About Journal of Sichuan University (Engineering Science Edition)

Journal of Sichuan University (Engineering Science Edition)

Overview and bibliographic identity

The Journal of Sichuan University (Engineering Science Edition) is a Chinese-language engineering journal published in Chengdu, Sichuan, by Sichuan University. Its Chinese title is Sichuan Daxue Xuebao, Gongcheng Kexue Ban, and it carries the ISSN 1009-3087. Bibliographic listings record the publisher as Sichuan Daxue, the university itself, and the journal is produced through the editorial department responsible for the Journal of Sichuan University family of editions. It is the engineering member of that family: where the university's other editions are devoted to the natural sciences, to medicine, and to philosophy and the social sciences, this edition exists specifically to publish engineering research.

That position inside a multi-edition university journal system is the first thing a reader needs to understand about the title. Large Chinese comprehensive universities commonly publish their学报 (xuebao, or university journal) in several parallel editions, each with its own ISSN, editorial handling and disciplinary territory. The Engineering Science Edition is therefore not a section or a supplement of the other Sichuan University journals. It is a separate serial, with its own ISSN 1009-3087, its own article numbering built on that ISSN, and its own readership of engineers and applied scientists. Cataloguers, librarians and researchers citing work from Chengdu need to keep that separation in mind, because an article in the Engineering Science Edition and an article in the Natural Science Edition belong to two different journals that happen to share a parent university and part of a name.

The renaming question: Advanced Engineering Sciences

Any honest profile of this journal has to address its later history, because the title under ISSN 1009-3087 does not continue unchanged to the present day. Scopus-derived journal listings record a successor title, Gongcheng Kexue Yu Jishu, rendered in English as Advanced Engineering Sciences (also listed in the singular form Advanced Engineering Science), with a new ISSN, 2096-3246, and with coverage beginning in 2017. The publisher recorded for the successor is the same Editorial Department of Journal of Sichuan University, in the same country and city, which is the clearest bibliographic sign that this is a continuation under a new title rather than an unrelated new journal.

The volume numbering supports the same reading. Articles in the successor title in 2017 appear in volume 49, and database listings show the title reaching volume 54 in 2022, a steady one-volume-per-year progression. A journal that genuinely began in 2017 would have started at volume 1; a journal whose 2017 volume is numbered 49 is carrying forward the numbering of a long-running predecessor. The change is therefore best described as a renaming that took effect with the 2017 volume year: the Engineering Science Edition of the Journal of Sichuan University continued as Gongcheng Kexue Yu Jishu / Advanced Engineering Sciences, under ISSN 2096-3246, while the older title and ISSN 1009-3087 remain the correct citation identity for the volumes published before the change. SCImago's listings, which are built on Scopus data, continue to track the successor in the Engineering (miscellaneous) category, placing it in the third quartile in recent listings.

For users of this directory, the practical consequence is straightforward. Pre-2017 engineering research from Sichuan University should be searched and cited under Journal of Sichuan University (Engineering Science Edition) and ISSN 1009-3087. Later work from the same editorial department should be searched under the Gongcheng Kexue Yu Jishu / Advanced Engineering Sciences title and ISSN 2096-3246. Treating the two titles as two unrelated journals would split one continuous publishing history in half; treating them as the same title without noting the change would produce citations that cannot be verified. This profile keeps the historical title assigned to it, and records the successor explicitly so that both halves of the record can be found.

Sichuan University: the publishing institution

Sichuan University is a public university in Chengdu affiliated with and funded by China's Ministry of Education, and one of the earliest modern institutions of higher education in China. Its modern history is dated to 1896, when the Sichuan Chinese and Western School was formally opened in Chengdu on 18 June of that year, following a petition by Lu Chuanlin, then governor of Sichuan, to the Guangxu Emperor. The present-day university is the product of two major mergers: in 1994 the former Sichuan University merged with the former Chengdu University of Science and Technology to form Sichuan Union University, renamed Sichuan University in 1998, and in 2000 the former West China University of Medical Sciences merged into it as well. The university works across three Chengdu campuses — Wangjiang, Huaxi and Jiang'an.

The 1994 merger matters directly for this journal. The engineering side of today's Sichuan University descends in large part from the Chengdu institution: in August 1954 the former College of Engineering of Sichuan University became the independent Chengdu Engineering College, initially encompassing fields including mechanical, electrical, civil and hydraulic engineering, and in 1955 it absorbed the Sichuan Chemical Engineering College. That lineage — an engineering college strong in exactly the disciplines this journal covers — flowed back into the merged university in 1994, and the Engineering Science Edition is the journal in which that engineering tradition publishes within the university's journal family. The 2000 medical merger, by contrast, explains the separate Medical Science Edition, which is a different journal again.

