About Acta Universitatis Traditionis Medicalis Sinensis Pharmacologiaeque Shanghai

Acta Universitatis Traditionis Medicalis Sinensis Pharmacologiaeque Shanghai

A Latin title for a Shanghai journal

Acta Universitatis Traditionis Medicalis Sinensis Pharmacologiaeque Shanghai is the Latin-form title of the Journal of Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine — in Chinese, 上海中医药大学学报 (Shanghai Zhongyiyao Daxue Xuebao). It is the academic journal of the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, published by the university in Shanghai, China, and it carries the ISSN 1008-861X. The journal appears bimonthly, six issues a year. Elaborate Latin titles of this kind are a convention of Chinese university journals, whose covers and catalogue records give the Chinese title together with a Latin rendering that places the journal in the old international family of university acta — the "proceedings" or transactions of a university — while the journal itself is a modern, Chinese-language, peer-reviewed research periodical.

The Latin name repays a moment's reading, because it encodes the institution's history. Traditionis Medicalis Sinensis is "of traditional Chinese medicine"; Pharmacologiaeque adds "and pharmacology" — in context, the pharmacology of Chinese materia medica — reflecting the university's combined strength in Chinese medicine and Chinese pharmacy; and Shanghai fixes the journal to its city. Readers meeting the title in an international catalogue should treat it as exactly equivalent to the Journal of Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and use the ISSN 1008-861X to confirm the identification.

The university and its history

The publishing university, officially the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine and also rendered Shanghai University of Chinese Medicine, is one of China's leading institutions in its field. Its history is traceable to the Shanghai School of Chinese Medicine founded in the early twentieth century — the school was established in 1917 — and it was promoted in 1956 to Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, one of the first group of TCM colleges created in the People's Republic's formalisation of Chinese medicine higher education. In 1985 the Shanghai Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine was established and merged with the college, and in 1993 the institution was renamed a university, taking its present name.

The university confirms, in its own published profile as summarised by Wikipedia, that it publishes several journals, and the Journal of Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (上海中医药大学学报) is listed among them, alongside titles such as the Shanghai Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Journal of Acupuncture and Tuina Science. The university is also home to the Shanghai Museum of Traditional Chinese Medicine, established in 2003, one of the principal public collections for the history of Chinese medicine. A university with that depth of institutional history — older than the People's Republic itself in its earliest roots — gives its journal an inheritance that few house periodicals can match.

Origins: succeeding the college journal

The present journal succeeds the journal of the former Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. That succession matters for understanding its age and its back run. Chinese university journals commonly began as the学报 of a college and continued, through renamings of both institution and title, as the university grew. When Shanghai College of Traditional Chinese Medicine became Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in 1993, its journal continued under the university's name, carrying forward the editorial tradition, the contributor base and the cumulative volume sequence of the college periodical.

Directory descriptions of the journal are therefore careful to record the lineage: the current title is the successor to the college journal, not a new foundation of the 1990s. For librarians, the consequence is practical — a complete holding of the journal's literature means holding both the college-era and university-era titles, catalogued as a single continuing serial under its successive names, with the current ISSN 1008-861X applying to the present title. For historians of Chinese medicine, the combined run documents the research of one of China's most important TCM institutions across the decades in which laboratory science was brought to bear on classical medicine.

Scope: basic theory and clinical research

The journal publishes across the discipline of traditional Chinese medicine, and its stated coverage begins with basic theory and clinical research. Basic theory in this context means the theoretical foundations of Chinese medicine — the doctrines of yin and yang, the viscera and channels, pattern differentiation and the classical texts in which they are recorded — studied both as a living clinical framework and, increasingly, with experimental methods intended to test and explain how TCM treatments work. Clinical research covers the application of Chinese medicine in the university's affiliated hospitals and elsewhere: studies in internal medicine, surgery, gynaecology, paediatrics and the other clinical branches, using the case series, controlled comparisons and outcome measures of contemporary clinical scholarship.

