About Journal of Yangzhou University (Agricultural and Life Science Edition)

Journal of Yangzhou University (Agricultural and Life Science Edition)

Overview and identity

The Journal of Yangzhou University (Agricultural and Life Science Edition) is the Chinese-language agricultural journal of Yangzhou University, published quarterly in Yangzhou, Jiangsu Province. Its Chinese title is Yangzhou Daxue Xuebao Nongye Yu Shengming Kexue Ban, and it carries the ISSN 1671-4652, recorded in journal directories as both the print and electronic identifier of the title, with its quarterly frequency confirmed in those same directory records. The journal publishes peer-reviewed research in agronomy, animal and veterinary science, horticulture, food science and the life sciences — the agricultural half of the research output of one of China's largest comprehensive universities, whose agricultural colleges descend from some of Jiangsu's earliest agricultural schools.

The edition is a separate journal in its own right, not a section of another title. Yangzhou University publishes parallel editions of its flagship journal, and this Agricultural and Life Science Edition holds its own ISSN, wholly distinct from the Natural Science Edition's ISSN 1007-824X and from the university's already-covered Humanities and Social Sciences Edition. Under the edition rule applied throughout this directory — a distinct ISSN and disciplinary remit make a distinct journal — the agricultural edition is listed separately, and its articles, volumes and citations must never be merged with those of its sibling editions.

The publisher: Yangzhou University and its 1992 merger

Yangzhou University was established in 1992 as China's pioneering merger university, formed by combining six colleges: Jiangsu Agricultural College, Yangzhou Teachers' College, Yangzhou Institute of Technology, Yangzhou Medical College, Jiangsu Water Conservancy College and Jiangsu Commerce College. It is a key comprehensive university of Jiangsu Province, jointly constructed since 2015 by the Jiangsu Provincial People's Government and the Ministry of Education, teaching across twelve disciplines on a multi-campus estate in one of China's first-designated famous historical and cultural cities.

For this journal, one partner in that merger matters above all: Jiangsu Agricultural College. It brought into the new university a complete agricultural establishment — crop science, animal husbandry, veterinary medicine, horticulture and agricultural biology — with its own staff, farms, laboratories and scholarly traditions. When the merged university organised its journal publishing into editions, agriculture was strong enough, and distinct enough, to sustain an edition of its own rather than being absorbed into the natural-science title. The Agricultural and Life Science Edition is the direct product of that decision, and its existence is one of the clearest bibliographic traces of the agricultural college's continuing identity inside the comprehensive university.

Agricultural roots reaching back to 1902

The university's agricultural lineage is far older than the 1992 merger. Yangzhou University traces its origins to 1902, when Zhang Jian, the celebrated industrialist and educator of modern China, founded the Tongzhou Teachers' School and the Tonghai Agricultural School — the latter among the earliest modern agricultural schools in the region. The agricultural school's line passed into Nantong College's agriculture section, and in the national reorganisation of 1952 those agricultural courses moved west to Yangzhou, forming the Northern Jiangsu — Subei — Agricultural College from which Jiangsu Agricultural College, and ultimately this journal's sponsoring community, developed.

Individual colleges still tell that story in their own histories. The College of Animal Science and Technology, formally founded in 2004, traces its ancestry to Zhang Jian's 1902 foundation and recalls pioneer scientists of animal husbandry and veterinary science who built the discipline there across generations. The College of Veterinary Medicine likewise presents itself as founded on the legacy of the Tonghai Agricultural School of 1902, formally established as Yangzhou University's veterinary college in 2003. A journal published for communities with a self-conscious 120-year lineage is therefore not merely a research outlet; it is the current chapter of one of Jiangsu's oldest agricultural education traditions.

Scope: agronomy and horticulture

Agronomy is the journal's foundational field: the science of crops and farming systems in the fertile, intensively farmed landscapes of Jiangsu, where rice, wheat, rapeseed and vegetables are produced under some of China's most demanding land-use conditions. Yangzhou's crop researchers work within a university whose plant and animal sciences and agricultural sciences stand in the top one percent of the global ESI rankings, according to provincial education reporting, and the journal carries their work on crop cultivation and farming systems, varieties and production — including, as citations in the international literature show, studies of cigar tobacco production technology published in its pages in 2019. Work of this kind serves Jiangsu's farms directly while contributing to national debates on yield, quality and sustainable intensification.

Horticulture extends the same plant-science mission to fruit, vegetables and ornamental production. In a province of dense cities and high-value agriculture, horticultural research — on varieties, protected cultivation, quality and post-harvest handling — has an immediate commercial and public readership beyond the university. Placing horticulture beside agronomy in the journal's scope reflects the structure of Yangzhou's agricultural colleges, where field crops and horticultural crops are studied by neighbouring communities sharing laboratories, trial fields and postgraduate programmes.

