About Chinese Journal of Veterinary Science

Chinese Journal of Veterinary Science

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Veterinary Science is a Chinese-language veterinary journal published in Changchun, Jilin province, by Jilin University. Its Chinese title is 中国兽医学报, rendered in pinyin as Zhongguo Shouyi Xuebao, and it carries the ISSN 1005-4545; bibliographic records also give its CODEN as ZSXUF5. Founded in 1981, it is a Chinese core journal covering basic veterinary medicine, preventive veterinary medicine, clinical veterinary medicine and animal infectious disease research. Its articles are registered with DOIs in the form 10.16303/j.cnki.1005-4545, and the journal publishes in Chinese with summaries in Chinese and English, as its records in the international AGRIS agricultural database consistently show.

The journal's publication rhythm can be read from its recent volumes: volume 45 in 2025, with its ninth issue dated September of that year, indicates a monthly pattern of twelve issues a year and an unbroken annual volume sequence running back to its founding era. SCImago's journal ranking tables list the title among the veterinary journals of the Asiatic region, recording 368 documents published in 2023 alone — the output of a large, active national journal rather than a small institutional bulletin, even though it is published by a single university.

Founding and institutional lineage

The journal was founded in 1981 in Changchun. Its institutional ancestry is inseparable from the history of veterinary education in that city. Bibliographic records from the journal's earlier decades name, as the corporate source of its research community, the PLA University of Agriculture and Animal Sciences in Changchun and its Institute of Military Veterinary Medicine — the military veterinary establishment that was based in Changchun and that published fundamental work in animal infectious disease. When that establishment was transferred to Jilin University in 2004, its veterinary departments became the university's college of animal husbandry and veterinary medicine, renamed the College of Veterinary Medicine in 2012, and the journal continued as a Jilin University title.

That lineage gives the journal a distinctive character among Chinese veterinary periodicals. Many university journals were founded by civilian agricultural universities; this one descends from the military veterinary tradition, in which animal disease research — on equine, livestock and epidemic disease — was a strategic as well as an academic undertaking. The journal's long-standing strength in infectious disease and preventive veterinary medicine, visible throughout its contents, is the publishing expression of that inheritance.

The host institution: veterinary medicine at Jilin University

Veterinary education at Jilin University began in 1904, when the Qing government established the Equine Medicine Hall in Baoding, Hebei province — described by the university as the first veterinary school in China and the origin of modern veterinary education in the country. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, the PLA Veterinary University was set up in Changchun, its name inscribed by Commander-in-Chief Zhu De in 1953. The institution was renamed the University of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry of the PLA in 1992 and the Quartermaster University of the PLA in 1999, before being transferred to Jilin University in 2004; the College of Veterinary Medicine took its present name in 2012.

The university calls this college the cradle of China's modern veterinary medicine education and records that it was the first in China to recruit undergraduate and graduate students in veterinary medicine. A journal published from within that institution — one that has trained, in the college's own account, tens of thousands of veterinary professionals over more than a century — speaks with the authority of the discipline's founding school. The Chinese Journal of Veterinary Science is the periodical record of that school in its Jilin University era.

Scope: basic veterinary medicine

The first element of the journal's stated scope is basic veterinary medicine: the foundational sciences of animal health, including veterinary anatomy, physiology, pathology, microbiology and immunology as applied to animals. The journal's cited record shows this strand clearly. It has published structural and functional analyses of viral proteins, studies of viral infection in laboratory animal models — including, in 2021, an investigation of the effects of porcine hemagglutinating encephalomyelitis virus infection on the astrocytes of mice — and work on the immune responses of poultry, such as the early study of chicken infectious anaemia virus and the proliferative responses of T and B lymphocytes that appears in its 1994 volume.

Basic research of this kind underpins everything else the journal publishes. The viruses, bacteria and parasites studied in its laboratory papers are the agents that preventive and clinical veterinarians must diagnose, vaccinate against and treat; by carrying the fundamental work alongside the applied work, the journal keeps the whole chain of veterinary knowledge — from pathogen structure to field control — inside a single title.