Shanghai gives this scope a particular flavour. The city has been a centre of Chinese medicine since the early twentieth century — the university's own ancestor school was part of the effort to put Chinese medicine on a modern educational footing — and its TCM community is known for strong schools of classical scholarship as well as for large teaching hospitals. A journal drawing authors from that community can publish classical-theory scholarship and hospital research side by side, which is precisely the combination its remit describes.

Scope: acupuncture and Chinese materia medica

Two further named areas complete the journal's scope: acupuncture and Chinese materia medica. Acupuncture research in the journal spans clinical studies of needling for particular conditions and experimental work on the mechanisms of acupuncture and moxibustion, a field in which Shanghai institutions have a long record. Materia medica research covers the study of Chinese medicinal substances — their identification, chemistry, pharmacology, processing and clinical application — and it is this strand that the Latin title's Pharmacologiaeque acknowledges, marking the pharmacological study of Chinese drugs as one of the journal's defining interests.

The conjunction of the two is characteristic of a comprehensive TCM university journal. The same institution that trains acupuncturists also trains pharmacists of Chinese medicine; the same journal that reports a clinical trial of acupuncture also reports the chemical analysis of a medicinal herb. Readers of the journal should expect a contents list that moves between theory, clinic, needle and herb, unified by the university's role as a complete centre for the discipline rather than by any single specialty.

Standing as a Chinese core journal

The journal is a Chinese core journal in traditional Chinese medicine. In the Chinese system, "core journal" status is conferred through national evaluation exercises — most prominently the Peking University core-journal listings — that assess periodicals by citation, usage and peer judgement within their disciplines, and inclusion marks a journal as one of the recognised leading titles of its field. For a university xuebao, core status is a significant distinction: it places the Shanghai journal in the company of the national society and academy journals of Chinese medicine, and it affects authors directly, because publication in core journals carries weight in Chinese academic evaluation, promotion and postgraduate requirements.

Core standing also disciplines the journal itself. To keep its place in successive evaluations, a core journal must maintain peer review, regular publication and citation performance in its discipline, which is why the bimonthly schedule and the breadth of the journal's national authorship matter: a core journal cannot survive as a purely internal outlet, and the Shanghai title's contributor and reader base extends, as its standing requires, well beyond its own university.

Publication pattern and identification

The journal is published bimonthly by Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Shanghai, in Chinese, under ISSN 1008-861X. It should be distinguished carefully from the university's other periodicals. The Shanghai Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine (上海中医药杂志) is a separate, older journal of the city's TCM community, first published in 1955; the Journal of Acupuncture and Tuina Science is the university's English-language acupuncture title; and Chinese Medicine and Culture is a further university publication. The xuebao — the university journal proper, under its Latin acta title — is the comprehensive research journal among them, and the ISSN is the safest means of telling them apart in catalogues, where the similar names otherwise invite confusion.

Bibliographically, the journal is a standard Chinese university serial: identified by its Chinese title 上海中医药大学学报, its Latin title Acta Universitatis Traditionis Medicalis Sinensis Pharmacologiaeque Shanghai, its Shanghai imprint, its bimonthly frequency and its ISSN. Any two of those identifiers used together will locate it unambiguously; the Latin title on its own, though imposing, is used by no other journal.

Readership and role

The journal's primary readers are researchers, clinicians and postgraduate students in traditional Chinese medicine in China: university staff publishing and following research in basic theory and pharmacology, hospital clinicians following clinical studies, and acupuncture and materia medica specialists following their strands of its contents. As the journal of a university whose graduates practise and teach across China and abroad, it also serves an alumni and institutional readership for whom it represents the continuing scholarship of their school.

Within the wider landscape of Chinese medical publishing, the journal's role is that of a leading university acta: a core-listed, bimonthly forum in which one of China's historic TCM universities — an institution whose roots reach back to 1917 and whose present form dates from the college of 1956 and the university renaming of 1993 — publishes its discipline's research to the nation. Its Latin title, far from being an ornament, states that ambition in the traditional language of learned journals: the acts, or proceedings, of Shanghai's university of Chinese medicine and pharmacology, issued for the record of the field.