About Journal of Inner Mongolia University of Technology (Natural Science Edition)

Journal of Inner Mongolia University of Technology (Natural Science Edition)

Overview and identity

The Journal of Inner Mongolia University of Technology (Natural Science Edition) is the Chinese-language natural-science journal of Inner Mongolia University of Technology in Hohhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Its Chinese title is Neimenggu Gongye Daxue Xuebao, Ziran Kexue Ban. Its identity is unusually well attested for a university journal: the journal's own 2024 issue, volume 43, number 4, carries articles numbered under ISSN 1001-5167, and its articles bear digital object identifiers under the prefix 10.13785/j.cnki.nmggydxxbzrkxb, in which the letters nmggydxxbzrkxb reproduce the abbreviated pinyin of the Chinese title. A 2024 article on forecasting the gross domestic product of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region with a long short-term memory neural network, at pages 296 to 301 of that issue, is cited internationally with the identifier 10.13785/j.cnki.nmggydxxbzrkxb.2024.04.002.

The words Natural Science Edition mark the journal's place in the publishing structure of its sponsor. Inner Mongolia University of Technology is primarily an engineering university, and this edition is where its research in engineering, materials, chemistry and the supporting physical and computational sciences is gathered. The journal therefore documents, in Chinese and under a single title, the scientific output of the oldest engineering institution in China's ethnic-minority regions, an institution whose history reaches back to 1951, seven decades before the 2024 volume cited above.

The sponsoring university

Inner Mongolia University of Technology, shortened to IMUT, is a public university in Hohhot under the authority of the Autonomous Region government. Profiles of the university describe it, after more than seventy years of development, as a multi-disciplinary university with distinctive characteristics, mainly engineering, combining engineering with science, literature, economics, management, law, education and art, and operating a complete talent-cultivation system of doctoral, master's and bachelor's degrees. Its degree and postgraduate education began in 1984. Current university descriptions record six first-level disciplines authorised for doctoral degrees, namely chemical engineering and technology, materials science and engineering, mechanics, power engineering and engineering thermophysics, architecture, and politics, together with twenty-five first-level disciplines authorised for master's degrees and a large undergraduate offer of more than sixty programmes.

That doctoral list is, in effect, a table of contents for the journal. Chemical engineering and technology, materials science and engineering, mechanics and power engineering are precisely the fields from which the natural-science edition's most-cited recent articles come, as the published record examined below shows. A university journal is only ever as strong as the laboratories behind it, and in this case the laboratories are the university's flagship doctoral schools.

Origins: the Suiyuan Advanced Industrial School, 1951

The university was founded in 1951 and was originally known as the Suiyuan Higher Technical School, rendered in other profiles as the Suiyuan Provincial Senior Industrial School or Suiyuan Advanced Industrial School. Suiyuan was the former province, centred on Hohhot, that was later absorbed into the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and the school was created to give that northern region its own industrial training capacity in the first years of the People's Republic of China. University profiles make a point of the founding's significance: Inner Mongolia University of Technology is described as the earliest engineering university established in a minority area after the founding of the People's Republic.

In 1958 the school was raised to a full institute as the Inner Mongolia Institute of Technology, in some translations the Inner Mongolia Polytechnic Institute. Profiles of the university record that the institute was established with the support of Tsinghua University and other leading institutions, an arrangement typical of the period, in which established universities in Beijing helped to staff and shape new institutes in the regions. For much of its history the institute was subordinate to the Ministry of Machinery Industry and the Ministry of Agricultural Machinery, national ministries whose remit explains its enduring strengths in mechanical engineering, machinery for agriculture and industrial chemistry.

From institute to university, 1983 to 1993

In 1983 the institute was transferred from ministerial subordination to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, making it a regional university in governance as well as in location. A decade later, in 1993, it was renamed Inner Mongolia University of Technology, the name it and its journal still carry. The sequence 1951, 1958, 1983 and 1993 is given identically in the university's entry in international reference works and in its Chinese profiles, and it frames the journal's history: the natural-science edition publishes under the university name acquired in 1993, but the research community it serves was formed across the institute decades that preceded it.

The modern university operates three campuses. University profiles name the Xincheng, or New City, campus and the Jinchuan campus in Hohhot, together with the Zhungeer campus, giving a total area of about 3,227 acres, or 3,228 mu-based measures in Chinese accounts, with a building area of over 875,000 square metres in one recent description. International reference works describe the same pattern in different words: three campuses, two located in Hohhot and one located in Ordos City, the Zhungeer campus standing in the Ordos area south of the capital. Either way, the journal's editorial home is Hohhot, and its contributing community is spread across the capital and the region's industrial south.

Engineering strengths behind the journal

Analyses of the university's publication output confirm where its scientific weight lies. A study of high-level papers published by Inner Mongolia institutions during the Twelfth Five-Year Plan period found that Inner Mongolia University of Technology's output was concentrated in chemical engineering and in its college of science and college of materials science and engineering, with named leading authors in the School of Chemical Engineering and the College of Materials Science and Engineering, and it placed the university among the top three institutions of the region, with Inner Mongolia University and Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, for citation frequency. The university's exchange and programme listings show the same structure from the teaching side: a School of Chemical Engineering, a School of Materials Science, a School of Information Engineering, a School of Architecture and schools for economics and management.

For the journal, the consequence is a recognisable centre of gravity. Its natural-science pages are dominated by the chemistry of Inner Mongolia's coal and industrial base, by materials for construction and energy, and by mechanical and civil engineering for a region of deserts, mines and rapidly built cities. That centre of gravity is not an editorial slogan; it is visible, article by article, in the journal's recent volumes.

