About Chinese Journal of Pediatric Emergency Medicine

Chinese Journal of Pediatric Emergency Medicine

The Chinese Journal of Pediatric Emergency Medicine (中国小儿急救医学, Zhongguo Xiao'er Jijiu Yixue) is a Chinese-language journal of pediatric emergency and critical care medicine published in Shenyang, Liaoning Province, in association with Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University and the Chinese Medical Association. Founded in 1994 and carrying ISSN 1673-4912, it covers pediatric emergency medicine, pediatric intensive care, poisoning, trauma and resuscitation — the disciplines concerned with the acutely ill and injured child. Its history is inseparable from the history of pediatric critical care in China, a field whose development its pages have documented since the specialty's formative decade.

Founding in 1994 as Pediatric Emergency Medicine

The journal was founded in 1994 under the title Pediatric Emergency Medicine. The date is confirmed by the specialty's own published history: a 2019 account of the history of pediatric critical care medicine in mainland China, published in Pediatric Investigation, records that in 1994 a peer-reviewed journal, Pediatric Emergency Medicine, was founded, and that it was renamed Chinese Pediatric Emergency Medicine in 2006. The founding came at a moment when the specialty was organising itself nationally. The Pediatrics Group of the Society of Emergency Medicine of the Chinese Medical Association had been established in 1988; the first National Pediatric Critical Care Conference was held in Dandong, Liaoning, in 1989; and in 1993, under Professors Xiangwen Zhao and Xunmei Fan, the Emergency Group of the Chinese Society of Pediatrics was formed. A dedicated journal, launched the following year, gave this young community its own organ of publication.

The 2006 renaming and present identity

In 2006 the journal took its present name, Chinese Journal of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, and it is cited internationally under the abbreviation Chin J Pediatr Emerg Med and in English-language reference lists as Chinese Pediatric Emergency Medicine. Volume numbering has run continuously from the founding: citations in the international literature show volume 28 in 2021, volume 29 in 2022, volume 30 in 2023 and volume 32 in 2025, a sequence that matches a 1994 start and confirms an unbroken publication record of more than three decades. The 2025 citations, which reach at least issue 10 within the volume year, reflect a journal publishing on a frequent, effectively monthly rhythm. It carries ISSN 1673-4912 and is published in Shenyang in association with Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University and the Chinese Medical Association.

Shenyang, Shengjing Hospital and China Medical University

The journal's Shenyang base is historically apt. Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University was one of the four key hospitals in the Pediatric Intensive Care Training Project run by China's Ministry of Health with UNICEF between 1982 and 1984 — alongside Beijing Children's Hospital, the Children's Hospital of Chongqing Medical University and Shanghai Children's Hospital — which seeded modern pediatric intensive care in China. The project chose eleven Chinese hospitals in all; delegations visited the United States and Canada, staff were selected for study abroad, and the pilot hospitals established PICUs, neonatal ICUs and surgical ICUs for children. A journal of pediatric emergency medicine edited from one of those founding hospitals thus sits at one of the specialty's original centres. In the 1990s Shenyang was also among the major cities — with Beijing, Shanghai and Chongqing — in which doctoral training in the pediatric critical care subspecialty began, deepening the academic base from which the journal draws its authors and reviewers.

Scope: emergency and critical care of children

The journal covers pediatric emergency medicine and pediatric intensive care, together with poisoning, trauma and resuscitation. In the pages of its recent volumes this scope appears in concrete form: clinical analyses of severe childhood infections presenting as emergencies, studies of vasovagal syncope and its diagnostic testing, case reports with autopsy findings in fatal pediatric myocardial infarction complicating Kawasaki disease, and guidance on questions such as the diagnosis, treatment and prevention of catheter-related thrombosis in neonates. The common thread is the child whose condition is urgent, unstable or life-threatening — the patient of the emergency department, the transport team and the pediatric intensive care unit. Alongside original research and case material, the journal carries the reviews and expert commentary through which a fast-moving, protocol-driven specialty keeps its practitioners current.

Roots in China's pediatric critical care story

To understand the journal's remit, the specialty's history matters, and the journal's own era is well documented. Pediatric critical care in mainland China grew from the treatment of childhood infectious diseases — toxic bacillary dysentery and fulminant meningitis among them — in the 1950s. In the 1970s Professor Xiangwen Zhao of Hunan Children's Hospital organised a National Collaborative Group on Septic Shock in Changsha, which held symposiums and formulated diagnosis and treatment criteria for septic shock in children. In 1983, with World Health Organization support, Professor Xunmei Fan of Beijing Children's Hospital — regarded as the pioneer and founder of pediatric critical care medicine in China — set up the country's first PICU, starting with a ventilator and six beds. China's first monograph on pediatric emergency medicine, Practical Pediatric Emergency Medicine, appeared in 1992, two years before this journal's founding, and the journal's launch in 1994 completed the specialty's basic infrastructure of societies, conferences, textbooks and a periodical of its own.

Role in professional standardisation

The journal operates within a specialty that has progressively formalised its training and standards. The Emergency Group of the Chinese Society of Pediatrics and the Pediatrics Group of the Emergency Medicine Society of the Chinese Medical Association jointly organised the specialty's national conferences; in 2015 the Professional Committee on Pediatric Critical Care Medicine of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association was established; and in 2018 a Critical Care Medicine section used as a textbook for training resident pediatricians was published, gradually standardising the training of PICU specialists. Journals are where such standardisation becomes literature: criteria, consensus recommendations and training experience acquire citable form. The Chinese Journal of Pediatric Emergency Medicine, as the specialty's dedicated Chinese-language periodical since 1994, is a principal site of that process, and it is counted among China's core paediatric titles in evaluative research — a cross-sectional assessment of paediatric randomised controlled trials published in China from 1999 to 2022 included it among the twenty paediatric medical journals surveyed.

Audience and readership

The journal is written for the clinicians of China's pediatric emergency and intensive care services: emergency pediatricians, intensivists, and the wider team of the PICU, together with general pediatricians who first receive the deteriorating child. Its subject matter — resuscitation, shock, poisoning, trauma, severe infection and organ support — is the material of on-call practice, and its articles characteristically aim at decisions: how to recognise, triage, stabilise and treat. For readers outside China, the journal is discoverable through the Western Pacific Region Index Medicus and the international citation record, where its articles appear in English-language reference lists under its translated title, offering a window onto the case mix and practice of Chinese pediatric emergency care.

Distinction from similarly named titles

The journal should not be confused with the Chinese Journal of Emergency Medicine, a separate association journal for emergency medicine generally, nor with international titles in pediatric emergency care. Its identity is specific: Chinese-language, devoted exclusively to the emergency and critical care of children, published in Shenyang since 1994, and rooted institutionally in Shengjing Hospital of China Medical University — one of the birthplaces of Chinese pediatric intensive care — and the Chinese Medical Association.

The journal today

Three decades after its founding, the Chinese Journal of Pediatric Emergency Medicine remains the specialist record of a discipline that China built within living memory — from a single six-bed PICU in 1983 to a national network of emergency departments and intensive care units. Founded in 1994, renamed in 2006, and publishing continuously under ISSN 1673-4912, it documents, issue by issue, how Chinese medicine rescues its most acutely ill children.