About Optics and Precision Engineering

Optics and Precision Engineering

Optics and Precision Engineering (光学精密工程) is a Chinese-language academic journal published in Changchun, Jilin, China. Founded in 1993 and identified by ISSN 1004-924X, it is one of the established specialist journals through which Chinese researchers in optics and precision engineering report original work, review progress in their discipline and communicate with the wider national research community. Its sponsoring and publishing home is Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. For readers of WorldNM this profile records, from verified bibliographic and institutional sources only, what the journal is, who stands behind it, what it publishes and why it matters within Chinese science.

Overview and Identity

The journal's formal identity is straightforward and well documented. Its Chinese title is 光学精密工程, rendered in English as Optics and Precision Engineering. It is published from Changchun in Jilin, and its International Standard Serial Number is 1004-924X, the identifier used by libraries, abstracting services and citation databases worldwide to distinguish it from similarly named titles. That distinction matters in this field, because Chinese science supports several journals with overlapping English names, and the ISSN, the city of publication and the sponsoring body together fix exactly which journal is meant here.

Optics and Precision Engineering is a peer-reviewed research journal, not a trade magazine or a popular publication. Its articles are written by researchers for researchers, carry the apparatus of scholarly publishing — abstracts, keywords, references and institutional affiliations — and are read primarily in universities, academy institutes and industry research centres. Publication in Chinese is itself significant: it serves the large domestic research community that works day to day in Chinese, while English titles and abstracts, where provided, make individual articles discoverable internationally.

History and Origins

The journal was founded in 1993. That date places its origins in a specific moment in the development of Chinese science. Journals founded in China in the decades after 1949 were typically created by academy institutes or national learned societies to give a fast-growing research system its own channels of record, at a time when publishing abroad was difficult and domestic communication was essential. A journal that has continued from 1993 to the present has therefore lived through the expansion, reform and internationalisation of Chinese research, and its back archive is a primary source for the history of its discipline in China.

Continuity over that span should not be taken for granted. Many periodicals founded in the same era changed titles, merged or ceased. The continued appearance of Optics and Precision Engineering under its established title and ISSN indicates a stable sponsoring institution, a continuing community of authors and readers, and a subject area that has remained active. Where a journal's early title differed from its present one, that earlier history still belongs to the same publication lineage, and libraries catalogue the run accordingly. The verified founding year of 1993 is the anchor for that lineage in this profile.

Publisher, Sponsor and Institutional Home

Behind the journal stands Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. In the Chinese academic publishing system, a journal is typically sponsored by a research institute, a university or a national learned society, and that sponsorship shapes its character: the sponsor supplies its editorial community, its reviewer networks and much of its early authorship, while the journal in turn serves researchers well beyond its home institution.

The institute behind the journal, the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics, was founded in 1952 and focuses on luminescence, applied optics, optical engineering and precision mechanics and instrumentation. Directory records classify the journal under Materials Science and Physics and Astronomy, with Scopus categories including Atomic and Molecular Physics and Optics and Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials.

Understanding the sponsor also explains the journal's location. Editorial offices in this system sit with the sponsoring body, so publication from Changchun, Jilin, reflects institutional geography rather than a commercial choice. For librarians and researchers, the sponsor is also a quality signal: academy institutes and national societies maintain editorial boards drawn from active researchers and apply the peer-review norms of their disciplines.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's verified scope covers modern applied optics, precision engineering, space optics, micro-nano fabrication and optical measurement. In full, its subject territory includes: modern applied optics; precision engineering; space optics; micro-nano fabrication and optical measurement. Those headings define both what editors will consider and what readers can expect to find. Submissions outside that territory are normally redirected to more suitable journals, which keeps the title coherent as a disciplinary record.

Scope statements of this kind are deliberately practical. Each heading corresponds to a community of authors and a set of methods. A paper in this journal will typically state a research problem within one of those headings, describe the materials, instruments, data or fieldwork involved, present results in tables, figures or analyses, and discuss what the findings add to existing knowledge. Review articles, which survey and synthesise a subfield, appear in many Chinese academy journals alongside original research and are among their most cited items, because they give newcomers and neighbouring specialists a reliable entry point into the literature.

