About Acta Seismologica Sinica

Acta Seismologica Sinica

Overview and identity

Acta Seismologica Sinica is a comprehensive Chinese journal of seismology published in Beijing, with its first issue appearing in 1979 as volume 1, number 1. Its print ISSN is 0253-3782. It is sponsored by the Seismological Society of China and the Institute of Geophysics of the China Earthquake Administration, and it publishes original and innovative research results and technical achievements in seismology together with papers in geophysics, earthquake geology — also rendered seismogeology — and engineering seismology. A study of the journal cluster to which it belongs describes it as established in 1979, published bimonthly, and classified at T1 level in the high-quality journal grading directory released by the China Association for Science and Technology.

The timing of its founding defines its character. The journal was created in the immediate aftermath of the most consequential decade in modern Chinese earthquake history, and its first issue was given over in large part to scientific studies of the great earthquakes of 1975 and 1976. From the beginning, therefore, it was not an abstract theoretical journal but the research record of a national earthquake science community working on real, recent and devastating events.

Sponsorship and editorial home

The journal's two sponsors pair the profession with the state research system. The Seismological Society of China is the national learned society for seismology, with a membership recorded at more than 3,000 in its English journal's account of its sponsorship. The Institute of Geophysics of the China Earthquake Administration, based in Beijing, is described in the same account as one of the major and oldest institutions for earthquake research in China. The journal's editorial office is in Beijing, at postcode 100081 in published editorial addresses, alongside the institute.

That joint sponsorship is shared with the journal's English-language counterpart, Earthquake Science, which is the only international journal sponsored by the Seismological Society of China, with the Institute of Geophysics becoming its co-sponsor in 2012. Acta Seismologica Sinica is the Chinese-language senior title of the pair: the society's flagship in Chinese, edited from the institute, and the journal in which Chinese seismologists have traditionally published their primary research for a domestic readership of researchers, observatory staff and earthquake administration scientists.

The first issue of 1979

The contents of volume 1, number 1, published in 1979, are preserved in the journal's own online archive and give a precise picture of its founding concerns. The issue opened with a study, by the Section of Earthquake Prediction of the State Bureau of Oceanography, of the relation between variations of mean sea level and earthquake occurrence, specifically the variation of mean sea level before the 1975 Haicheng earthquake, printed at pages 1 to 8. It carried a study of the focal process of the Zhaotong earthquake of 11 May 1974 in Yunnan, derived from the directivity function of Rayleigh waves. It carried, at pages 39 to 49, a paper by Fan Guohua and colleagues on the effect of the Tangshan earthquake on the geomagnetic total field in the Peking — Beijing — area.

The same first issue contained an experimental study of deep structure along a profile near Beijing using converted waves of earthquakes, a paper on a steady-state plate method of measuring the thermal conductivity of rock samples, and, at pages 91 to 107, a paper by the geothermal investigation group of the Institute of Geology of Academia Sinica presenting the first portion of data of terrestrial heat flow measurements in China. A first issue that publishes a country's first terrestrial heat-flow dataset alongside post-mortems of its two most studied earthquakes is announcing a comprehensive remit: observation, prediction research, deep structure, and the basic physical measurements on which earthquake science rests.

Haicheng, Tangshan and the prediction question

The earthquakes behind that first issue explain why a national seismology journal was needed in 1979. The Haicheng earthquake of 4 February 1975, in Liaoning province, became internationally famous because it was preceded by an evacuation informed by observed precursors — a case discussed in the scientific literature ever since as evidence that some earthquakes can be predicted usefully, however imperfectly. The Tangshan earthquake of 28 July 1976, by contrast, struck without such a successful prediction and caused catastrophic loss. Research on the two events — their foreshocks, precursors, focal processes, crustal deformation and geomagnetic and resistivity anomalies — dominated Chinese seismology for years, and Acta Seismologica Sinica was founded to publish it.

Its early volumes show that work continuing in detail. Volume 2, number 2, in 1980 carried Zhang Zhili and colleagues on the fracture process of the Tangshan earthquake and its mechanical analysis, a study of stress variations around Beijing and Tianjin before and after the 1976 Tangshan earthquake, work on tectonic stress directions and earthquake source mechanisms, ten examples of changes in earth resistivity prior to strong earthquakes, experimental results on radon and thorium emanations from rock under pressure, and a study of earth tides and seismic waves recorded by water-level fluctuations in a deep borehole near Beijing. Volume 3, number 1, in 1981 compared the Haicheng foreshock sequence with earthquake swarms in its neighbourhood and analysed eleven repeated surveys of crustal deformation in the Tangshan area before the 1976 earthquake. Taken together, these contents are a primary source for the history of earthquake prediction research in China.