Evidence from recent volumes

The journal's recent record can be reconstructed from the citations its articles receive in the international literature, and the reconstruction is remarkably consistent. In volume 42, number 6, in 2023, it published work on the effect of steel slag on the hydration of belite sulphoaluminate cement made from solid waste, at pages 549 to 554. In volume 43 in 2024 it published, in number 1, work on the mechanical properties and stress-strain constitutive models of desert sand concrete in different regions, at pages 63 to 69; in number 3, work on optimising the properties of aeolian sand cement-based materials by metakaolin, at pages 278 to 283; and in number 4, the long short-term memory forecasting study of the region's gross domestic product already mentioned, at pages 296 to 301. In volume 44, number 1, in 2025, it published a design and simulation study of a serrated blade modelled on Salix cheilophila, a sand willow, using bionic technology, at pages 44 to 50.

Older citations show the same profile extending backwards: a 2017 article in volume 36, number 2, at pages 155 to 160, examined the effect of a warm-mix agent on the high- and low-temperature rheological properties of asphalt, road engineering for a region of extreme seasonal temperatures. The numbering itself is informative. A volume that reaches at least number 6, as volume 42 did in 2023, is appearing at least six times in its year, and the sequence of volumes 36, 42, 43 and 44 for 2017, 2023, 2024 and 2025 confirms an unbroken annual volume count across the journal's recent history.

Scope: materials, chemistry and desert engineering

Read together, those articles define the edition's scope more precisely than any general statement could. The first pillar is construction materials from local and waste resources: desert sand and aeolian, wind-blown, sand used as concrete aggregate, steel slag and other solid wastes converted into cement, and metakaolin-modified cement-based materials. In a region that is simultaneously rich in sand, heavy industry and industrial residue, and short of conventional building materials in many districts, this is applied science with an immediate local market. The second pillar is chemical engineering and applied chemistry, the university's strongest doctoral field, serving the coal-chemical and materials industries of Inner Mongolia. The third is mechanical and civil engineering, from bionic cutting blades inspired by a desert shrub to asphalt performance in continental climates.

A fourth, newer element is computation. The presence, in the natural-science edition, of a neural-network economic forecasting paper shows the edition also carrying the university's information and statistical work where it is methodological and quantitative, consistent with a sponsor whose schools include information engineering and whose doctoral and master's offers include applied computer technology and computational mathematics. The journal is thus best classified as a comprehensive engineering and natural-science university journal with a strong materials-and-chemistry accent, rather than as a single-discipline title.

Editorial leadership and the solid-waste research school

The journal's editorial leadership connects directly to that scope. Changwang Yan, a professor at the university's School of Resources and Environmental Engineering, serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Inner Mongolia University of Technology (Natural Science Edition), and his own research focuses on sustainable construction materials derived from industrial solid waste. He is credited with more than 100 peer-reviewed journal articles, six academic monographs and over 40 patents, and he works alongside colleagues in the university's School of Civil Engineering on low-carbon cementitious materials made entirely from solid wastes. An editor-in-chief whose laboratory works on exactly the steel-slag, tailings and waste-derived cements that fill the journal's pages gives the title an unusual coherence between its editorial direction and its published content.

That coherence matters for readers assessing the journal. University journals are sometimes miscellaneous by necessity, collecting whatever a diverse faculty produces. This edition, by contrast, shows a recognisable school of research, solid-waste and desert-sand construction materials, being published, developed and cited through its pages over successive volumes, with the editor's own research programme at its centre. The journal functions, in that respect, as the house journal of a genuine regional research specialism.

Language, identifiers and bibliographic presence

The journal publishes in Chinese; the international citations to its articles routinely note that fact, marking them as in Chinese even when the citing paper is in English. Its bibliographic identity rests on ISSN 1001-5167, attested in its own 2024 issue, and on the DOI prefix 10.13785/j.cnki.nmggydxxbzrkxb, under which its articles receive individual digital object identifiers of the standard CNKI form. Those identifiers are the journal's route into international scholarship: the forecasting article of 2024, for example, is cited by its DOI in an English-language journal of economics and management sciences, and the materials articles of 2023 to 2025 are cited in Springer and De Gruyter publications on concrete and applied mechanics, whose reference lists reproduce the journal's volume, issue and page details exactly.

No claim beyond that evidence is needed. A Chinese-language university journal whose articles carry DOIs, whose recent volumes can be reconstructed from citations in international monographs and journals, and whose ISSN is printed in its own current issues has a verifiable, functioning presence in the scholarly record, whatever wider indexing lists it may or may not appear on.

Readership and role

The journal's primary readership is the engineering research community of northern China: faculty and graduate students at its sponsoring university and at comparable institutions, and engineers in the region's construction, materials, chemical and machinery industries who read Chinese-language peer-reviewed literature as part of their professional work. For that readership the edition offers something international journals cannot: full-length, peer-reviewed treatment of Inner Mongolian materials and conditions, desert sand, aeolian sand, local solid wastes and continental-climate road engineering, written by the researchers who work with those materials every day.

Assessed as a whole, the Journal of Inner Mongolia University of Technology (Natural Science Edition) is the scholarly record of the first engineering institution founded in China's minority regions, a school of 1951 that became an institute with Tsinghua's support in 1958 and a university in 1993. Its recent volumes, running from volume 36 in 2017 to volume 44 in 2025 under ISSN 1001-5167, show a journal centred on chemical engineering, materials science and mechanical and civil engineering, and distinguished by a coherent, regionally rooted specialism in turning desert sand and industrial waste into building materials. That combination of institutional age, verifiable current publication and distinctive subject identity is the journal's standing and its value.