About Chinese Journal of Vaccines and Immunization

Chinese Journal of Vaccines and Immunization

The Chinese Journal of Vaccines and Immunization, known in Chinese as Zhongguo Yimiao he Mianyi, is a Chinese-language public-health journal published in Beijing since 1995. It carries the International Standard Serial Number 1006-916X and the Chinese domestic serial number CN 11-5517/R, and it appears on the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention's own overview of the journals it sponsors or co-sponsors. Where most medical journals treat vaccination as one topic among many, this title is devoted entirely to vaccines and immunisation practice: the surveillance of vaccine-preventable diseases, the coverage and management of China's national immunisation programme, the safety and effectiveness of vaccines in use, and the cold-chain and service-delivery systems that carry vaccines from factory to clinic. It is recognised in China as a Chinese core journal, and its readership is the professional community that runs immunisation in China — staff of the national, provincial and county disease-control system, immunisation planners, and researchers who evaluate vaccine policy.

Identity, ISSN and place in the China CDC journal family

The journal's bibliographic identity is unusually easy to pin down because its sponsoring institution lists it directly. The English-language overview page of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) records that the China CDC sponsors or co-sponsors sixteen academic journals, and among the Chinese-language titles in that family it names the Chinese Journal of Vaccines and Immunization with ISSN 1006-916X and CN 11-5517/R, alongside sister titles such as Disease Surveillance (ISSN 1003-9961). The ISSN stem is also embedded in the digital object identifiers of its articles, which take forms such as 10.3969/j.1006-916X.2008.06.017 in its earlier series and the 10.19914 prefix in more recent years, so individual papers can be traced unambiguously to this title and not to any other vaccine journal. Its Chinese title, Zhongguo Yimiao he Mianyi, translates literally as "China Vaccines and Immunization", and it is cited internationally in abbreviated form as Chin J Vaccines Immun.

Founding in 1995 and the immunisation programme it serves

The journal began publication in 1995, and its volume numbering confirms the date: volume 13 appeared in 2007, volume 14 in 2008, volume 21 in 2015 and volume 27 in 2021, a sequence that runs back in unbroken annual steps to a 1995 first volume. The mid-1990s were a formative moment for Chinese immunisation. China had interrupted indigenous poliovirus transmission by 1995 through oral polio vaccine campaigns, as the China CDC's own immunisation history records, and the planned-immunisation system built since 1978 was maturing into a permanent national programme with its own surveillance, logistics and evaluation needs. A specialist journal gave that programme a professional literature of its own, separate from general epidemiology. The programme's institutional home also took shape in the same era: the China CDC's Center for Immunization Planning traces its origin to the National Technical Guidance Center for Immunization Planning established in 1990 and was formally established under its present name in 2002, with responsibilities that include monitoring vaccination rates and adverse events following immunisation, evaluating vaccine policy and strategy, and drafting technical guidelines — precisely the subject matter this journal publishes.

Scope: surveillance, coverage and programme management

The journal's scope follows the working agenda of a national immunisation programme. One large strand is surveillance of vaccine-preventable diseases themselves: incidence trends for diseases such as measles, hepatitis B, pertussis and Japanese encephalitis, outbreak investigations, and the laboratory and reporting systems that detect them. A second strand measures the programme rather than the diseases — vaccination coverage surveys, studies of under-vaccinated populations such as the children of internal migrants, and analyses of how services reach particular groups. A study of the immunisation status of five vaccines among children living in a migrant-population gathering area of Dalian, published in volume 14 in 2008, is a characteristic example, as is a 2015 paper in volume 21 on the pre-exposure immunisation status of international travellers in Shanghai, which extends the journal's attention from the childhood schedule to travel and occupational vaccination. Programme management topics — cold-chain equipment and practice, immunisation information systems, training and supervision of grassroots vaccination staff, and the financing and supply of programme vaccines — form a third strand that distinguishes the journal from clinically oriented vaccine titles.

Vaccine safety and effectiveness research

Safety surveillance is one of the journal's defining functions. China operates a national system for reporting adverse events following immunisation (AEFI), and the journal has carried the system's landmark descriptive analyses: a study of AEFI surveillance in China in 2005–2006 appeared in volume 13 in 2007, an analysis of the 2014 national AEFI surveillance data followed, and a paper on surveillance for adverse events following immunisation with BCG vaccine in China from 2015 to 2019 appeared in volume 27 in 2021. These papers document how reports are collected, classified and investigated, and they give provincial and county staff a reference point for distinguishing coincidental events from genuine vaccine reactions. Alongside safety, the journal publishes effectiveness and quality work: laboratory quality-control studies, such as an early paper on quality control of measles neutralisation and ELISA assays, evaluations of vaccine potency and of serological responses after vaccination, and field effectiveness studies conducted during outbreaks. Together, the safety and effectiveness strands make the journal the natural home for the evaluative evidence on which Chinese immunisation policy rests.

