About Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine

Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine (Chinese: 中国预防兽医学报) is a Chinese-language veterinary science journal published in Harbin, Heilongjiang Province, in north-eastern China. It is the specialist journal of preventive veterinary medicine in China, the branch of veterinary science concerned with the prevention, surveillance and control of animal infectious diseases rather than with their clinical treatment in individual animals. The journal is published by the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, one of China's most important animal-health research institutions. It is identified by print ISSN 1008-0589, and its standard title abbreviation in international catalogues is Chin. J. Prev. Vet. Med.; the United States National Library of Medicine catalogue records the title under NLM ID 101125320. Published in Chinese, it serves China's large community of veterinary researchers, animal-disease control officials and vaccine scientists.

Preventive veterinary medicine occupies a central place in Chinese agricultural science because China maintains the world's largest populations of several farmed species, including pigs and poultry, and because outbreaks of diseases such as African swine fever, foot-and-mouth disease, avian influenza and lumpy skin disease carry enormous economic and food-security consequences. A national journal devoted specifically to prevention — to epidemiology, diagnostics, vaccines and biosecurity — therefore performs a function that general veterinary titles cannot: it concentrates the research output of China's disease-control system in a single, citable venue. The Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine has performed that function for more than four decades, and its longevity and institute backing give it a standing distinct from newer or commercially published veterinary titles.

History and founding

The journal was founded in 1979, a date that places its origins at the beginning of China's reform era, when Chinese scientific publishing was being rebuilt and expanded after the disruptions of the preceding decade. Its founding publisher, the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute, was itself a much older institution: the institute was created in 1948 and is recognised as the first veterinary medicine research institute in China. A journal launched by such an institute in 1979 inherited an established research community working on the infectious diseases of livestock, and the title's uninterrupted run from 1979 to the present reflects the continuity of that community.

Over the decades since 1979 the journal has documented successive generations of Chinese animal-disease research, from classical bacteriology and serology through to molecular virology, recombinant vaccines and genomic surveillance. The institute behind it has continued to expand its facilities, most notably putting into operation in 2018 the country's second biosafety level-4 (BSL-4) laboratory and its first such laboratory for large animals — infrastructure that underpins the high-consequence pathogen research that a preventive veterinary journal exists to publish. The journal's history is thus inseparable from the institutional history of the Harbin institute and of China's national animal epidemic prevention system.

Publisher and institutional home

The journal is published in Harbin by the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute (HVRI), which operates under the supervision of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), the national agricultural research organisation administered through China's Ministry of Agriculture system. HVRI is a comprehensive veterinary research institute whose work spans fundamental virology and immunology through to vaccine development and diagnostic technology, and it has attracted international attention for its research on high-consequence avian and swine viruses, including H5N1 avian influenza and H1N1 influenza research reported internationally in 2013.

Harbin's position as the journal's home is significant. The city, the capital of Heilongjiang Province, has been a centre of veterinary research since the institute's creation in 1948, and the journal's editorial base there connects it directly to laboratory science rather than to a university teaching faculty. Institute-published journals of this kind are a characteristic feature of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences system: each major institute sustains a title in its own discipline, and the Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine is the corresponding title for animal disease prevention. Its Harbin base also distinguishes it geographically from China's Beijing-centred veterinary titles.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal's scope covers the prevention of animal infectious diseases in the broadest sense. Its core territory includes veterinary epidemiology and disease surveillance; the aetiology, pathogenesis and molecular biology of bacterial, viral, parasitic and other infectious agents of livestock, poultry and other farmed animals; diagnostic methods, from classical isolation and identification through serological assays to molecular and genomic techniques; immunology and vaccinology, including the development and evaluation of conventional and novel vaccines; and veterinary public health, covering zoonotic diseases at the animal–human interface and the safety of animal-derived food chains.

A representative and widely noted example of the journal's content is its report of the isolation and identification of the lumpy skin disease virus from China's first outbreak of that disease in 2019. Lumpy skin disease, a poxvirus infection of cattle, had spread westward across Asia before its first confirmed Chinese occurrence, and the rapid characterisation of the causative virus was exactly the kind of first-response science the journal exists to record. Papers of this type — first isolations, outbreak investigations, new diagnostic assays and vaccine trials — form the characteristic core of the journal alongside broader research on endemic diseases of pigs, cattle, sheep, goats and poultry.

