About Journal of Inner Mongolia Normal University

Journal of Inner Mongolia Normal University

The Journal of Inner Mongolia Normal University is the academic journal sponsored by Inner Mongolia Normal University in Hohhot, the capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. The university publishes its journal in separate Chinese-language editions. The Philosophy and Social Sciences edition carries ISSN 1001-7623, a number attested in the digital object identifiers of its articles, for example DOI 10.3969/j.issn.1001-7623.2010.02.004. Separate Natural Science (Chinese) and Education Science editions also exist alongside it. Because the natural-science edition's ISSN could not be fully attested in the sources consulted for this profile, the journal is recorded here once, under its plain name, with the philosophy and social sciences edition as its best-documented form.

An edition-based journal

Like most large Chinese normal universities, Inner Mongolia Normal University does not publish a single undifferentiated journal. Scholarship is divided by field: humanities and social sciences in one edition, natural sciences in another, and education science — the founding discipline of any normal university — in an edition of its own. The philosophy and social sciences edition, ISSN 1001-7623, is the edition through which the university's historians, philosophers, literary scholars, economists and social scientists publish. Its DOI record, attested from 2010 articles onward, shows the edition operating within China's standard digital citation system, in which each article receives a persistent identifier built on the journal's ISSN.

The sponsoring university

Inner Mongolia Normal University was established on 5 May 1952 in Ulanhot, then the capital of the region. It was the first institution of higher education established by the Communist Party of China and the state in a border ethnic-minority area after the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and the first university established in Inner Mongolia in that period. In 1953 and 1954 the college formed by merging Zhangjiakou Teachers College and Suiyuan Teachers College was incorporated, the institution took the name Inner Mongolia Normal College, and it settled in Hohhot with both Mongolian and Chinese departments. In 2000 the Inner Mongolia Institute of Education was incorporated into the university. It is a key university of the autonomous region and is known as the cradle of ethnic education.

Ethnic education as institutional mission

The university describes itself as a comprehensive normal university with distinctive characteristics of teacher education and ethnic education. It is the autonomous region's base for training basic-education teachers, ethnic-education teachers and Mongolian-Chinese bilingual talent, and it serves as the region's middle-school teacher training centre and primary and secondary school teacher continuing-education centre. Of its roughly 92 undergraduate programmes, about 30 are taught in Mongolian, and thousands of its students study through Mongolian-language textbooks. A journal published by such an institution naturally carries scholarship on the languages, history, folklore and education of the Mongolian people and of northern China, alongside general humanities and social-science research, although each edition's precise column structure is set by its own editorial office.

Scale of the university

Inner Mongolia Normal University offers 92 undergraduate majors covering ten disciplines, holds the right to confer doctoral degrees in five first-level disciplines and master's degrees in 26 first-level disciplines, and maintains a postdoctoral research station. Its student body numbers more than 31,000 full-time undergraduates together with several thousand postgraduates, adult-education students and international students. The university's main address is 81 Zhaowuda Road, in the Saihan District of Hohhot. It has established cooperative relations with universities and research institutions in more than twenty countries, including Mongolia and Russia. A journal attached to an institution of this scale draws its authors and readers from a large regional professoriate and from the teacher-training system of the whole autonomous region.

Hohhot and Inner Mongolia

Hohhot, the journal's home city, is the political, economic and cultural centre of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, a vast northern border region of China adjoining Mongolia and Russia. The region's universities carry a distinctive research agenda shaped by steppe ecology, pastoral society, Mongolian language and literature, and the history of China's northern frontier. The university's own research structure — including its Academy of Mongolian Studies, established in 2001, and the Northeast Asian Ethnic History and Culture Research Institute, established in Hohhot in December 2019 — reflects that agenda, and the philosophy and social sciences edition is one of the publication channels through which such regionally grounded scholarship enters the national Chinese-language literature.

Scope of the philosophy and social sciences edition

The documented edition of the journal covers philosophy and the social sciences: the fields named in its edition title. In the practice of Chinese normal-university journals, that remit spans philosophy, economics, political science, law, sociology, history, language and literature, and education-related social research. The university's teaching strengths in these areas — it lists philosophy, economics, law, political science and public administration, and sociology among its standout majors — define the pool of scholarship from which the edition is built. Articles are published in Chinese and are cited by author, title, year, volume and issue in the standard Chinese format, with DOIs in the 10.3969/j.issn.1001-7623 series providing persistent digital links.

A family of editions

Understanding this journal requires understanding the family it belongs to. The philosophy and social sciences edition (ISSN 1001-7623) is the humanities and social-science serial; the natural science edition serves the university's mathematicians, physicists, chemists, biologists and geographers; and the education science edition serves the discipline for which the university was founded. Citations must be matched to the correct edition, because the editions are separate serials even though they share the university's name. This profile records the journal under its plain name, as the sponsoring institution's journal, and identifies the philosophy and social sciences edition as the form whose ISSN is firmly attested through its articles' DOIs.

Readership and role

The journal's readers are scholars and teachers in the humanities and social sciences across Inner Mongolia and China, together with the librarians and database indexers who track Chinese academic serials. For its sponsor, the journal is both a service and a record: a service to regional scholarship, giving the professoriate of China's northern border region a peer-reviewed Chinese-language outlet, and a record of the research life of a university founded in 1952 to bring higher education to the ethnic-minority borderlands. Its survival and continued DOI registration into the present century mark it as one of the durable academic serials of the autonomous region.

International and affiliated institutions

The university's international profile is part of the context in which its journal circulates. Inner Mongolia Normal University began enrolling international students in the 1980s and has since accepted more than 2,000 of them from more than ten countries; its current admissions materials record 62 inter-university cooperation agreements with institutions in fifteen countries and regions, including Russia, Mongolia, South Korea, Japan, Australia, the United States, Belarus, the United Kingdom and Germany, and it has established Confucius Institutes in Russia and Mongolia. At home, its best-known affiliated institution is the Affiliated Middle School, founded in 1954, a public high school blending Chinese and Mongolian cultures with teaching in Mandarin Chinese, Mongolian and English. These connections — cross-border, bilingual and school-based — mirror the journal's own position at the meeting point of Mongolian and Chinese scholarship.

How to identify the journal

The journal is identified by its title, Journal of Inner Mongolia Normal University, its sponsor, Inner Mongolia Normal University of Hohhot, and — for the philosophy and social sciences edition — ISSN 1001-7623. Article DOIs beginning 10.3969/j.issn.1001-7623 belong to that edition. Researchers should specify the edition when citing, and should treat the natural science and education science editions as distinct serials issued by the same university in the same city.