About Journal of Shijiazhuang Tiedao University (Social Science Edition)

Journal of Shijiazhuang Tiedao University (Social Science Edition)

Overview and identity

The Journal of Shijiazhuang Tiedao University (Social Science Edition) is the humanities and social sciences journal of Shijiazhuang Tiedao University in Shijiazhuang, Hebei Province. It carries ISSN 2095-0365, its own serial identity distinct from the university's older natural science edition, and it appears quarterly. The edition is the humanities companion to the natural science journal of the same university, publishing scholarship in economics, management, law, education and transport policy from an institution best known nationally for railway engineering.

That combination — social science publishing inside a famous engineering university — is the edition's defining feature. Shijiazhuang Tiedao University teaches across science, management, economics, the arts and social sciences as well as engineering, and the social science edition is the reviewed outlet through which that non-engineering side of the university presents its research. It is sponsored by the university under the Hebei Provincial Department of Education, in the same governance framework as its science companion.

Founding in 2007 and early volumes

The social science edition was founded in 2007, a quarter-century after the university's natural science journal. Its early publication record is attested at volume 4 in 2010, consistent with annual volumes from its 2007 founding, and it settled into the quarterly pattern standard for Chinese university social science journals. The late founding, relative to the science edition of 1982, reflects the trajectory of the university itself: an institution created for railway engineering that broadened, decade by decade, into management, economics, law and the humanities, and eventually required a journal of its own for those fields.

The timing also coincides with the university's approach to its 2010 renaming. In March 2010 Shijiazhuang Railway Institute became Shijiazhuang Tiedao University, and the social science edition — launched while the institution was still an institute — took its place in the journal system of the renamed university. Its ISSN 2095-0365 belongs to the same 2095 sequence as the natural science edition's 2095-0373, the two numbers recording the paired re-registration of the university's journals in their modern form.

The sponsoring university: a railway institution broadened

Shijiazhuang Tiedao University descends from the Railway Engineering Institute of the People's Liberation Army, founded in 1950 as a Railway Corps institution, listed as a national key university in 1979, transferred to the Ministry of Railways in 1984 as Shijiazhuang Railway Institute, transferred to Hebei Province in 2000, and renamed a university in 2010. Since 2015 it has been jointly built by the Hebei Provincial People's Government, the National Railway Administration and the Ministry of Education, and Hebei counts it among its key and first-class construction universities.

Alongside its engineering schools — civil engineering, traffic and transportation, mechanical engineering and others — the university's official introductions list schools and departments in economics, management and the humanities and social sciences, and describe a technical university offering a wide range of disciplines covering science, management, economics, arts and social sciences. The social science edition exists because that second, non-engineering university grew up inside the first: its pages are where the economists, management scholars, legal academics and education researchers of a railway university publish.

Scope: economics and management

Economics and management stand at the head of the edition's scope. The university maintains a School of Economics and management teaching and research connected to the transport and construction industries it serves — the economics of infrastructure investment, the management of large engineering projects and enterprises, and the business administration of organisations in the railway and construction sectors. Scholarship in these areas, published in the social science edition, brings a social-scientific lens to the same industry whose engineering the natural science edition records.

That pairing gives the edition a distinctive potential readership. Research on the financing, organisation and management of transport enterprises speaks both to academic economists and management scholars and to the senior practitioner community the university has produced — its graduates include large numbers of managers in China Railway Construction Corporation and similar organisations, whose work raises exactly the economic and managerial questions the edition exists to examine.

Scope: law, education and transport policy

Law and education complete the edition's named humanities fields, together with transport-policy research. Legal scholarship in a railway university's journal naturally engages the legal frameworks of infrastructure and transport — construction and contract law, transport regulation and the public law of large state-directed industries — while education research addresses the training of engineers and the pedagogy of applied, industry-linked higher education of the kind the university itself practises.

Transport policy is the field in which the edition's identity is most its own. The policy questions of Chinese railway development — investment, pricing, safety regulation, regional development effects, the organisation of the state railway system — require exactly the combination the edition assembles: economics, management, law and an institutional home inside the railway engineering community. A transport-policy article published at Shijiazhuang appears in the journal of the university whose engineers build the system the policy governs, a juxtaposition few other social science journals in China can reproduce.

Relationship to the natural science edition

The two editions of the Journal of Shijiazhuang Tiedao University divide the university's research output between them along the standard Chinese line between natural science and social science. The natural science edition, founded in 1982 with ISSN 2095-0373 and CN 13-1042/N, carries civil, bridge, tunnel, transport and mechanical engineering. The social science edition, founded in 2007 with ISSN 2095-0365, carries the university's scholarship on the economic, managerial, legal and educational dimensions of the same transport world.

Together the editions present a complete portrait of the university: the engineering knowledge to build a railway and the social-scientific knowledge to finance, organise, regulate and teach it. For readers of a directory, the social science edition is best understood in that paired role — not as a general social science journal that happens to sit in Shijiazhuang, but as the deliberate second half of a railway university's publishing system.

Shijiazhuang and the Hebei context

The edition is published in Shijiazhuang, the capital of Hebei, a city whose existence as a major urban centre is a product of railway construction — it grew from a village at the point where the Lu–Han railway arrived — and now a principal junction of the north China network. Hebei, encircling Beijing and Tianjin, is a province through which the capital region's transport, industry and population movements constantly pass, generating the economic and policy questions that occupy social scientists at its universities.

The university's own position reinforces the connection. Administered principally by Hebei and supervised in its journal publishing by the Hebei Provincial Department of Education, it serves the province as one of its top universities, while its railway specialism gives it a national constituency. The social science edition sits at that intersection: a provincially governed journal, published quarterly in Chinese, for scholarship on the economy, management and policy of transport and of the region the university serves.

Role in the university's development

The founding of a social science edition in 2007 marked a stage in the university's transformation from a single-purpose railway engineering college into a multi-disciplinary university. Institutions make such transitions in stages — first adding management and economics teaching to serve their industry, then humanities and law, then the research ambitions that require journals. By the time the institute became a university in 2010, its social science edition had already completed its first volumes, giving the new university a complete, two-edition journal system from its first years under the university name.

The edition also serves the university's staff and postgraduate students in the social sciences, for whom a house journal reviewed within their own scholarly community provides a first and continuing venue, and it signals externally — to peer universities, to the railway industry and to Hebei's government — that the university's remit now formally includes the social study of transport. In a publishing landscape dominated by the university's engineering reputation, the social science edition is the documentary evidence of its broader academic identity.

Readership

The edition's readers are scholars and students in economics, management, law, education and transport policy, above all within Hebei's universities and the national community of transport-related social science, together with practitioners and officials concerned with the management and governance of the railway and construction industries. Its quarterly, Chinese-language issues address that domestic readership in its working language.

Catalogued under ISSN 2095-0365 and founded in 2007, the Journal of Shijiazhuang Tiedao University (Social Science Edition) completes the publishing portrait of its sponsor: the humanities and social-science voice of China's railway-named university, descended from the PLA Railway Corps college of 1950 and publishing, since 2007, the economic, legal and policy scholarship of a university built for engineers.