About Transactions of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Transactions of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Overview and bibliographic identity

Transactions of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, abbreviated TNUAA, is an English-language comprehensive engineering journal published in Nanjing, Jiangsu, by Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics (NUAA). It carries the ISSN 1005-1120, and its articles bear DOIs in the form 10.16356/j.1005-1120, embedding the ISSN in the DOI string. It is a bimonthly, peer-reviewed journal, published in six issues a year through the journal's site at tnuaa.nuaa.edu.cn. Its own information for contributors describes it as a bimonthly journal facing the international academic community, emphasising prompt and effective dissemination of key data and new scientific insights, and offering publication of new experimental and theoretical papers bearing on applications to all branches of aeronautics, astronautics and civil aviation.

The journal's volume numbering shows its longevity. Volume 37 appeared in 2020, volume 42 in 2025, and database listings record volume 43, issue 1, in 2026 — one volume per year, continuing without interruption. It is the English-language face of NUAA's journal publishing, and it is a distinct serial from the university's Chinese-language Journal of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, ISSN 1005-2615, which is profiled separately in this directory. The two journals share a publisher, a city and a disciplinary territory; they differ in language, ISSN and intended readership, and under the edition rule applied across this directory those differences make them two journals, not one.

Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics: the publishing institution

NUAA was founded in October 1952 as the Nanjing College of Aviation Industry, one of the first aviation colleges founded in the People's Republic of China. Renamed the Nanjing Aeronautical Institute in 1956, it took its present name in 1993. It is a public university affiliated with the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, part of Project 211 and of the Double First-Class Construction, recognised as a national key university in 1978 and authorised to award doctoral degrees in the first national batch in 1981. The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology and the Civil Aviation Administration of China agreed in December 2012 to build the university jointly, and the ministry, the Ministry of Education and Jiangsu Province added a further joint-building agreement in December 2018.

The university describes itself as a research university with the characteristics of aeronautics, astronautics and civil aviation, based on engineering. Its structure includes colleges of aerospace engineering, energy and power engineering, automation engineering, information science and technology, mechanical engineering, materials science and technology, civil aviation and astronautics. Several NUAA journals are listed among the university's publications, including both titles profiled in this batch and the more specialised Journal of Vibration Engineering. Within that family, the Transactions has the specific job of carrying the university's research, in English, to readers who do not work in Chinese — the function its contributor information expresses as facing the international academic community.

Scope: aeronautics, astronautics and civil aviation in English

The journal's scope, as stated by the university, is the dissemination of original archival research papers on theoretical developments, novel applications and case studies regarding pressing issues in aeronautics, astronautics and civil aviation. Its call-for-papers material repeats the same three-part territory: all branches of aeronautics, all branches of astronautics, and civil aviation. In practice that means aircraft and rotorcraft aerodynamics and design, flight mechanics, propulsion, spacecraft and astronautical engineering, air transportation and airport and air-traffic questions, and the supporting disciplines of mechanics, materials, control and information engineering that the university's colleges represent.

Concrete contents from its recent volumes show how the scope works. Volume 37, issue 1, in February 2020 included a study of pilot micro-behaviour based on human-aircraft-environment interaction, by authors at NUAA's School of Civil Aviation and Flight together with the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Center — civil aviation safety research, in English, aimed at an international flight-safety readership. The same volume year carried an experimental study of the mechanical and acoustic performance of a newly designed metal noise barrier unit plate with a no-riveted connection, work from the College of Civil Aviation that connects aviation-adjacent transport infrastructure to acoustics and structural testing. Issue 6 of volume 37, in December 2020, included a study of handling label noise in air traffic complexity evaluation based on confident learning and XGBoost, from NUAA's civil aviation and computer science colleges — air traffic management meeting machine learning. A reader who samples a single volume therefore meets flight safety, structures and acoustics, and data-driven air traffic research, which is exactly the comprehensive character the journal claims.

Scope: mechanics, materials and special issues

Mechanics and materials are integral to the journal rather than peripheral. Aerospace structures, vibration, composite behaviour and energy materials all fall within the research territory of NUAA's aerospace, mechanical and materials colleges, and the journal actively develops these areas through special issues. Its call for papers for a special issue on "Materials for Energy Storage and Conversion in Aerospace", with Xiaogang Zhang as guest editor, invited novel, high-quality original research articles as well as review articles, short communications and letters benchmarking the state of research on materials for energy storage and conversion pertaining to aerospace applications, and promoting cooperation in the aerospace industry. A special issue of that kind shows the Transactions doing what English-language university journals do for their institutions: selecting a fast-moving topic in which the university has strength — energy materials for aerospace — and presenting it, under a named guest editor, to the international specialists in the field.