Article character and editorial function

As an institute research journal, the Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine primarily publishes original research articles reporting laboratory and field investigations, together with reviews that synthesise progress in particular diseases or technologies. Its articles typically follow the conventions of Chinese scientific journals: full text in Chinese, structured around experimental methods and results, serving in the first instance the domestic research and disease-control community. The emphasis falls on work with direct application to China's national programmes for the prevention and control of major animal epidemics, which are organised through the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs and its provincial veterinary services.

That applied orientation does not make the journal a trade magazine. The diseases within its scope — African swine fever, highly pathogenic avian influenza, foot-and-mouth disease, brucellosis, rabies and emerging infections — require fundamental science of international standard, and the journal's pages record the diagnostic and vaccine research on which control policy depends. For international readers, the journal's value lies in its coverage of disease events and research inside China that may be reported nowhere else in such technical detail; the 2019 lumpy skin disease virus isolation report is a case in point.

Place among Chinese veterinary journals

China publishes a family of veterinary titles whose English names can be confusingly similar, and the Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine should be distinguished from its neighbours. The Chinese Journal of Veterinary Science, published by Jilin University in Changchun and founded in 1981, is a general veterinary title covering basic, preventive and clinical veterinary medicine together. Acta Veterinaria et Zootechnica Sinica, published in Beijing since 1956 under the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine, covers animal husbandry as well as veterinary science. The Harbin journal, by contrast, is defined by its preventive specialism and by its single-institute publishing base.

That specialism aligns the journal with the discipline of preventive veterinary medicine as it is organised in Chinese universities and academies, where it stands as a named discipline alongside basic and clinical veterinary medicine. Researchers in that discipline — in CAAS institutes, in the veterinary colleges of agricultural universities and in the national and provincial animal disease control centres — form the journal's natural authorship and readership. Its identification by ISSN 1008-0589, its Harbin imprint and its institute publisher together distinguish it reliably in catalogues and citation indexes.

Readership and authorship

The journal's readership is concentrated in China's animal-health system: researchers at the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute and sister CAAS institutes, academics in preventive veterinary medicine departments, diagnosticians in national and provincial veterinary laboratories, scientists in the animal vaccine and biologics industry, and officials responsible for epidemic prevention policy. Because China operates a comprehensive national system for the compulsory prevention of major animal diseases, research published in the journal can move quickly from the laboratory into surveillance practice, vaccine production and field control programmes.

Its authorship reflects the same community. Papers characteristically come from institute and university laboratories reporting pathogen characterisation, epidemiological investigations of outbreaks in Chinese herds and flocks, and the development of diagnostics and vaccines adapted to the strains circulating in China. The journal therefore functions as a record of the working science of the world's largest national veterinary service, and its archive forms a primary source for anyone studying the history of animal disease control in China since 1979.

Language, identification and access

The Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine is a Chinese-language journal, and its full title in Chinese, 中国预防兽医学报, should be used together with the English title and ISSN 1008-0589 when the journal is cited or catalogued, since several Chinese veterinary titles share similar English renderings. International bibliographic control is provided through the ISSN system and through the National Library of Medicine catalogue record (NLM ID 101125320), which fixes the journal's ISO abbreviation as Chin. J. Prev. Vet. Med. for use in reference lists.

Within China, the journal circulates through the standard channels of Chinese scientific publishing: institute and university libraries, the national journal distribution system and the major Chinese full-text databases through which most Chinese-language research is now read. For the directory user, the essential facts are stable and verifiable: founded in 1979; published in Harbin by the Harbin Veterinary Research Institute of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences; ISSN 1008-0589; and devoted to the prevention of animal infectious diseases, vaccine science and veterinary public health. Those four facts identify the journal uniquely among China's veterinary periodicals.

Legacy and continuing role

More than forty-five years after its founding, the Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine remains the dedicated Chinese-language record of preventive veterinary science in China. Its longevity spans the transformation of Chinese animal agriculture from smallholder production to industrial-scale farming, and the corresponding transformation of disease risk: the journal's archive covers the era of classical endemic diseases, the emergence of new swine and avian viruses, and the genomic era of outbreak investigation exemplified by its 2019 lumpy skin disease report.

The journal's continuing role is guaranteed by the structure of the system it serves. As long as China maintains national programmes for the prevention of major animal epidemics — and the scale of its livestock sector makes those programmes permanent — there will be a need for a specialist, Chinese-language, institute-based journal in which the underlying research is published and preserved. Published from Harbin by the institute that has led Chinese veterinary research since 1948, the Chinese Journal of Preventive Veterinary Medicine occupies that position, and its combination of founding date, publisher, ISSN and preventive scope makes it a well-defined entry in any directory of Chinese scientific journals.