The Chinese immunisation context reflected in its pages

Reading the journal against the China CDC's published immunisation record shows how closely it tracks national milestones. The prevalence of hepatitis B virus infection in children under five fell from 9.7 percent in 1992 to 0.3 percent in 2014 after neonatal hepatitis B vaccination was popularised; annual measles incidence fell from more than nine million cases in the mid-1990s to below six thousand in 2017; and no diphtheria cases have been reported since 2006. Each of those transitions generated the kinds of questions this journal exists to answer: how coverage was achieved and verified, how surveillance proved that incidence had really fallen, how adverse events were monitored as vaccine use expanded, and how the schedule should adapt as diseases retreat. The periodisation used by Chinese immunisation historians — a planned-immunisation era beginning in 1978 and an expanded national immunisation programme era from 2008, when more vaccines were brought into the free national schedule — is likewise reflected in the journal's contents, which move from establishing basic coverage toward the harder problems of maintaining high coverage, reaching mobile populations and evaluating newer vaccines for possible inclusion in the programme.

Readership and professional role

The journal is written for practitioners as much as for academics. Its natural readers are the staff of the China CDC's immunisation planning system and of provincial and municipal CDCs, the clinicians and nurses who staff vaccination clinics, and the programme managers responsible for vaccine supply, cold chain and coverage targets. Articles are typically in Chinese, the working language of that system, which makes the journal a channel through which national technical guidance, surveillance findings and field experience circulate within China. Research groups at universities and at the China CDC's National Immunization Program also publish in it when their audience is the domestic programme community rather than an international readership; author affiliations on its safety-surveillance papers, for example, run through the National Immunization Program in Beijing and its collaborating provincial units. This practitioner orientation explains the journal's mix of research articles, surveillance reports, programme experience summaries and policy discussion.

Relationship to neighbouring titles

The journal sits in a crowded preventive-medicine neighbourhood, and its boundaries are worth stating precisely. It is not the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology, the Chinese Medical Association's general epidemiological title, nor the Chinese Journal of Preventive Medicine, the association's broad preventive-medicine journal; both of those publish immunisation papers occasionally but cover the whole of their parent disciplines. It is also distinct from the Chinese Journal of Biologicals, published in Changchun in association with a biological-products institute, which deals with the research, manufacture and quality control of vaccines and other biological products as industrial products rather than with their deployment in a public immunisation programme. Within the China CDC family itself, Disease Surveillance reports communicable-disease surveillance generally, while the vaccines journal takes the vaccine-preventable subset and the programme built around it. Holding these distinctions matters for citation practice, because the journal's abbreviated title is sometimes confused in databases with international titles such as Vaccine or Clinical and Vaccine Immunology, which are entirely separate publications.

Publication record and continuity

Continuity is documented across three decades of the journal's run. Citations in the international literature reach from its 2007 volume 13 papers on AEFI surveillance and measles assay quality control, through the 2008 Dalian migrant-children study and the 2015 travellers' immunisation study, to the 2021 BCG safety-surveillance analysis in volume 27 — a span that shows the title publishing steadily through the expansion of the national programme, the strengthening of the AEFI system in the 2010s and the COVID-era intensification of vaccine-safety attention. Its articles are cited in international reviews of vaccine safety surveillance and of vaccination in China, which is how much of the outside world's knowledge of the Chinese AEFI system is sourced. The journal's persistence in the same specialist niche, under the same title and ISSN, since 1995 gives it a cumulative archive value: a researcher tracing how China monitored a single vaccine's safety, or how coverage of a single antigen evolved, can follow the question through successive volumes of one journal rather than across the general medical press.

Why the journal matters

The Chinese Journal of Vaccines and Immunization matters because immunisation is one of the largest organised preventive activities in China, and this is its dedicated professional record. It documents, in the language of the people who operate the system, how vaccine-preventable diseases are watched, how coverage is achieved among more than a billion people, how the safety of hundreds of millions of doses is monitored, and how policy changes are argued from evidence. For readers outside China, it is a primary source — often the primary source — for the operational detail behind the headline achievements of Chinese immunisation, from polio interruption in the year of its founding to the near-elimination of childhood hepatitis B carriage a generation later. As a Beijing-published, China CDC-sponsored core journal with ISSN 1006-916X, it occupies a specific and verifiable place in the world directory of medical periodicals: the specialist vaccines-and-immunisation title of the world's most populous immunisation programme.