About Acta Palaeontologica Sinica

Acta Palaeontologica Sinica

Overview and identity

Acta Palaeontologica Sinica is a peer-reviewed journal of palaeontology published in Nanjing, in Jiangsu province, and established in 1953. Its own aims-and-scope statement gives its identifiers as ISSN 0001-6616 and CN 32-1188/Q, describes it as the only official journal of the Palaeontological Society of China, and states that it is published quarterly in print and online, in Chinese and English. It is a comprehensive academic journal for palaeontology and related biostratigraphy, publishing original research papers together with material on disciplinary trends, academic discussion, reviews of works, and the application of new technologies and methods in palaeontology and related disciplines.

The journal's Nanjing base is not incidental. Nanjing is the historic home of Chinese palaeontology's principal institute, and Acta Palaeontologica Sinica is one of the four peer-reviewed journals published by that institute. Its subject remit, as recorded in its directory descriptions, centres on invertebrate palaeontology, palaeobotany and stratigraphy — exactly the three fields in which its host institute specialises, and the fields in which Chinese fossil research of the mid-twentieth century was principally built.

Founding in 1953 and the first editorial board

The journal was established in 1953, with Zunyi Yang chairing its first editorial board. That founding is recorded in a peer-reviewed history of Chinese palaeontology published in 2022, which places the journal's creation in the formative early 1950s, alongside the other institutions of the new Chinese earth sciences. The same history notes that in 1957 Yang Zunyi and Hao Yichun, both graduates of the National Southwestern Associated University, published the first Chinese textbook on palaeontology, a pairing that underlines the educational as well as the research function of the generation that founded the journal.

The context matters. The history divides a century of Chinese palaeontology into the stages 1920 to 1949, 1949 to 1978 and 1979 to 2020. In the first stage, the leading Chinese palaeontological publication had been Palaeontologia Sinica, founded in 1922 under Ding Wenjiang, which published monographs largely in English and German. By 1953, with a national academy institute in Nanjing and a national society to serve, Chinese palaeontology needed a regular journal of its own. Acta Palaeontologica Sinica, appearing only two years after its host institute was founded, was that journal, and it has carried the discipline's research record ever since.

Sponsorship, supervision and publisher

The journal's own statement of its governance says that it is superintended by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, jointly sponsored by the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Palaeontological Society of China, and published by Science Press. As the only official journal of the Palaeontological Society of China, it speaks for the organised profession as well as for its host institute: the society connection gives it a national constituency of palaeontologists, while the institute connection gives it an editorial home inside China's principal centre for its subject.

Science Press, the publishing house of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is the publisher of many of the academy's long-running Acta and society journals. For a quarterly journal founded in 1953, that combination of academy superintendence, institute and society sponsorship, and academy-press publication has provided the institutional continuity behind more than seven decades of publication.

The host institute: NIGPAS

The Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, known by the acronym NIGPAS, was founded in 1951. Its own introduction traces its roots to the former Palaeontological Section of the Institute of Geology of Academia Sinica and to the Palaeontological Group of the Geological Survey of China, and records that its founding director was Professor Li Siguang, rendered in English as J. S. Lee, a distinguished geologist and palaeontologist. NIGPAS states that it is the only Chinese institution that specialises in invertebrate palaeontology, palaeobotany and stratigraphy, conducting both basic and applied research in those fields.

The institute's current research focus, as it describes it, includes the origin and evolution of life on Earth, evolutionary palaeontology, biostratigraphy and chronostratigraphy, systematic palaeontology, palaeoecology, palaeogeography and palaeoclimatology, molecular palaeobiology, geobiology, the coevolution of life and environment, and applied palaeontology and stratigraphy. Its research units include a Department of Systematic Paleontology, a State Key Laboratory of Palaeobiology and Stratigraphy, and a CAS Key Laboratory of Economic Stratigraphy and Palaeogeography. It also houses a large collection of specimens and a library of multilingual literature on geology and palaeontology. A journal edited in that environment draws its editors, reviewers and many of its authors from the institute's own research staff, and its contents reflect the institute's fossil collections and field programmes.

One of four NIGPAS journals

NIGPAS states that it publishes four peer-reviewed academic journals: Acta Palaeontologica Sinica, Acta Micropalaeontologica Sinica, the Journal of Stratigraphy and Palaeoworld. The four divide the institute's territory between them. Acta Micropalaeontologica Sinica covers microfossils and palynology. The Journal of Stratigraphy covers the ordering and correlation of rock strata. Palaeoworld is the institute's English-language international title. Acta Palaeontologica Sinica is the senior and general title of the set: founded in 1953, decades before its companions, comprehensive across palaeontology rather than confined to one fossil group, and carrying the official-journal status of the Palaeontological Society of China.

Understanding the journal as the flagship of that four-journal family clarifies its scope decisions. Material on a newly described microfossil assemblage may belong naturally in the micropalaeontology title, and a purely stratigraphic correlation paper in the stratigraphy title, while the systematic description of a major invertebrate fauna, a palaeobotanical study, or a synthesis spanning fossils and strata belongs in Acta Palaeontologica Sinica. The family structure lets the institute serve specialist and general readers without diluting the senior journal's identity.