Scope across seismology and geophysics

The journal is described by its indexing services and its own cluster documentation as comprehensive. Its core is seismology: earthquake source processes, seismicity, focal mechanisms, seismic waves and the structure of the crust and upper mantle as revealed by them. Around that core sit geophysics more broadly — geomagnetism, gravity, earth tides, terrestrial heat flow and electrical resistivity among the methods visible in its early volumes — together with earthquake geology, which connects seismicity to active faults and tectonic structures, and engineering seismology, which connects ground motion to the safety of buildings and infrastructure.

Later contents confirm that breadth has been maintained. Recent research published in the journal includes a large receiver-function study using teleseismic waveform data recorded by 823 temporary seismic stations of the ChinArray programme's second and third phases, from which the authors obtained 174,562 high-quality P-wave receiver functions to study the structure of the North China Craton region by common-conversion-point stacking. A journal that began with single-profile converted-wave experiments near Beijing in 1979 is now publishing analyses built on hundreds of temporary broadband stations, which is a fair measure of how Chinese observational seismology, and its journal, have developed together.

Publication pattern and indexing

Acta Seismologica Sinica is a bimonthly journal, appearing six times a year. The study of its journal cluster records that it is indexed in Scopus, the Chinese Science and Technology Core Journals catalogue, the Peking University core journals list, and the Chinese Science Citation Database, among other databases, and that its editorial office has three editors. International bibliometric services likewise list it in the geophysics category, with coverage recorded from 1979, under its Acta Seismologica Sinica Press imprint in Beijing.

Its T1 classification in the China Association for Science and Technology's high-quality journal grading directory places it in the top tier of that national grading for its field. For a Chinese-language journal, such domestic grading, together with Scopus coverage, is the practical mechanism by which its papers count in the evaluation of Chinese researchers, and it reflects the journal's position as the senior Chinese title in its discipline.

The journal cluster and the English counterpart

The journal belongs to a small cluster of titles associated with the Institute of Geophysics, informally named the Zhenqiu Journals after the abbreviation used for the institute's journals. The cluster study lists alongside Acta Seismologica Sinica its English counterpart Earthquake Science, the journal Earth and Planetary Physics, and CT Theory and Applications. Earthquake Science was established in 1988 as one of the earliest English journals founded in China, has a publication scope basically the same as Acta Seismologica Sinica, and assumed its current name in 2009; its own history traces it back to 1979, when the Chinese Acta Seismologica Sinica was established, through the journal's former English edition.

The relationship between the two titles needs care. Acta Seismologica Sinica is the Chinese journal founded in 1979 under ISSN 0253-3782. Earthquake Science is the separate English-language international journal that grew out of its English edition and now publishes under its own identity. They share sponsors, scope and institutional home, but they are distinct publications, and citations, dates and identifiers belonging to one should not be transferred to the other. This profile concerns the Chinese journal.

Role in Chinese earthquake science

China is one of the world's most seismically active countries, and its earthquake science is organised nationally through the China Earthquake Administration, its institutes, its observatory networks and its provincial bureaus. A comprehensive national journal in Chinese serves that whole system: it is where observatory and institute researchers publish source studies of Chinese earthquakes, where new observational methods are tested against Chinese data, and where the accumulated research on events such as Haicheng and Tangshan remains available as a citable record. Its founding contents — sea-level variations before Haicheng, geomagnetic effects of Tangshan, China's first heat-flow data — were national scientific firsts published in a national journal.

The journal also preserves the methodological history of the field in China. Earth-resistivity precursors, radon emanation experiments, deep borehole water-level observations and repeated levelling surveys, all prominent in its early volumes, were central techniques of the Chinese prediction programme of that era. Whatever the present assessment of individual methods, the journal's archive is where that programme documented itself, and historians and seismologists returning to the Haicheng and Tangshan literature must work through its pages.

Readership and authorship

The journal's readers are seismologists and geophysicists in the China Earthquake Administration's institutes and provincial organisations, university earth-science departments, engineering seismology and earthquake engineering researchers, and the staff of seismic observatories across China. Its authors come from the same system, from the Institute of Geophysics and its sister institutes to university groups deploying temporary arrays such as ChinArray. International readers encounter it mainly through Scopus and through its English counterpart, which presents the same research community to the world in English.

Assessment and continuing role

Assessed on the verified record, Acta Seismologica Sinica is the senior Chinese journal of its discipline: founded in Beijing in 1979 under ISSN 0253-3782, sponsored by the Seismological Society of China and the Institute of Geophysics of the China Earthquake Administration, published bimonthly, indexed in Scopus and the principal Chinese core-journal systems, and graded T1 in the China Association for Science and Technology's high-quality journal directory. Its distinction is historical as well as continuing: it was founded to publish the science of Haicheng and Tangshan, it carried China's first terrestrial heat-flow data in its first issue, and it continues to publish the observational seismology of a country whose earthquake research remains a national priority.