About Information and Control

Information and Control

Overview and identity

Information and Control (Chinese: 信息与控制; pinyin: Xinxi yu Kongzhi) is a Chinese-language automation journal published in Shenyang by the Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Founded in 1972, it carries ISSN 1002-0411 and covers robotics, intelligent control, information processing and industrial automation. It is among China's oldest automation journals — a title that began publishing when Chinese automation meant analogue control of industrial processes, and that now publishes the robotics research of the institute that is one of China's national robotics centres.

The pairing in the title — information and control — is the founding idea of cybernetics itself: that systems are governed by flows of information as much as by flows of energy. An institute journal carrying that title since 1972, from the academy institute that does China's pioneering work in robotics and industrial automation, is a direct descendant of the cybernetic tradition in Chinese science.

History and founding

The journal was founded in 1972 under the Shenyang Institute of Automation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The institute itself, founded in 1958, was one of the academy's original automation institutes, created to carry control and automation research for Chinese industry; its journal followed as the institute's publication, giving the automation community of the northeast — and of the academy — a specialist title years before most Chinese engineering journals existed.

Publication since 1972 spans the entire modern history of Chinese automation: analogue and then digital control, the computer-control era, the rise of robotics — in which the Shenyang Institute became a national leader — and the current era of intelligent systems. The journal's volumes are a continuous record of that half-century, published from the same institute throughout.

Publisher: Shenyang Institute of Automation, CAS

The Shenyang Institute of Automation (SIA) is the journal's sponsor and home. A Chinese Academy of Sciences institute in Shenyang, Liaoning, SIA is known nationally for robotics — it hosts the State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems — and for research in industrial automation, optoelectronic information and related fields, with a Nature Index research profile recording its current output across applied sciences.

An academy-institute journal takes its character from its institute, and SIA's character is applied and systems-oriented: robots, automation systems and information technology built to work. The journal's editorial board is recorded in SCImago listings as its publisher of record ('Editorial Board of Information and Control'), the standard form for an institute journal, with 68 documents recorded for 2025 in recent SCImago counts.

Scope: robotics

Robotics is the journal's flagship subject, as it is its sponsor's. The journal publishes research on robot systems and control, intelligent robots, and the sensing, planning and manipulation that make robots useful — the research programme of the institute whose laboratory is a national key laboratory for robotics and intelligent systems.

The connection between journal and laboratory matters for readers: papers in this strand frequently come from, or speak directly to, one of China's principal robotics research establishments, whose work spans industrial, special and service robots. A specialist following Chinese robotics in the Chinese language will find this journal on the shortest of short lists.

Scope: intelligent control and information processing

The journal's remaining scope joins intelligent control — the AI-inflected control methods that supplement classical theory — with information processing: the sensing, signal processing and data handling by which automated systems perceive their world. Together with industrial automation, these complete the title's promise: information (perception and processing) and control (decision and action) in one journal.

Industrial automation is where the synthesis is tested. The journal's applied papers address the automation of production and process systems — the institute's original mission from 1958 — now pursued with networked, intelligent methods unimaginable at the founding. In scope, the journal thus covers the full loop of automation, from sensor to decision to actuator, as its title has announced since 1972.

Indexing and standing

SCImago records Information and Control as a journal of the Editorial Board of Information and Control, Shenyang, with an SJR of about 0.223 (Q4 in control and systems engineering in recent listings) and a continuing annual document flow. The journal is an established Chinese core-periodical title in automation, published in Chinese with English abstracts.

Its standing rests less on metrics than on pedigree and institution. Among China's oldest automation journals, published by one of the academy's founding automation institutes, it occupies the senior generation of its field alongside the other long-lived titles in this batch — seniority that in the Chinese journal system carries real professional weight.

Identification note: the title Information and Control was also borne by a famous American journal (founded 1957, renamed Information and Computation in 1987); the Shenyang journal of 1972, ISSN 1002-0411, is a separate, Chinese publication and should not be confused with it.

Publication pattern

The journal publishes regularly from its Shenyang editorial office — recent SCImago data record dozens of documents per year — in the standard Chinese journal format with English titles and abstracts, and its contents are retrievable through China's national journal platforms. Its schedule, sustained across more than fifty years, is the operational fact behind its archive's value.

That archive is the point. A researcher tracing how Chinese automation treated a problem — robot control in the 1980s, intelligent control in the 1990s, networked automation in the 2000s — can follow the treatment decade by decade in a single journal that never moved, never renamed and never stopped. Few sources offer so continuous a thread through the field's history.

Readership and authors

Readers are automation engineers and researchers in robotics, control and information processing — in CAS institutes, universities and the automation industry. The journal speaks particularly to the robotics community gathered around its sponsor institute and to the industrial-automation practitioners of China's manufacturing regions.

Authors come from the same academy-and-university system, with SIA's own researchers prominent — institute journals traditionally carry a strong share of their home institution's work alongside national submissions. For the directory reader, the journal's author community is a guide to where Chinese robotics and automation research is actually done.

Place in Chinese engineering publishing

Founded in 1972 at the Shenyang Institute of Automation, Information and Control is one of the founding-generation journals of Chinese automation — older than the reform era, rooted in one of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' original automation institutes, and still publishing the robotics and automation research of that institute and its national community.

In the WorldNM directory it is profiled as a Shenyang-based Chinese-language magazine-category journal. Alongside its Shenyang neighbour Control and Decision, it marks the Liaoning capital as one of the historic centres of Chinese control publishing — a distinction this batch's two Shenyang titles together establish.

The Shenyang context completes the picture. The journal's home city was for decades the centre of China's state industrial automation effort, and its home institute — founded in 1958, when automation was a new science everywhere — helped build that effort. Information and Control is thus not merely about Chinese automation; it is one of the instruments by which Chinese automation organised itself, publishing the field to itself from the institute that practised it. That is the sense in which, of all the titles in this batch, it may be the one most deeply woven into its subject's history.