Scope: preventive veterinary medicine and infectious disease

Preventive veterinary medicine and animal infectious disease research form the journal's most prominent applied strand, reflecting both its military-veterinary inheritance and China's position as the world's largest producer of farmed animals. The journal publishes work on the identification and characterisation of animal pathogens, on disease mechanisms, and on vaccines and protective interventions. Its recent volumes illustrate the range: in 2025 it published a structural and functional analysis of the NS2 protein of porcine hemagglutinating encephalomyelitis virus, a coronavirus of swine; in 2024, work on the role of butyric acid in hamster leptospirosis; and in 2025, a study of the protective effect of Angelica sinensis polysaccharide against leptospiral infection in golden hamsters.

The journal's archive reaches back across the modern history of China's animal epidemics and emerging diseases. In 1997 it published the report of a new Babesia species found in sheep in China — a taxonomic and diagnostic contribution of the kind on which parasite control depends. Records of its contents are held in AGRIS, the FAO's international agricultural information system, whose entries for the journal run from the 1990s onward and document its coverage of poultry disease, swine disease, parasitology and immunisation, including field trials of vaccines against fowl cholera. For veterinary researchers tracing the first Chinese reports of a pathogen or a control method, this journal is one of the places the record is kept.

Scope: clinical veterinary medicine

The third element of the journal's scope is clinical veterinary medicine: the diagnosis and treatment of disease in individual animals and herds. Clinical content in the journal covers pathology and post-mortem investigation — its AGRIS records include pathological observations on conditions such as chicken ulcerative enteritis — together with pharmacology and therapeutics relevant to practice, such as comparative pharmacokinetic studies of antimicrobials in farmed fish. This clinical strand connects the journal to the working veterinarian in animal husbandry, aquaculture and companion and production animal practice.

Clinical veterinary publishing in China serves an industry of enormous scale. The country's pig, poultry, cattle, sheep and aquaculture sectors require a literature in which drug behaviour, disease presentation and treatment outcomes in Chinese production conditions are reported in Chinese, promptly and in detail. A national core journal published monthly, as this one's issue pattern indicates, is built for exactly that circulation of practical knowledge, while its basic and preventive content serves the research community that supplies the clinics with diagnostics and vaccines.

Standing and indexing

The journal is a Chinese core journal — a status that, in the Chinese system, marks a title as one of the principal journals of its discipline, selected through the national core journal evaluations — and it is listed in SCImago's Scopus-based journal rankings for veterinary science in the Asiatic region. Its presence in AGRIS gives its contents an additional international channel in the agricultural sciences, through which its Chinese-language articles, with their English summaries, become discoverable to veterinary and agricultural researchers worldwide who might otherwise never encounter them.

That combination — domestic core status, a monthly flow of several hundred documents a year, and indexing that reaches both the Scopus ecosystem and the FAO's agricultural system — explains the journal's footprint in international scholarship. Duke University's scholarly records, to take one visible example, catalogue multiple articles from the journal on porcine coronavirus research published by Chinese teams in collaboration with international researchers, evidence that work published here is read, cited and built on far beyond Changchun.

Distinguishing the title

Readers should distinguish the Chinese Journal of Veterinary Science, ISSN 1005-4545, published by Jilin University in Changchun, from other similarly named Chinese veterinary titles. It is not the Chinese Journal of Animal and Veterinary Sciences (Acta Veterinaria et Zootechnica Sinica), the journal of the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine published with the Institute of Animal Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing, nor the Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine, published in Harbin by the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute. The Changchun title is identified by its publisher, Jilin University, its 1981 founding and its ISSN.

Summary

The Chinese Journal of Veterinary Science is a Chinese-language core journal of veterinary medicine, founded in 1981, published in Changchun by Jilin University, and carrying ISSN 1005-4545. It publishes basic veterinary medicine, preventive veterinary medicine, clinical veterinary medicine and animal infectious disease research, in Chinese with English summaries, at a monthly rhythm that produces several hundred documents a year. Behind it stands the longest institutional lineage in Chinese veterinary education — a tradition that began with the first veterinary school of 1904, passed through the PLA veterinary university in Changchun, and continues today in Jilin University's College of Veterinary Medicine — and the journal remains one of the principal periodical records of veterinary science in China.