Research Themes in Practice

Reading across the journal's stated scope shows how its themes connect. Work on modern applied optics sits alongside work on precision engineering, and both draw on shared methods, shared instruments and shared questions about how results obtained in the laboratory, in computation or in the field can be trusted and reproduced. That combination of fundamental and applied material is characteristic of Chinese academy journals in the applied sciences and earth sciences, whose sponsors are themselves charged with both advancing knowledge and serving national needs.

Authors publishing in Optics and Precision Engineering are drawn from across China, not only from Changchun. National circulation matters: a result reported from one institute can be tested, extended or applied by groups elsewhere only if the community's journals circulate it promptly and permanently. The journal's archive therefore functions as shared memory for the discipline, recording negative as well as positive results, incremental improvements as well as breakthroughs, in a form that later work can cite.

Language, Readership and Communication

Optics and Precision Engineering publishes in Chinese. That choice serves its primary readership — researchers, engineers, graduate students and technical specialists working in China — and preserves the precise technical vocabulary of the discipline in Chinese. At the same time, Chinese scholarly journals operate inside an international bibliographic system: ISSN registration, abstracting services and citation databases ensure that an article published in Chinese in Changchun can be found by a researcher anywhere who searches by subject, author or institution.

The readership is specialist rather than general. Few copies reach newsstands; instead the journal is read in institute libraries, through Chinese academic databases and, increasingly, through its online presence and article-level digital identifiers where these are assigned. For the historian or bibliographer, that distribution pattern is typical of academy publishing worldwide: influence is measured not by retail sales but by citation, by use in teaching and by the journal's standing in the evaluation systems that Chinese institutions apply to research output.

Indexing, Standing and Bibliographic Record

The journal's documented standing includes the following verified points: Scopus coverage from 2005. It carries ISSN 1004-924X and is catalogued under its Chinese title 光学精密工程 as well as its English rendering. In China, inclusion in national core-journal lists and in the Chinese Science Citation Database system is the standing that matters most for domestic evaluation, while coverage in international services such as Scopus extends discoverability abroad; this profile records only the coverage that sources actually attest for this title and does not claim wider indexing.

Bibliographic care matters particularly for transliterated Chinese titles. The same journal may appear in databases under a pinyin rendering, a translated title or the original characters, and records can fragment across those forms. Citing the ISSN alongside the title is the reliable way to reunite them. Researchers tracing a reference to Optics and Precision Engineering should therefore search by ISSN 1004-924X as well as by title, and should treat the Changchun publication place and the sponsor, Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, as confirming details.

Place in Chinese Scientific Publishing

China's scientific journal system is large, decentralised and closely tied to its research institutions. Alongside a small number of famous general titles, it contains hundreds of specialist journals like this one, each anchored to an institute or society and each carrying the detailed, cumulative record of a single field. Optics and Precision Engineering belongs to that specialist layer. Its contribution is not a handful of headline papers but the steady, refereed accumulation of results in optics and precision engineering from 1993 onward.

That layer is easy to overlook in English-language accounts of Chinese science, which naturally concentrate on the minority of papers published in international journals. Yet domestic journals remain where much applied, regional and methodological work is first and sometimes only reported. A directory profile that records them accurately — correct title, sponsor, city, ISSN and scope, with nothing invented — helps correct that imbalance and gives each title a findable, factual presence.

Why the Journal Matters and How to Use This Record

For a researcher entering the field covered by Optics and Precision Engineering, the journal offers a map of who works on what in China, which methods are standard and which questions remain open. For a librarian, its ISSN, sponsor and place of publication support correct cataloguing and inter-library work. For a reader of this directory, the essential verified facts are these: title Optics and Precision Engineering (光学精密工程); published in Changchun, Jilin, China; founded in 1993; ISSN 1004-924X; sponsor and publisher Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences; scope covering modern applied optics, precision engineering, space optics, micro-nano fabrication and optical measurement.

This profile deliberately confines itself to facts attested by the journal's own record, its sponsoring institutions and credible directories. Details that could not be verified — such as a complete list of editors, exact issue-by-issue contents or current commercial terms for authors — are omitted rather than guessed. That restraint is the standard applied across the WorldNM directory: a shorter truth is worth more than a longer invention, and in this case the verified record is sufficient to support the full account given above.