About World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine

World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Overview and identity

The World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine is an English-language journal of the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies (WFCMS), based in Beijing and published with Wolters Kluwer Medknow. It was launched in 2015 and carries the print ISSN 2311-8571 and the online ISSN 2589-2894. Its standard abbreviation, as recorded in the National Library of Medicine cataloguing tradition, is World J Tradit Chin Med, and its NLM catalog number is 101723303. Unlike the Chinese-language university journals that carry most of China's traditional Chinese medicine research, this title publishes in English from the outset, for an international readership of researchers, practitioners and students of Chinese medicine.

The journal is an open access publication. It is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which records that it does not charge article processing charges, and library records based on the DOAJ give an average period of about 24 weeks between submission and publication. Its issues are organised on a quarterly pattern — the third issue of volume 12, for example, is dated July–September 2026 — so that volume 12 falls in 2026, consistent with a first volume in 2015. Publication is handled through Wolters Kluwer's Medknow platform, the imprint that publishes a large number of society journals in medicine, which gives the title distribution and production infrastructure of an international commercial publisher while its ownership and editorial identity remain with the federation.

The sponsoring federation

The journal's sponsor, the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies, is an international, nongovernmental, nonprofit organisation of Chinese medicine societies and individuals, headquartered in Beijing. Planning for the federation began in April 2000; on 26 June 2002 the State Council of the People's Republic of China endorsed its formation, and it was officially launched at a meeting held in Beijing on 23–26 September 2003, attended by representatives from 44 countries drawn from more than 100 societies, whose combined constituents were estimated at 100,000 practitioners worldwide. The federation's stated objectives are to promote exchange and cooperation among Chinese medicine societies and between Chinese medicine and other medicines worldwide, to strengthen international academic exchanges, to improve the professional level of TCM personnel, to inherit and develop Chinese medicine, and to advance its modernisation and its entry into mainstream health care systems.

The federation has held the World Congress of Chinese Medicine annually since 2004, and its UNESCO listing as an accredited nongovernmental organisation has recorded 201 member societies from 58 countries and regions, dedicated to providing TCM health services and spreading TCM culture. A federation of that shape needs a journal for the same reason a university does: to give its worldwide constituency a shared scholarly record. The World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, launched a dozen years after the federation itself, is that record in periodical form — the point at which the federation's conference-centred activity acquired a permanent, citable literature.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal publishes peer-reviewed research on traditional Chinese medicine theory, clinical practice, acupuncture and herbal medicine for an international readership. Library subject records classify it across integrative and complementary medicine, medicine research and experimental work, and pharmacology and pharmacy, with subject keywords spanning Chinese medicine, alternative medicine, integrative medicine and herbal medicine. That classification captures the journal's defining position: it is a TCM journal, but one framed in the categories that international databases use, so that its contents can be found by readers searching the complementary and integrative medicine literature rather than only by specialists in Chinese medicine.

Within that scope, the journal's published content ranges widely. Its early volumes carried agenda-setting reviews, such as the 2016 survey of the evolutional development of traditional Chinese medicine outside the Chinese mainland — its challenges, training, practice and research — published in volume 2. Its recent volumes carry experimental pharmacology, such as studies of herbal formulas in models of intestinal inflammation and myocardial injury; consensus and standards work, including expert consensus documents on intervention in cardiovascular disease with Chinese medicine formulas and reporting specifications for the diagnostic criteria of Chinese medicine syndromes; and mechanism studies using metabolomics and transcriptomics to explain how identified herbal compounds act. The mixture is characteristic: classical theory, laboratory mechanism, clinical evidence and professional standard-setting all appear in the same journal, because all four are part of what the federation exists to advance.

Indexing and metrics

The journal is indexed in Scopus, with coverage recorded from 2015, and in the Directory of Open Access Journals; journal directories also record it in the Emerging Sources Citation Index of Web of Science and in Embase, and in India's UGC CARE list. Its Scopus CiteScore in the 2025 metrics is 4.2, placing it in the second quartile (Q2) of the Complementary and Alternative Medicine category, at the 70th percentile. Those figures describe a young journal that has established itself, within a decade of launch, in the upper half of its international subject category.

