatal outcomes of gestational diabetes in volume 26, issue 9, show the journal publishing research well beyond the infectious-disease core from which it started.

Publisher and home institution: Anhui Medical University

The journal is published in Hefei by Anhui Medical University. The 2008 epidemiologists' guide independently confirms this sponsorship, listing Anhui Medical University as the journal's sponsor, with the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association named as the responsible authority. Anhui Medical University is a provincial medical university whose school of public health has long-standing strengths in epidemiology and health statistics, and the journal functions as one of its principal academic outlets. Its editorial base in Hefei places it close to the provincial disease control apparatus of Anhui while serving a national authorship and readership. This university-based model differs from the association-published national titles in Beijing: the journal is rooted in a teaching institution that trains the very professionals — preventive medicine undergraduates, epidemiology postgraduates and in-service CDC staff — who form its natural constituency.

Scope: epidemiology and the science of disease control

As its title declares, the journal covers epidemiology, disease prevention and control, environmental and occupational health, and health statistics. In practice this spans the surveillance and analysis of infectious disease outbreaks; the epidemiology of chronic diseases such as diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer; immunisation policy and practice; environmental exposures and occupational hazards and their health effects; maternal, child and school health; health emergency preparedness and response; and the statistical and methodological foundations — study design, modelling and data analysis — on which disease control work depends. The 2022 gestational diabetes paper noted above illustrates the journal's breadth: a study of risk factors and perinatal outcomes sits naturally in a journal whose remit joins population-level prevention to clinical and community settings. Articles are published in Chinese, the working language of the CDC system whose experience the journal exists to circulate.

Place within China's public health journal landscape

China's preventive medicine literature is extensive — the 2008 guide counted 105 journals in the "preventive medicine and hygienics" category of a major Chinese database — and it is organised in recognisable tiers. At the top stand national titles such as the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology and the Chinese Journal of Preventive Medicine, published by the Chinese Medical Association, and the Journal of Hygiene Research, published by the China CDC. Below and beside them sits a second tier of strong specialist and university journals, and it is in this tier that the Chinese Journal of Disease Control & Prevention operates. Its designation as a Chinese core journal in preventive medicine marks it as one of the field's recognised quality titles: the Chinese core journal system, compiled through citation and peer evaluation, is the standard by which Chinese academic libraries and promotion committees judge domestic periodicals. For international readers, the 2008 guide made a point that still applies: Chinese journals in epidemiology, preventive medicine and public health contain much of potential international interest, yet remain little known to non-Chinese speakers, which makes accurate directory records of titles such as this one valuable in their own right.

Indexing and bibliographic record

The journal's record is traceable through several independent channels. It appears in the Western Pacific Region Index Medicus (WPRIM), the WHO-supported regional index that makes the journal's articles discoverable alongside other Western Pacific biomedical titles; a WPRIM search on the journal's title returns hundreds of records, including the full run of its 2020 volume. It is cited in the international guide literature under both its former ISSN 1008-6013 and, in current databases, its present ISSN 1674-3679. Its domestic registration, CN 34-1188/R, was recorded in the 2006-era listings, the "R" suffix denoting a medical journal. Within China it is covered by the standard full-text databases through which Chinese medical literature circulates, and its core-journal status in preventive medicine ensures its inclusion in the citation statistics used to evaluate Chinese public health research.

Frequency and publication pattern

The journal's publication frequency has grown with its field. The 2008 epidemiologists' guide, reporting 2006 data, listed six issues per year, a bimonthly pattern typical of Chinese specialist journals of that period. Subsequent volume records show a journal publishing at a fuller rhythm: the 2022 citation to volume 26, issue 9 demonstrates that by the 2020s the journal was producing at least nine numbered issues in a single year, consistent with the monthly schedule adopted by many leading Chinese medical titles as submission volumes rose. Throughout these changes the annual volume numbering has remained continuous from 1997, so that the volume year alone allows a reader to date any article in the journal's history.

Readership and professional role

The journal's readers are the professionals who staff China's disease control system and the academic departments that support it: epidemiologists and biostatisticians, environmental and occupational health specialists, immunisation programme managers, health emergency responders, and graduate students in preventive medicine. For this readership the journal performs several functions at once. It is a channel for outbreak investigations and surveillance analyses that might otherwise remain in internal reports; a forum for evaluating interventions, from vaccination campaigns to chronic disease screening; a methods resource in health statistics; and a training ground in scientific writing for younger CDC staff publishing their first papers. Papers in the journal characteristically combine population data with practical conclusions aimed at programme improvement, reflecting an editorial identity shaped by practice as much as by academia.

The journal in an era of heightened disease control

The decades since the journal's founding have repeatedly underlined the importance of its subject. The reorganisation of China's disease control system, the strengthening of direct online reporting of infectious diseases, the growth of chronic disease prevention programmes and the global experience of pandemic response have all expanded the research agenda that a journal of disease control and prevention exists to publish. Based in Hefei, sponsored by Anhui Medical University, published since 1997 and carrying its present title since 2007, the Chinese Journal of Disease Control & Prevention remains a core Chinese-language record of how the world's largest public health workforce studies, prevents and controls disease.