Scope: water resources and hydraulics first

The journal's stated territory is water resources and hydraulics, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering and materials. Within that list, water comes first, and that ordering reflects the university's genuine research profile. Sichuan University is home to the State Key Laboratory of Hydraulics and Mountain River Engineering, attached to its College of Water Resources and Hydropower. The laboratory was authorised by the National Planning Board in May 1988 and is described in the university's own materials as the first approved State Key Laboratory in the hydraulic engineering field. The underlying discipline of hydraulics and river dynamics had been a key discipline at the university since 1952 and was among the first batch of doctoral programmes in China in 1981.

The laboratory's stated research areas show the kind of work that feeds a journal like this one: high dam hydraulics, sediment dynamics in mountain rivers, the water environment of high dams and large reservoirs, dam and reservoir bank safety, and the intelligent scheduling of cascade hydropower stations. Its predecessor college structure likewise included departments of hydraulic and hydroelectric engineering, hydrology and water resources, and agricultural hydraulic engineering. Sichuan is a province of large rivers and major hydropower development, and Chengdu's university has built a national position in the engineering of mountain rivers, high dams and flood discharge. Papers on river-bed adjustment in mountain rivers, on the breach processes of landslide dams, and on stage-discharge prediction in compound channels — all recorded in this journal in its final years under the old title, in 2014 to 2016 — are representative examples of that hydraulics tradition in print.

Scope: civil, mechanical, chemical and materials engineering

Beyond water, the edition covers the wider engineering of the merged university. Civil engineering work addresses structures, geotechnical problems and construction materials; work recorded in the journal and its successor includes studies of recycled coarse aggregate and the drying shrinkage of concrete, and of boundary shear stress in sharply curved channels, a topic that sits where civil and hydraulic engineering meet. Mechanical engineering contributions include work on structures and vibration, such as research on neural-network generalisation applied to cable-force vibration measurement, which appeared in the successor title. Chemical engineering, inherited from the Chengdu University of Science and Technology lineage and its 1955 absorption of chemical-engineering resources from across southwestern China, and materials science and engineering complete the stated scope.

This breadth is characteristic of a university engineering xuebao. Unlike a specialist society journal, which serves one discipline wherever its practitioners work, the Engineering Science Edition served as the general engineering outlet of one very large university, publishing across the departments of its engineering colleges. Its contents therefore map the research life of those colleges — hydraulics strongest, because that is where Sichuan University is strongest, but civil, mechanical, chemical and materials work appearing alongside it — rather than the agenda of a single professional society.

Position among the Sichuan University editions

Readers should distinguish this journal carefully from its siblings. The Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Science Edition), ISSN 0490-6756, publishes the university's basic-science research in fields such as mathematics, physics, chemistry and biology. The Medical Science Edition publishes the research of the West China medical tradition that entered the university in the 2000 merger, and carries its own separate ISSN. The Philosophy and Social Sciences edition covers the humanities and social sciences. Each edition is a distinct serial. An author submitting an engineering manuscript, a librarian ordering a subscription, or a researcher tracing a citation must select the edition whose ISSN matches the work in hand; citing the parent title "Journal of Sichuan University" without the edition is ambiguous, because four different journals answer to it.

Language, readership and use

The journal publishes in Chinese, as its Chinese title indicates, and its primary readership is the Chinese engineering research community: faculty and graduate students in university engineering departments, researchers in water-resources and hydropower institutes, and practising engineers working on the dams, rivers, structures and industrial plant of western China. Through abstracting and citation databases, including Scopus coverage recorded for its articles and for its successor title, its research is also discoverable internationally, typically through English-language titles, abstracts and citation records even though the full text is Chinese. That pattern — Chinese full text, international bibliographic visibility — is the standard position of a major Chinese university xuebao, and it is why the journal appears in global author and citation records despite being a domestic-language publication.

Why the journal matters

The Journal of Sichuan University (Engineering Science Edition) matters for three reasons. First, it documents the engineering output of one of China's oldest and largest universities across the decades in which western China built hydropower stations, transport infrastructure and heavy industry at exceptional speed, and its hydraulics contents in particular record research from a state key laboratory working on mountain rivers and high dams. Second, its history illustrates how Chinese university publishing reorganised itself in the 2010s, when long-running xuebao editions were relaunched under new titles and new ISSNs — here, the 2017 continuation as Gongcheng Kexue Yu Jishu / Advanced Engineering Sciences — in pursuit of clearer disciplinary identity and international indexing. Third, precisely because of that renaming, it is a title that researchers can easily lose: work published in Chengdu under ISSN 1009-3087 and work published there under ISSN 2096-3246 belong to one continuous journal, and a complete search of Sichuan University's engineering literature must follow the title across the change.