Scope: animal and veterinary science

Animal science and veterinary medicine form the journal's second pillar, and historically one of its strongest. The College of Animal Science and Technology describes a community of around a hundred faculty working across animal science, aquaculture and grassland science, hosting a Jiangsu provincial key laboratory of animal genetics, breeding and molecular design, and taking credit for widely adopted livestock achievements — the popularisation of Yangzhou geese, Jinhai yellow chickens and Sujiang pigs among them, alongside feed and honeybee-product work that the college reports as bringing marked social and economic benefits. Research of exactly this kind — breeding, nutrition, production systems — is the natural content of the animal-science sections of an agricultural university journal.

The veterinary community adds the animal-health dimension. Yangzhou's College of Veterinary Medicine integrates education, research and clinical services across basic, preventive and clinical veterinary sciences, hosts key laboratories of the Ministry of Education and of Jiangsu Province, and is recognised for work in animal disease control, vaccine development and transgenic animal research, with collaborations extending to institutions in the United States, Britain, Germany and Japan. Its affiliated teaching animal hospital gives its research a clinical base. For the journal, that means its animal pages range from laboratory immunology to field disease prevention — the full span of a modern veterinary school's output, published in Chinese for the practitioners, farms and agencies of the region it serves.

Scope: food science and life sciences

Food science connects the journal's farm research to the processing industries and consumers at the end of the food chain. Jiangsu's dense urban markets create strong demand for work on food quality, safety, processing and preservation, and a comprehensive university that teaches both agriculture and related sciences can carry a result from field trial to food product within a single institution — and, in this journal, within a single title. The life sciences, named in the edition's very title, supply the underlying biology: genetics, microbiology, biochemistry and molecular biology as they apply to crops, livestock and food. The university's ESI-recognised standing in biology and biochemistry, microbiology and molecular biology and genetics underwrites this strand of the scope.

The quarterly rhythm of publication suits this remit. Agricultural research is seasonal and cumulative: field trials report after harvests, breeding programmes over years, disease studies as outbreaks and control campaigns conclude. Four issues a year give the edition room for full research articles across its five named fields without the pressure of a monthly schedule, and they match the directory record of the journal as a quarterly title under ISSN 1671-4652.

Yangzhou and Jiangsu as an agricultural setting

The journal's geography is integral to its content. Yangzhou stands where the Yangtze River meets the Grand Canal, in the agricultural heartland of northern Jiangsu — the Subei region the university's agricultural predecessors were explicitly created to serve. Yangzhou University's own histories emphasise a working method built on serving agricultural and rural development by combining fieldwork, scientific research and classroom teaching, with northern Jiangsu as its base. Research published here is therefore characteristically place-aware: soils, waters, livestock systems and farming households of the Jiangsu plain are its recurring subjects, studied by scientists whose institution has worked the same ground, in organisational terms, since 1902.

The journal in China's agricultural publishing landscape

China supports a large ecosystem of agricultural journals — national society titles, academy journals and the agricultural editions of university xuebao — and Yangzhou's edition occupies the university tier of that ecosystem. Its particular value is integration: where a national journal specialises, this title ranges across the whole agricultural college portfolio, so that agronomists, veterinarians, horticulturists and food scientists of one university read, cite and referee one another in a shared forum. Directory records list the journal under its romanised Chinese title with its quarterly frequency, and its articles surface in international agricultural bibliographies, showing that even a Chinese-language, regionally anchored journal contributes records to the world's agricultural literature.

Distinguishing the edition

The journal's full identity is: Journal of Yangzhou University (Agricultural and Life Science Edition); Chinese title Yangzhou Daxue Xuebao Nongye Yu Shengming Kexue Ban; ISSN 1671-4652; language Chinese; frequency quarterly; place of publication Yangzhou, Jiangsu; publisher Yangzhou University. It is a separate title from the university's Natural Science Edition (ISSN 1007-824X), listed separately in this batch, and from its Humanities and Social Sciences Edition. It should also be distinguished from other Jiangsu agricultural periodicals with similar names, such as Jiangsu Agricultural Sciences, an unrelated journal of the provincial academy system.

Readership and use

The edition's readers are agricultural researchers, veterinarians, extension specialists, food-industry scientists and postgraduate students, concentrated in Jiangsu and the wider Yangtze Delta but extending wherever Yangzhou's graduates and collaborators work. For practitioners, it offers locally tested results — on Jiangsu crops, regional livestock breeds such as the Yangzhou goose, and animal-disease control in the province's farming conditions — that national journals cannot supply at the same local resolution. For scholars of Chinese agricultural education, its volumes document the continuing research life of a college tradition founded in 1902, carried through the Subei and Jiangsu agricultural colleges, and preserved, under its own ISSN, inside one of China's largest comprehensive universities.