Indexing and international visibility

The journal's contributor information and its call-for-papers material list an unusually full set of indexing services for a university journal. TNUAA states that it is indexed by Ei Compendex (USA), Scopus (Holland), Mathematical Reviews (USA), Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA), Science Abstracts (SA, England), the Russian abstracting service PZh, and Zbl (Germany), together with the Chinese Science Citation Database (CSCD) and the Chinese S&T Journal Citation Reports (CSTJCR). Ei Compendex and Scopus are the two listings that matter most to international engineers: Ei Compendex is the principal engineering bibliographic database, and Scopus coverage places the journal in global citation tracking, where SCImago's Scopus-derived listings record it among China's aerospace engineering journals, published by NUAA, with a continuing annual output of articles into 2025. The presence of Mathematical Reviews and zbMATH (Zbl) in the list reflects the journal's mechanics and applied-mathematics contents, which are abstracted by the mathematics services as well as the engineering ones.

For authors, the practical meaning of that indexing list is that an article published in the Transactions, although it appears in a university journal in Nanjing, is retrievable through the same databases an engineer in Europe or North America uses every day. That is the entire rationale of an English-language transactions journal: the research of a Chinese aerospace university, which in the Chinese-language companion journal would be visible abroad mainly as citation metadata, becomes in TNUAA a full text that international readers can read, assess and cite.

Instructions to authors and editorial character

The journal's information for contributors gives a clear picture of its editorial expectations. Manuscripts are to be submitted through the journal's online manuscript submission system at tnuaa.nuaa.edu.cn, after registration. All manuscripts should be written in English, with an abstract of about 600 words — a notably full abstract, suited to a journal whose readers may decide from the abstract whether the work warrants close reading — and keywords of three to five. Manuscripts are peer reviewed by referees, with the contributor information giving a review period of three to six months. These details, preserved in the journal's own contributor documentation, describe a conventional international journal operation: online submission, English full text, structured abstracts, external refereeing. They also underline the difference from the Chinese companion journal, whose submission and reading community is domestic.

Relationship to the Chinese-language journal

The Transactions and the Journal of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics are companions, and this profile treats their relationship as a central fact. Both are published by NUAA in Nanjing. Both are bimonthly. Both cover aeronautics, astronautics, civil aviation, mechanics and materials. They differ in the one respect that determines readership: language. The Journal, ISSN 1005-2615, publishes in Chinese for the domestic research community; the Transactions, ISSN 1005-1120, publishes in English for the international academic community its contributor information explicitly addresses. They are not parallel editions of the same issues, and an article in one should never be cited as if it were in the other. A researcher surveying NUAA's output completely must search both ISSNs; a researcher who reads only English will find the Transactions the accessible half of the pair, and should be aware that the Chinese half exists and is larger in domestic reach.

Readership and use

The journal's intended readers are aerospace researchers outside the Chinese-language system: university and institute engineers in aeronautics and astronautics, civil aviation specialists, and the mechanics and materials communities served by its abstracting services. Libraries encounter it through EBSCO's journal listings, which record its volumes running through volume 42 in 2025 to volume 43 in 2026, and researchers encounter it through Ei Compendex and Scopus searches, where its English titles and abstracts are directly intelligible. For NUAA's own authors, it offers an English venue under their own university's imprint, indexed in the databases by which international collaboration and citation are organised; for external authors and readers, it offers a window into the research programmes of one of China's three principal aerospace universities, presented in a form they can actually read.

Why the journal matters

Transactions of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics matters because it is the mechanism by which a major Chinese aerospace university speaks to the world in the world's scholarly language. Its forty-third volume in 2026 represents more than four decades of annual volumes; its indexing in Ei Compendex and Scopus gives its contents a permanent place in the international engineering record; and its contents — pilot behaviour and flight safety, air traffic complexity, aerospace energy materials, structures and acoustics — show the breadth of NUAA's research as its authors themselves choose to present it abroad. In a directory of Chinese media and journals, it also stands as the clearest illustration of the paired-journal system of Chinese aerospace universities: one university, two flagship journals, two languages, two ISSNs — 1005-2615 in Chinese for home, 1005-1120 in English for the world.