Indexing is not a formality for a journal of this kind; it is the mechanism of its purpose. A Chinese-language TCM journal can rely on a domestic readership that already knows it exists. An English-language journal founded to carry Chinese medicine to the world succeeds only if its articles surface where the world searches — in Scopus, in Web of Science, in Embase and in the DOAJ — and the World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine's presence in those services, with a rising CiteScore, is the evidence that the strategy behind its 2015 launch has worked.

Publishing model and readership

The journal's publishing model combines society ownership with commercial platform publication. The federation provides the scholarly community, the editorial identity and the mission; Wolters Kluwer Medknow provides the submission system, production, hosting and international sales and indexing infrastructure. The result is a journal that looks and behaves like an international medical title — DOIs in the form 10.4103/2311-8571, an Ovid presence through Wolters Kluwer, open access availability — while remaining the organ of a Beijing-headquartered federation of Chinese medicine societies.

Its readership is correspondingly different from that of China's domestic TCM journals. It addresses practitioners of Chinese medicine in the dozens of countries where the federation has member societies, researchers in integrative and complementary medicine who do not read Chinese, and clinicians and pharmacologists interested in herbal medicine evidence. For those readers, the journal offers something the Chinese-language literature cannot: peer-reviewed TCM research, including work originating in China, presented in English with the apparatus of an international journal. It thereby competes and converses with other English-language TCM titles, including the older Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, while differing from them in its direct federation ownership.

Role in the globalisation of Chinese medicine

The journal must be understood against the federation's larger project: the standardisation and international legitimation of Chinese medicine. The WFCMS works on educational, licensure and research policies for use internationally, has engaged with the World Health Organization's traditional medicine strategy, and has sought to establish means by which TCM products and practice can be monitored internationally for quality. A peer-reviewed English journal serves that project in a specific way: it creates a venue in which the evidence for TCM — its pharmacology, its clinical trials, its consensus standards — is assembled in the language and format that regulators, academics and clinicians outside China can evaluate.

At the same time, the journal documents the globalisation it promotes. Its pages carry work on the development of TCM outside the Chinese mainland, on cross-cultural training and practice, and on the integration of Chinese medicine with other medical systems — the federation's stated aim of cooperation between Chinese medicine and the other medicines of the world, pursued in print. The reporting specifications for syndrome diagnostic criteria published in its 2026 volume are a compact example: a core TCM concept, diagnosis by syndrome, being given the standardised reporting apparatus that international evidence culture requires.

Distinguishing features

Several features distinguish this title from the other journals in this batch of the directory. It is the only one published in English. It is the only one owned by an international federation rather than by a university or a national professional association. It is the youngest, launched in 2015 against university titles founded in the 1950s and 1970s. And it is fully open access without article processing charges, according to its DOAJ record, which removes both reader and author price barriers — a deliberate posture for a journal whose mission is dissemination to a worldwide professional community of very varied means.

Its bibliographic identity should be kept distinct from similarly named titles. The World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, ISSN 2311-8571 (print) and 2589-2894 (online), is not the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine (ISSN 0255-2922), the older Beijing title sponsored by the China Association of Chinese Medicine and the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, nor is it the federation-era Science of Traditional Chinese Medicine distributed through the same publisher's platforms. The federation title is identified by its sponsor, the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies, and by its 2015 start.

Summary

The World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine is the English-language journal of the World Federation of Chinese Medicine Societies, based in Beijing, launched in 2015, and published with Wolters Kluwer Medknow. It carries print ISSN 2311-8571 and online ISSN 2589-2894, is indexed in Scopus, the DOAJ, the Emerging Sources Citation Index and Embase, holds a Scopus CiteScore of 4.2 in the 2025 metrics with a Q2 ranking in complementary and alternative medicine, and publishes peer-reviewed research on TCM theory, clinical practice, acupuncture and herbal medicine for an international readership. In a directory of China's medical periodicals, it represents the outward-facing, English-language face of Chinese medicine's organised global profession.