About Journal of Tangshan Normal University

Journal of Tangshan Normal University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Tangshan Normal University is the Chinese-language comprehensive academic journal of Tangshan Normal University in Tangshan, Hebei Province. Its Chinese title is Tangshan Shifan Xueyuan Xuebao, and it carries the International Standard Serial Number 1009-9115, attested through a Crossref-recorded article DOI, 10.3969/j.issn.1009-9115.2021.04.007, and through the journal's code TSSF in the CNKI database. The journal is cited at volume 36 in 2014, volume 41 in 2019 and volume 45 in 2023, a numbering sequence that indicates a run beginning in 1979. No Chinese domestic serial number, or CN, was attested in the sources consulted, and none is claimed here. As a comprehensive xuebao, the journal publishes across the humanities, social sciences and natural sciences of its host, a provincial undergraduate university whose own history is bound up with the destruction and rebuilding of Tangshan itself.

A run beginning in 1979

The volume arithmetic tells a story that matches the university's institutional record. If volume 45 corresponds to 2023, and volumes 41 and 36 to 2019 and 2014 respectively, then volume 1 falls in 1979, the year Tangshan Teachers College was restored after the upheavals of the preceding decade. A journal founded or refounded in the restoration year would have grown alongside the restored college: through its commendation in 1988, its upgrading to an undergraduate institution in 2000, and its expansion to tens of thousands of students in the decades since. The citations available for this profile confirm the journal's activity at regular intervals across 2014, 2019 and 2023, including articles in its 2023 volume on subjects as various as licence-plate recognition system design, Grand Canal urban memory and the development path of local universities. That spread of topics is itself evidence of the comprehensive character the journal claims.

The host university: 1956 foundation and restoration

Tangshan Normal University began as the Tangshan crash-course, or accelerated, teachers college founded in 1956 to train teachers quickly for a rapidly expanding school system. It was promoted to undergraduate status once before, in 1958, and then dismissed, or closed, in 1962 during the retrenchment that followed. In 1979 the college was restored as Tangshan Teachers College. In 1988 the former State Education Commission commended it as a National Excellent Teachers College. In 2000, with the approval of the Ministry of Education, it was converted into an undergraduate college, and in 2007 its undergraduate teaching was evaluated by the Ministry and awarded a good grade. In 2014 it was selected as a national university with typical graduate employment experience, and in 2017 it was named among the first National Defense Education Characteristic Schools. Few Chinese university journals can point to a host whose founding, closure and restoration so closely track the policy turns of the People's Republic's first three decades.

Tangshan: earthquake and rebuilding

No profile of a Tangshan institution can ignore 28 July 1976, when an earthquake of magnitude 7.8 struck the city, killing at least 242,000 people and destroying the overwhelming majority of its buildings. The college that publishes this journal lived through that catastrophe in its years of closure and was restored in 1979, as the city itself was being rebuilt. Tangshan's identity since 1976 has been defined by reconstruction: a modern industrial city raised on the site of the destroyed one, known as a cradle of modern industry in China. The university's campuses in the Tangshan High-tech Development Zone and on University Road, College Road and Construction Road belong to that rebuilt city. The journal, running continuously in volume terms from 1979, is one small printed thread in the larger story of a city and its institutions returning to life.

Scale and disciplines today

University introductions describe an institution of roughly 17,000 to 17,900 full-time undergraduate and junior college students, with 15 teaching units and between 54 and 60 undergraduate majors across ten disciplines: literature, science, law, economics, history, education, management, agriculture, art and engineering. The campus area is given in different introductions as about 668,200 square metres for two campuses, and as 793,337 square metres across three campuses including the Construction Road campus, with building area of 474,740 square metres in the fuller account. This profile reports both figures as sources give them, since university statistics are updated between editions. What is consistent is the disciplinary map: ten fields of study feeding one comprehensive journal, from Chinese language and literature to computer science, from ideological and political education to finance and digital media security research.

Scope and content of the journal

The journal's comprehensive scope is visible in the articles through which it is cited. Its 2023 volume alone, as traced in reference lists consulted for this profile, includes engineering work on MATLAB-based licence plate recognition, a humanities study of urban memory and modernisation through Yangzhou's Grand Canal culture, an analysis of high-quality development paths for local universities, and a study of Li Dazhao's philosophy of youth education published in its 2023 and cited from its 2022 volumes. Other citations reach its pages on mathematical abstraction in school teaching and on the translation of Chinese political vocabulary. This is the classic profile of a Chinese normal-university xuebao: education research, regional and national humanities, and applied science sharing one title, unified by the institution rather than by a single discipline.

Li Dazhao and the Tangshan connection

Among the subjects documented in the journal's recent volumes, the repeated attention to Li Dazhao is locally rooted. Li Dazhao, a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party and a pioneering figure in modern Chinese thought, was a native of Laoting County, which belongs to the Tangshan prefecture. Scholarship on his educational philosophy published in the Journal of Tangshan Normal University, including the 2022 study cited in later literature and a 2023 article in volume 45, reflects a regional research interest of the kind that gives provincial journals their particular value: national figures studied with local knowledge, in the place they came from. Tangshan's universities have an obvious claim on this field, and their journal is one of the venues where that claim is exercised.

Place among Hebei university journals

Within the family of Hebei college journals covered in this directory, the Tangshan title is distinguished by the completeness of its bibliographic footprint: an attested ISSN, a CNKI journal code, and a volume sequence traceable year by year from 1979. It is also the journal of Hebei's great eastern industrial city, publishing from a university that was commended nationally as a teachers college in 1988 and that today teaches 60 undergraduate majors. Where the Handan journal is known for Zhao culture and the Hengshui journal for its national social science honours, the Tangshan journal's profile rests on longevity, comprehensiveness and the quiet distinction of having been restored, with its city, in 1979.

Access and citation

The journal is published in Chinese and is indexed in CNKI under the code TSSF. Its articles carry DOIs in the 10.3969/j.issn.1009-9115 pattern, as the 2021 article attested in Crossref shows, which makes individual articles traceable in international citation systems as well as Chinese databases. Bibliographic identification is therefore straightforward: Journal of Tangshan Normal University, ISSN 1009-9115, sponsored by Tangshan Normal University, Tangshan, Hebei. Researchers in education, local-university studies, canal culture or applied computing may all encounter its volumes, and libraries cataloguing Chinese university journals will find in this title one of the more fully documented Hebei xuebao.

Continuing significance

From its indicated start in 1979 to volume 45 in 2023, the Journal of Tangshan Normal University has recorded the scholarship of a teachers college that became a university in all but the final word of its English name. Its pages hold the research of an institution serving a rebuilt city of heavy industry and hard memory, and its comprehensive mix, from Li Dazhao studies to licence-plate algorithms, is exactly what the Chinese xuebao system exists to publish. For this directory, it stands as the scholarly voice of Tangshan's normal university: restored in 1979, publishing ever since, and documented here with the identifiers its record supports.