About China Communications

China Communications

China Communications is a monthly, peer-reviewed English-language journal covering information and communications technology, published in Beijing and co-sponsored by the China Institute of Communications and the IEEE Communications Society. It has been published since 2004, carries the ISSN 1673-5447, and is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, with its articles available through the IEEE Xplore digital library since January 2013. The journal publishes research papers, surveys and industry-oriented articles on communications theories and systems, signal processing, artificial intelligence for communications, the internet, network security and emerging technologies, drawing heavily on China's large telecommunications research and industry community.

Its identity is a partnership. On one side stands the China Institute of Communications, the national learned society of China's communications profession; on the other, the IEEE Communications Society, the international professional home of communications engineering. China Communications — often styled IEEE/CIC China Communications in recognition of that joint sponsorship — is the journal the two bodies produce together, and it functions as the flagship English-language periodical of the Chinese communications industry.

Published since 2004, monthly

The journal's publication history runs from 2004 to the present, at a monthly frequency of twelve issues a year. Volume numbering visible in its own calls for papers confirms the cadence: volume 15 appeared in 2018 and volume 21 in 2024, one volume per year since the first. A monthly schedule is the fastest standard rhythm for a journal of this kind, and it suits a field in which the objects of study — successive generations of mobile networks, new multiple-access schemes, new satellite systems — change on industry timescales rather than academic ones.

The journal was admitted to the Science Citation Index Expanded in January 2007, only a few years after its launch, according to the IEEE Communications Society's journal listing for the title. From January 2013 all of its articles have been available in IEEE Xplore, the digital library through which IEEE's journals and conference proceedings reach most of the world's engineering libraries. Those two dates mark the journal's integration into the international system: indexed for evaluation from 2007, and distributed on the field's dominant platform from 2013.

The China Institute of Communications and IEEE

The China Institute of Communications (CIC) is the national professional society for communications in China, and the journal is its English-language flagship, published from Beijing — the journal's listed address is on West Chang'an Avenue in the capital. The clean record of the title describes it as published by the China Institute of Communications in technical cooperation with IEEE; the IEEE Communications Society describes the arrangement as co-sponsorship, and the journal is consequently known in IEEE contexts as IEEE/CIC China Communications.

For the CIC, the journal presents the work of China's communications sector — its universities, research institutes, operators and equipment industry — to the world in the profession's working language. For IEEE, the partnership provides a structured connection to the largest national communications community in the world, at a time when much of the field's research output and its industrial centre of gravity have moved towards China. The journal's editorial and feature-topic programmes, visible on its Beijing-based official site, are run in English for that combined audience.

Scope: communications theories, systems and applications

The IEEE Communications Society's listing summarises the journal's major columns as communications theories and systems, signal processing, artificial intelligence, internet, security, and emerging technology and applications, aimed at engineers and information-technology workers in industry, universities, research and development organisations and government agencies worldwide. The journal's own descriptions add the survey and industry papers through which it addresses practitioners as well as researchers: alongside original technical research it publishes overviews of technology directions and contributions from the operating industry.

Scope summaries of the journal expand the same territory in technical detail: wireless communication technologies including mobile networks, satellite communications and the Internet of Things, with methods such as non-orthogonal multiple access, MIMO and reconfigurable intelligent surfaces; the integration of artificial intelligence and machine learning into communication systems, from signal detection to resource allocation; and security and privacy, including physical-layer security, privacy-preserving protocols and blockchain applications in networks. Optical networks and information theory, named in the journal's standard descriptions, complete a remit that runs from the physical layer to network architecture and policy-relevant industry analysis.

The mobile generations: 5G, 6G and beyond

No theme illustrates the journal better than the succession of mobile generations. China Communications publishes extensively on 5G and on the 6G research that follows it, reflecting China's central place in both the deployment of 5G networks and the international definition of 6G. Its feature topics show the mechanism: a 2024 feature topic on 6G new multiple access technology, organised in connection with the IEEE's Next-Generation Multiple Access initiative and China's IMT-2030 Promotion Group, invited the academic and industry researchers defining the next generation's air interface to publish their transmission schemes, coding and modulation work and receiver algorithms together.

Feature topics — the journal's term for its themed special issues — are a regular instrument. Another 2024 example addressed resilient satellite communication networks, aiming at highly dynamic and highly reliable transmission, with guest editors from the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China; a 2018 example covered wideband, intelligent and integrated HF communications. Each feature topic assembles a research community around a defined problem, and the sequence of topics across the years amounts to a running agenda of Chinese communications research priorities.

Research profile and most-cited work

Bibliometric portraits of the journal show computer networking as its largest area, followed by distributed computing, algorithms and wireless communications, with telecommunications and electronic engineering woven through the whole. Its author base is led by China's specialist communications universities — Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications is its most frequent contributing affiliation, followed by institutions including Tsinghua University and Xidian University — a distribution that maps directly onto the structure of Chinese communications research, in which the former posts-and-telecommunications university sector remains the field's core.

Among its most-cited individual papers is "Deep learning for wireless physical layer: Opportunities and challenges", a survey of the application of deep learning to the design of wireless physical layers. The paper's citation record captures the journal's moment precisely: as machine learning moved into communications engineering, a China-based English journal's survey became a standard reference for researchers entering the subject worldwide.

Publication pattern and indexing

China Communications is published monthly in English under ISSN 1673-5447, with twelve issues a year and articles carried in IEEE Xplore, where the journal has its own publication record. It keeps the journal abbreviation China Commun. in citation databases. Its official website, run from Beijing, publishes its calls for feature topics, its issue contents and its announcements in English.

The journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded — held since January 2007 — and in Scopus. In journal ranking systems it has stood in the first quartile in computer networks and communications categories in recent Scopus-based assessments, with an impact factor reported by the IEEE Communications Society's listing at above three and a Journal Citation Reports quartile in the second quartile range. For a national society journal, that standing places it among the more visible English-language communications titles published outside the traditional IEEE and IET stables, while remaining institutionally anchored in Beijing.

Readership: industry as well as academia

The journal's stated audience deliberately crosses the boundary between university and industry: engineers and IT workers in industry, universities, research and development organisations and government agencies. That breadth follows from its sponsor. The China Institute of Communications serves a profession whose centre is an operating industry — network operators, equipment manufacturers and their research institutes — and China Communications accordingly publishes industry papers and surveys alongside academic research, in a format closer to the great society magazines of communications engineering than to a purely academic transactions.

For international readers, the value of the journal is access. Chinese communications research is enormous in volume and much of it appears in Chinese-language venues or in conference proceedings; China Communications offers a monthly, refereed, IEEE-distributed selection of it in English, chosen by the profession's own national institute. Researchers following topics such as multiple access, satellite networks or AI-native air interfaces can use it as a structured guide to what the Chinese community — academic and industrial together — is working on.

China Communications and the Chinese communications sector

The journal's two decades coincide with the rise of China to the centre of global telecommunications: the build-out of the world's largest mobile networks, the emergence of Chinese vendors as leaders in network equipment, and China's prominent role in 5G deployment and 6G research. China Communications has been the English-language journal of record for that transformation, published by the sector's own institute with the endorsement and distribution of the IEEE Communications Society.

That combination — national institute ownership, international society co-sponsorship, SCIE indexing since 2007, IEEE Xplore distribution since 2013 and a monthly rhythm sustained since 2004 — gives China Communications a durable and unusual position among China's English-language journals. It is at once a domestic flagship, through which the Chinese communications profession speaks to itself in English, and an international channel, through which the rest of the world's communications engineers can follow the work of the largest communications community on earth.