Scope: invertebrates, fossil plants and strata

The journal's declared scope is palaeontology and related biostratigraphy, and its directory descriptions specify invertebrate palaeontology, palaeobotany and stratigraphy as its core. Invertebrate palaeontology covers the fossil record of animals without backbones — brachiopods, trilobites, corals, molluscs, graptolites and the many other groups on which the dating and correlation of Palaeozoic and Mesozoic rocks in China has been built. Palaeobotany covers fossil plants, from early land plants to the floras that record ancient climates and the formation of coal-bearing strata. Stratigraphy connects the two, using fossils to order rock successions in time.

Concrete examples from the journal's citation record show that scope at work. Its pages have carried, for instance, work on the first brachiopod fauna following the Late Ordovician mass extinction, reported from late Hirnantian brachiopods of Zhenxiong in Yunnan, and systematic and biostratigraphic studies of Ordovician faunas from the Tarim Basin and South China, the kind of research in which NIGPAS researchers such as Rong Jia-yu and Chen Xu have published on Late Ordovician faunal differentiation and environmental patterns in South China. These are not marginal topics: the end-Ordovician extinction is one of the major mass extinctions of the Phanerozoic, and Chinese sections are central to its study, which is precisely the research territory of the journal and its institute.

Article types and editorial character

The journal's aims statement lists the forms it publishes: original research papers as the main content, papers on discipline trends, academic discussions, reviews of works including introductions to new books in related areas, and papers on the application of new technologies and methods in palaeontology and related disciplines. That mix gives the journal a broader professional function than a pure research archive. The trend and discussion pieces let the Chinese palaeontological community debate the direction of its subject in its own journal, and the book-review and new-book material serves readers in a field where monographs and regional fossil atlases remain working tools.

It is also explicitly a peer-reviewed journal, available in print and online, publishing quarterly. Quarterly publication suits its subject: systematic palaeontology papers are long, heavily illustrated with fossil plates, and dependent on careful comparison with museum specimens, and a quarterly rhythm has been the traditional pattern for journals of this kind internationally. The bilingual Chinese and English presentation widens access, allowing Chinese researchers to publish in their own language while keeping titles, abstracts and systematic names — which are Latin-based by international convention — accessible to specialists abroad.

Indexing and discoverability

The journal states that it is included in international retrieval systems including Zoological Record, JST, GeoRef and the Russian Abstract Journal, together with WJCI and the Chinese systems CNKI, CSCD and CA. Zoological Record is the principal index for animal taxonomy, and its coverage is functionally important for a palaeontology journal: new fossil genera and species described in Acta Palaeontologica Sinica enter the international taxonomic record through it. GeoRef performs the corresponding service for geology and stratigraphy, and CSCD, the Chinese Science Citation Database, tracks its standing within Chinese science.

That indexing pattern — strong in the specialist taxonomic and geological services, and in the Chinese national databases, rather than centred on general citation indexes — accurately reflects the journal's readership. Palaeontologists searching for a taxon or a fauna work through Zoological Record and GeoRef, and it is there that this journal's seven decades of systematic descriptions remain findable and citable.

Recognition: the 2012 international influence award

The journal received a China's Most Influential International Academic Journal award in the citation reporting round based on the 2012 edition of the China Academic Journals International Citation Reports. The Palaeontological Society of China reported the award ceremony, held at the National Conference Center in Beijing, noting that the reports were released by the Chinese Academic Journals electronic publishing operation, the Chinese scientific bibliometric evaluation research centre and Tsinghua University Library, and that the 2012 edition was the first time China's academic journals had been assessed for international influence in this unified, systematic way, using 2011 bibliometric indicators across 3,533 Chinese science and technology journals.

For a specialist, Chinese-and-English, quarterly palaeontology journal to be selected in that first national assessment of international influence is a measurable mark of standing. It indicates that the journal's papers were being cited outside China at a level the bibliometric exercise could detect — consistent with the international importance of Chinese fossil localities and faunas, whose primary descriptions have historically appeared in this journal.

Readership and continuing role

The journal's natural readers are palaeontologists and stratigraphers in Chinese academy institutes and universities, museum and geological survey researchers working with fossil collections, and international specialists in invertebrate palaeontology and palaeobotany who follow Chinese faunas and floras through its English-language apparatus and its taxonomic indexing. Its authors are drawn from the same community, centred on NIGPAS in Nanjing but extending across Chinese palaeontology as the society's official journal.

Assessed on the verified record, Acta Palaeontologica Sinica is one of the founding journals of modern Chinese palaeontology: established in 1953 with Zunyi Yang chairing its first editorial board, superintended by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, jointly sponsored by the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology and the Palaeontological Society of China, published quarterly by Science Press under ISSN 0001-6616, senior among the four journals of an institute founded in 1951 under Li Siguang, indexed in Zoological Record and GeoRef, and recognised in the 2012-edition international citation reports. Its continuing role is the one it was created for: to publish, in China, the systematic and stratigraphic research on which the interpretation of China's fossil record depends.