About Biodiversity Science

Biodiversity Science

Biodiversity Science is a monthly peer-reviewed journal founded in October 1993 by the Biodiversity Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and described by its sponsors as China's only nationwide academic journal devoted specifically to biodiversity. Founded under the name Chinese Biodiversity, it is sponsored by the Biodiversity Committee together with the Botanical Society of China, and is jointly managed by the Institute of Botany, the Institute of Zoology and the Institute of Microbiology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Its editor-in-chief is Keping Ma of the Institute of Botany. Covering all taxa, from bacteria to plants and animals, and all ecosystem types, the journal marked its thirtieth anniversary in 2022–23 as a leading Chinese journal in the biological sciences, with an official site at biodiversity-science.net and the print ISSN 1005-0094.

The journal's founding date is itself a piece of history. It published its first issue in October 1993, following China's endorsement of the Convention on Biological Diversity, the international treaty adopted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Biodiversity Science was created, in other words, at the moment when biodiversity became a formal object of international policy, and it has spent three decades as the Chinese research community's dedicated forum for the science behind that policy.

Founding and Mission

The journal's own retrospective evaluations record that Biodiversity Science — formerly Chinese Biodiversity — was founded in October 1993 by the Biodiversity Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and that the scope and focus set out by its first editor-in-chief, Professor Yingqian Qian, were carried forward by his successors. The founding aim was to address the major issues of biodiversity, to report comprehensively on achievements in biodiversity research, and to enhance information exchange between Chinese and international scholars. The journal's sponsors frame the mission against China's situation: the country is one of the world's megabiodiverse nations, with a high ratio of endemic species, while population growth and economic activity place more and more species in danger, making conservation an internationally watched concern.

As the only nationwide academic journal in China specifically addressing biodiversity, in the sponsors' description, the journal occupies a defined niche among Chinese periodicals. Ecology journals, botany journals and zoology journals all publish biodiversity research, but Biodiversity Science exists for the field itself — for work whose organising question is the variety of life, how it is distributed, how it is changing and how it can be conserved.

Sponsors and Editorial Home

The journal is sponsored by the Biodiversity Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Botanical Society of China, and jointly managed by three CAS institutes in Beijing: the Institute of Botany, the Institute of Zoology and the Institute of Microbiology. That tri-institute management reflects the journal's all-taxa remit: plants, animals and micro-organisms each have a sponsoring institutional home. Its editor-in-chief, Keping Ma of the Institute of Botany, is one of China's best-known ecologists in the biodiversity field, and the journal's retrospective literature shows him among its most prolific authors as well as its editor.

The editorial model produced a notably collaborative authorship over time. The journal's twenty-year retrospective, based on CNKI data and the journal's website, found that the mean number of authors per paper rose from about 1.5 in 1993 to about 4 in 2011, and that the mean length of papers roughly doubled, from about five pages to about ten — quantitative traces of biodiversity science becoming a team-based, data-rich enterprise during the journal's first two decades.

Scope and Subject Coverage

Biodiversity Science covers all taxa — bacteria, plants and animals alike — and all ecosystem types. Its major research topics, as summarised in its retrospective evaluations, include biological invasion; biodiversity and global change; DNA barcoding; biodiversity monitoring; phylodiversity; biodiversity informatics; and research on the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity. Studies of species diversity, genetic diversity and ecosystem diversity structure much of its content, alongside work on conservation and protected areas.

The distribution of its early content is documented. Among 1,189 papers analysed in the twenty-year retrospective (excluding four English supplements), 149 papers concerned species diversity, 113 genetic diversity and 38 ecosystem diversity; studies of plant diversity and animal diversity formed a significant proportion, while microbial diversity papers were few. A later assessment of the decade to 2022 found that about 90 percent of papers focused on biodiversity conservation and environmental science or ecology, with botany, zoology and microbiology accounting for roughly 42, 47 and 5 percent of papers respectively, and the journal's research areas expanding from 61 to 78. New article categories were added in that decade, including Editorial, Bioinventory, Data Paper, Conservation and Governance, and Biocultural Diversity — the Data Paper and Bioinventory categories being designed to encourage data sharing.

