About Chinese Journal of Neonatology

Chinese Journal of Neonatology

The Chinese Journal of Neonatology (中国新生儿科杂志, Zhongguo Xinsheng'erke Zazhi) is a Chinese-language medical journal published in Beijing by the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House. Founded in 1986 as the Journal of Neonatology and renamed in 2006, it carries ISSN 1673-6710. It is China's specialist journal for newborn medicine, covering neonatal intensive care, perinatal medicine and the diseases of the newborn period, and it serves the neonatologists, pediatricians and neonatal nurses who staff the country's rapidly developed network of neonatal units.

A journal founded with the specialty

The journal's founding date is itself a piece of medical history. Neonatology as an organised specialty in China dates from the mid-1980s: surveys of neonatal care record that in that period tertiary hospitals in China's developed areas began to establish neonatal intensive care units, the first dedicated units for critically ill newborns. A specialist journal launched in 1986 therefore appeared at the very moment its discipline was taking institutional shape. Under its original title, Journal of Neonatology, it gave the new specialty a national platform on which unit directors could report organisational experience, clinicians could publish case series and treatment studies, and a common Chinese vocabulary for newborn medicine could develop. The journal and the specialty have grown together ever since.

The 2006 renaming

In 2006 the journal was renamed the Chinese Journal of Neonatology, taking the title and the ISSN 1673-6710 under which it is cited today. The change followed the pattern of several Chinese specialist titles renamed in the same period, adopting fuller, standardised names that state the discipline plainly for bibliographic systems at home and abroad. Its citation record shows the continuity behind the new name: the journal's abbreviated citation, Chin J Neonatol, appears in the reference lists of national consensus documents and network studies, and volume numbering runs consistently with the 1986 founding — volume 34, for example, corresponds to 2019. Under its present title the journal is published by the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House in Beijing, placing it within the large family of journals issued by China's national medical association publishing programme.

Publisher: the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House

Publication by the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House carries practical significance. The Chinese Medical Association is the country's principal national medical society, and its publishing house issues dozens of the "Zhonghua" and specialist journals that form the backbone of Chinese medical literature. A journal in this programme benefits from standardised editorial processes, national distribution and inclusion in the association's full-text journal databases, through which Chinese clinicians routinely search the literature. For the Chinese Journal of Neonatology, association publishing also reinforces its role as a quasi-official voice of its specialty: the journal works in the same institutional ecosystem as the neonatology groups of the national pediatric society, whose guidelines and consensus statements form part of the literature it publishes and cites.

Scope: the medicine of the newborn

The journal's scope is the full range of newborn medicine. It covers neonatal intensive care — the support of critically ill term and preterm infants, including respiratory support and the management of respiratory distress and failure; perinatal medicine, the interface with obstetrics surrounding birth, resuscitation and the transition to extrauterine life; and neonatal diseases across every system: infection and sepsis, jaundice and bilirubin disorders, hypoxic and neurological injury, congenital and metabolic conditions, feeding and nutrition of the preterm infant, and the surgical and cardiac problems that present in the first weeks of life. Its pages carry original clinical research, cohort and multicentre studies, case reports, reviews and — distinctively — expert consensus documents that standardise practice across China's neonatal units.

Consensus documents and the standardisation of care

One measure of the journal's standing is its role as a vehicle for national expert consensus. In 2019, for example, the journal published the consensus on the use of human milk fortifier for preterm infants (Chin J Neonatol 2019;34:321–328), prepared by an expert working group with the journal's own editorial board committee among its sponsors. Human milk fortification — supplementing mother's or donor milk so that rapidly growing preterm infants receive adequate protein, minerals and energy — is a technical question on which uniform guidance materially affects outcomes in every neonatal unit. That such a consensus appeared in this journal, under the imprint of its editorial board, illustrates the function the title performs for the specialty: it is not only a repository of research but an instrument through which Chinese neonatology agrees and promulgates its standards.

The field the journal serves

The clinical world behind the journal has been transformed during its lifetime. National survey research published in international journals records that neonatal mortality in China fell from 33.1 per thousand live births in 1991 to 9 per thousand in 2011, and a later national follow-up study gives a fall from 30 per thousand in 1989 to 4 per thousand in 2020. A nationwide survey of neonatal departments conducted through the Chinese Neonatologist Association, covering 150 member hospitals across all 31 provincial-level divisions of mainland China, documented units with a mean of 65 beds, including on average about twenty neonatal intensive care beds — infrastructure on a scale unimaginable when the journal was founded. Collaborative structures have followed: the Chinese Neonatal Network, established to collect prospective data on infants born before 32 weeks' gestation or under 1,500 grams at dozens of participating NICUs, represents the multicentre research culture whose findings a national specialty journal exists to disseminate. The journal's contents — unit surveys, outcome studies, consensus statements — mirror each stage of this development.

Place among China's pediatric journals

Chinese pediatrics is served by a defined family of journals, and the Chinese Journal of Neonatology is consistently enumerated within it. A BMC Pediatrics study of pediatric randomised controlled trials in mainland China surveyed seventeen Chinese pediatric journals and included this title; a later cross-sectional assessment of the quality of paediatric trials published in China from 1999 to 2022 likewise included it among twenty paediatric medical journals. Within that family, most titles are general pediatric journals; the Chinese Journal of Neonatology is distinguished by its single-subject focus. It is the periodical of record for the newborn period — the first twenty-eight days of life and the convalescence of preterm infants beyond them — in the world's most populous pediatric literature.

Language, audience and use

The journal is published in Chinese and addressed to the professionals of China's neonatal services: neonatologists and general pediatricians, neonatal nurses, perinatal obstetricians working alongside them, and trainees entering the specialty. For this audience it performs the classic functions of a national specialty journal. It circulates treatment experience between large metropolitan NICUs and smaller provincial units; it publishes the consensus documents by which practice is standardised; it provides a peer-reviewed outlet in which Chinese neonatal researchers can report cohort data from some of the largest newborn populations anywhere in the world; and it preserves, in its successive volumes since 1986, a continuous record of how newborn care in China was built. Directories and citation databases record it under ISSN 1673-6710, and its articles are cited internationally under the abbreviation Chin J Neonatol whenever the Chinese neonatal literature is reviewed.

An enduring specialist record

Few journals can claim to have accompanied their specialty from its founding generation to national maturity. The Chinese Journal of Neonatology, launched as the Journal of Neonatology in 1986 — the era of China's first NICUs — renamed in 2006, and published in Beijing by the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House, has done exactly that. For researchers, clinicians and librarians seeking the Chinese literature of newborn medicine, it remains the specialist title with which any search must begin.