About Chinese Journal of Experimental Surgery

Chinese Journal of Experimental Surgery

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Experimental Surgery (Zhonghua Shiyan Waike Zazhi) is a Chinese-language journal of experimental and basic surgical research, published in Beijing, China, within the journal family of the Chinese Medical Association. It is identified by ISSN 1001-9030. Its archive reaches volume 29 in 2012, indicating publication since 1984. As a Zhonghua-series title, it belongs to the flagship tier of Chinese medical publishing. Its distinctive mission within that family is the laboratory side of surgery: it publishes surgical models, transplantation research, surgical oncology experiments, wound-healing studies and other basic and translational research that underpins operative practice, rather than clinical case series. It is the journal in which China's surgical scientists report animal, cellular and molecular work directed at surgical questions.

Place in the Zhonghua journal family

The Zhonghua ("Chinese") journals are the senior titles of the Chinese Medical Association, published by the association's publishing house in Beijing, and they historically defined the disciplines of Chinese medicine. Surgical science in that system is divided between clinical titles — above all the Chinese Journal of Surgery — and this journal, whose "experimental" designation covers laboratory research. The division reflects the structure of Chinese academic surgery, in which large hospital departments maintain research laboratories, animal facilities and doctoral programmes alongside their operating theatres, and in which a surgeon's academic advancement depends on experimental as well as clinical publication. The Chinese Journal of Experimental Surgery was founded in 1984 to give that laboratory community a national journal of its own, at the moment when Chinese research was expanding rapidly in the reform era.

Scope: surgical models and technique research

The journal's content centres on experimental models of surgical disease and treatment. It publishes studies using animal models of trauma, shock, sepsis, burns, intestinal obstruction and ischaemia–reperfusion injury; work on surgical technique evaluated experimentally, including anastomosis healing, microsurgery and flap survival; and the development and testing of surgical materials, adhesives, prostheses and devices in preclinical settings. Such work forms the evidence base from which techniques pass into clinical trials and practice, and the journal's archive records the experimental foundations of much of modern Chinese surgery, from the microsurgical era of the 1980s to contemporary work with genetically modified models and stem-cell-based repair.

Scope: transplantation

Transplantation is one of the journal's historic strengths. Experimental transplantation research — organ preservation, rejection and immunosuppression in animal models, small-animal liver, kidney, heart and intestinal transplantation, composite tissue allotransplantation and, in more recent decades, xenotransplantation and bioengineering approaches — has a natural home in an experimental surgery journal. China's clinical transplantation programmes, which grew to very large scale, were supported by this experimental literature, and Chinese surgical scientists used the journal to report the model work behind clinical advances. Its transplantation content links it to the wider international experimental-surgery literature while remaining rooted in the Chinese research system.

Scope: surgical oncology and wound healing

Experimental oncology is a second major strand: studies of tumour growth, invasion and metastasis in model systems; angiogenesis; experimental chemotherapy, targeted and immune therapies for surgical cancers; and the molecular biology of the cancers Chinese surgeons treat most — liver, gastric, colorectal and pancreatic cancer among them. Wound healing forms a third strand, covering the biology of repair, growth factors, skin substitutes and burns research, scar formation and the healing of surgical wounds and anastomoses. Together with sepsis, nutrition and surgical infection research, these themes give the journal a coherent identity as the basic-science companion to China's clinical surgical journals.

Historical development

Volume 29 in 2012 dates the journal's founding to 1984. Its early volumes appeared as Chinese experimental surgery was being rebuilt on modern lines, with the re-establishment of graduate education, the return of researchers from abroad and the founding of departmental laboratories. Through the 1990s the journal absorbed the molecular turn in surgical research — from purely anatomical and physiological experiments toward cellular and genetic mechanisms — and through the 2000s the translational turn, in which experimental work is framed explicitly by its path to clinical application. Its continuing publication within the Zhonghua family, now produced by the Chinese Medical Journals Publishing House, maintains its position as the senior Chinese title in its niche.

Readership and authorship

The journal's authors are surgical scientists: professors and doctoral researchers in the laboratories of China's university hospital surgical departments, institutes of surgery and burns, and military medical universities, whose experimental programmes are among the largest in the world by personnel. Its readers are the same community, together with clinicians who follow the preclinical literature of their specialty. The journal is in Chinese, serving domestic scientific communication; its experimental papers are abstracted in Chinese databases, and its most influential work is typically also developed in English-language publications by the same groups, leaving this journal as the fullest record of the work in the national literature.

Relationship to other surgical journals

The journal is distinguished from the Chinese Medical Association's clinical surgical titles — the Chinese Journal of Surgery, the Chinese Journal of Digestive Surgery, the Chinese Journal of Hepatobiliary Surgery and other specialty journals — by its exclusive concern with experimental and basic research. It is also distinct from journals of laboratory animal science and from basic medical science journals such as those in physiology or pathology, whose questions are not surgical. Its closest conceptual relatives internationally are journals of surgical research publishing preclinical work. The Zhonghua prefix and ISSN 1001-9030 are its stable identifiers within the family.

Bibliographic record

The journal's bibliographic record is stable across four decades: one title, in Chinese Zhonghua Shiyan Waike Zazhi, ISSN 1001-9030, published from Beijing, volume 1 in 1984 and volume 29 in 2012 in its documented archive, continuing thereafter. Citations in the Chinese literature abbreviate the title in line with its Chinese name, and international databases record it under its translated English title, Chinese Journal of Experimental Surgery. The ISSN should be used to link the two language forms.

How to cite and identify the journal

The reliable identifiers of the Chinese Journal of Experimental Surgery are its exact title, ISSN 1001-9030, its Zhonghua-series status within the Chinese Medical Association's journals, its Beijing publication, its foundation in 1984, and its scope in experimental surgical research including models, transplantation, oncology and wound healing. Cited by title and ISSN, it uniquely identifies the journal described in this profile.

The journal also illustrates a wider feature of Chinese academic medicine: the expectation that clinical departments conduct laboratory science. China's leading surgical departments maintain experimental programmes as a matter of course, staffed by surgeon-scientists and full-time researchers, and national journals exist to receive that output in every major field. The Chinese Journal of Experimental Surgery is the surgical instance of that pattern within the Chinese Medical Association's portfolio. Its four decades of publication, from 1984 into the era of genomics and regenerative medicine, therefore document not only experimental results but the institutionalisation of research within Chinese surgery itself — the growth of the laboratories, doctoral programmes and funding streams whose papers fill its pages.

For bibliographers, the journal is also a reminder that Chinese experimental-surgery literature is easily missed in English-only searches. Because its papers are published in Chinese within a Beijing association journal, international systematic reviews of preclinical surgical questions risk overlooking relevant Chinese model studies unless they search the Chinese databases where this journal is indexed. Its ISSN provides the reliable retrieval key for that literature across both language forms of its title.