Special Issues and Landmark Content

Special issues and special features are a significant part of the journal's method. Thirteen were published between 2000 and the time of the twenty-year retrospective; the assessment of 2013–2022 counted 56 special issues or features in that decade alone, used to advance particular research fronts. The thirtieth-anniversary issue in October 2022 exemplified the approach: it carried a retrospective evaluation of the journal itself, condensed thirty key questions for biodiversity research in China through a questionnaire survey, and summarised progress and new technologies across biodiversity inventory and monitoring, endangered species conservation, protected areas and ecosystem restoration.

The journal's most-cited papers show its role in national biodiversity accounting: assessments such as the Red List of China's Vertebrates, threatened-species lists of China's higher plants, and analyses of the diversity and distribution patterns of China's seed plants rank among its most cited contributions. These are reference works for conservation policy as much as research papers, and their presence in the journal underlines its function as a place where China's biodiversity baseline is published and debated. The retrospective record notes more than 200 papers cited over 400 times within the journal's citation counts, with the most-cited individual papers approaching a thousand citations.

Publication Model and Frequency

Biodiversity Science is a monthly journal. It publishes primarily in Chinese for China's research and conservation community, with the English-language presence maintained through its official website, which carries English article pages and anniversary editorials in translation. Its funding base, documented in its retrospective, rests mainly on projects supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Ministry of Science and Technology and the Chinese Academy of Sciences — the same agencies that fund most of the research it publishes.

The journal's authorship in its first two decades was concentrated in China's leading biodiversity institutions: the top ten authors by paper count came from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University and Fudan University, with Fang Jingyun the most prolific contributor in the period analysed, followed by Ma Keping and Chen Jiakuan. That concentration reflects where China's biodiversity research capacity was built, and the journal's pages function as a partial who's-who of the field's founding generation in China.

Indexing and Standing

The journal is indexed in Scopus, where its coverage runs from 2017 onward in international listings, and it is classified in environmental science and in agricultural and biological sciences, with Q2 placements in ecology-related categories in Scimago assessments. Its domestic standing is the stronger half of its reputation: it describes itself, and is described by its sponsors, as the most important journal in the field of biodiversity science in China, and its thirtieth anniversary was marked by a special issue of the journal itself, reviewing the field's progress as well as the journal's.

That self-assessment is supported by the journal's record of firsts and onlys: the first nationwide academic journal in China specifically addressing biodiversity, founded in the year after the Rio summit, and for three decades the dedicated home of Chinese biodiversity research across all taxa and ecosystems.

Readership and Policy Role

The journal's readers are biodiversity researchers, ecologists, taxonomists and conservation practitioners in China, together with the officials and protected-area managers who use biodiversity science in their work. Its explicit coverage of the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity ties it directly to policy: China is a party to the convention, hosted the first part of the convention's fifteenth Conference of the Parties in Kunming, and maintains national biodiversity strategies whose scientific underpinning is exactly the inventory, monitoring and Red List work this journal publishes.

Its newer categories show an awareness of that bridging role. Conservation and Governance papers address the management side of biodiversity; Biocultural Diversity papers address the human cultures intertwined with biological diversity; Data Papers and Bioinventory papers build the shared data infrastructure on which both science and policy depend. A journal founded in 1993 to exchange information among scholars has, by its own account, organised itself increasingly around making biodiversity knowledge usable.

The Journal at Thirty

The anniversary assessments of 2022–23 give an unusually complete picture of a specialist journal's development. From about five-page papers with one or two authors in 1993, Biodiversity Science grew into a monthly carrying longer, multi-author, data-sharing-oriented work across 78 research areas, with dozens of special features per decade and a citation record headed by national Red Lists and flora-wide analyses. Its founding generation's agenda — set by first editor-in-chief Yingqian Qian and continued under Keping Ma — of addressing biodiversity as a subject in its own right has been sustained through three decades of rapid change in Chinese science.

Biodiversity Science today remains what it was founded to be: the nationwide Chinese journal of biodiversity, sponsored by the Biodiversity Committee of the Chinese Academy of Sciences with the Botanical Society of China, managed by the academy's botany, zoology and microbiology institutes in Beijing, publishing monthly research on every taxon and ecosystem, from DNA barcoding and biological invasion to monitoring networks and the implementation of the Convention on Biological Diversity.