About Chinese Journal of Public Health

Chinese Journal of Public Health

The Chinese Journal of Public Health is a monthly Chinese-language journal of public health sponsored by the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association and published from Shenyang, Liaoning Province. It carries the International Standard Serial Number 1001-0580 and the Chinese national periodical number CN 21-1234/R, the "21" prefix being the registration code for Liaoning. Its Chinese title is Zhongguo Gonggong Weisheng, and its articles carry DOIs under the prefix 10.11847/zgggws, built from the initials of that title. A peer-reviewed guide to Chinese journals in epidemiology, preventive medicine and public health, published in Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, documents it as one of the journals of the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association series and as a Chinese core journal, publishing twelve issues a year in Chinese. Its official website, zgggws.com, presents current issues and a deep archive, with an English-language interface for article records.

Sponsor, series and the Shenyang base

The journal belongs to the publishing series of the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association (CPMA), the national professional association for preventive medicine and public health in China. The epidemiologists' guide tabulates its position precisely: responsible authority, the Ministry of Health; sponsor, the CPMA; series, the CPMA series; twelve issues in 2006; ISSN 1001-0580; CN 21-1234/R; language, Chinese. The guide places it among the national journals of its field, alongside the association's other national title, China Preventive Medicine, and distinct from the Chinese Medical Association series that includes the Chinese Journal of Epidemiology and the Chinese Journal of Preventive Medicine. Its place of publication explains an apparent puzzle in its identifiers: although it is a national association journal, it is edited from Shenyang rather than Beijing, which is why its CN number carries the Liaoning registration prefix 21. That Shenyang base, in the capital of China's northeastern province of Liaoning, has remained the journal's home throughout its run.

Standing in the Chinese core-journal system

Chinese academic publishing runs on recognised core-journal lists, and the guide's table records this journal's standing in that system. It was listed as a Chinese core journal in the 2004 edition of the core list — the table marks it "Y" for Chinese core journals 2004 — while, in the same table, it is not flagged as Medline-indexed. The guide also supplies its contemporary bibliometric record from the Chinese VIP database: a 2005 impact factor of 0.3828 and an immediacy index of 0.0323, figures the guide published so that international epidemiologists could judge the weight of Chinese journals whose metrics are kept in Chinese databases rather than in the Journal Citation Reports. Those details matter for a directory reader because they describe exactly how this journal is found and weighed in practice: it is a nationally recognised core title whose citation life runs through CNKI, Wanfang, VIP and the other Chinese bibliographic databases — the databases the guide explicitly urges epidemiologists to search, since Chinese journals in epidemiology, preventive medicine and public health contain much of potential international interest that non-Chinese speakers rarely reach.

A long monthly run, visible in the archive

The journal's own archive documents its continuity. Its official site presents issue by issue a run that includes volume 17 in 2001, volume 18 in 2002, volume 21 in 2005, volume 22 in 2006, volume 25 in 2009, volume 36 in 2020, volume 37 in 2021, volume 40 in 2024, volume 41 in 2025 and volume 42 in 2026 — one volume a year, twelve monthly issues to a volume, over a span of more than two and a half decades in the archive alone. A monthly public-health journal sustained at that rhythm is a major piece of scholarly infrastructure: each year adds twelve issues of population-health research, surveillance analyses, health-policy studies and field investigations from across China, and the cumulative archive functions as a running record of Chinese public-health practice through the period that runs from the health-system reforms of the 2000s, through the building of the modern disease-control system, to the digital public-health research of the 2020s.

Scope, shown through its published contents

The journal publishes population-health, epidemiology and health-policy research in Chinese, and its archived tables of contents show the breadth that description implies. From the 2002 volume: a population-based dynamic surveillance study of essential hypertension in a Shanghai district, nutritional health-education studies in hypertensive community populations, a case-control study of occupational stress and hypertension, and work on compliance with anti-hypertensive therapy in the community. From the 2006 volume: an analysis of the human resources of county Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in China's middle and western regions, studies of the new rural cooperative medical system and its funds, an analysis of drug use in village health posts in poor rural areas of western China, and an investigation of tobacco sales to minors. From 2009: the development of systematic evaluation indicators for the health-service capacity of village clinics in western China. From 2020: a theoretical article establishing a general definition of public health itself, screening classic conceptions of the field to guide Chinese practice. From 2021: a discussion of the identity crisis of public-health physicians in China and its remedies, set against the Healthy China Initiative. From 2024: a bibliometric mapping of research hotspots and frontiers in digital public health in China and abroad, based on more than six thousand Chinese and five thousand international articles. Hypertension surveillance, rural insurance, village clinics, CDC staffing, professional identity, digital surveillance — the through-line is a journal concerned with the health of populations and the systems that protect it, at every level from the village post to national policy.

Who publishes in it, and who reads it

The authorship visible in the archive is national and institutional: schools of public health, provincial and county disease-control centres, health bureaus and medical universities from Chengdu to Shanghai to Wuhan appear as author affiliations, and many papers are field studies of a named province, county or community. That is the natural author base of a CPMA journal: China's preventive-medicine workforce, the staff of its CDC system and academic public-health researchers studying that system. Its readership is the same community, reading in Chinese, in the journal's monthly issues and through the Chinese databases. For international readers, the journal is most often met the way the epidemiologists' guide recommends: by searching the Chinese databases for Chinese journal articles on a Chinese public-health question, where this title's core-journal status makes it one of the first sources a competent search returns.

Access, citation and identification

The journal's official website, zgggws.com, is the primary access point: it presents current and archive issues with article records in Chinese and English — the English citation form, for example, renders the 2020 definition-of-public-health article as Chinese Journal of Public Health, 2020, 36(2): 140–144, DOI 10.11847/zgggws1127897. That DOI pattern, 10.11847/zgggws followed by an article number, is a reliable fingerprint of the journal in reference lists and databases. Searchers should use the Chinese title Zhongguo Gonggong Weisheng or ISSN 1001-0580 as catalogue keys, and should keep this journal distinct from its near-namesakes: the Chinese Journal of Preventive Medicine is the Chinese Medical Association's Medline-indexed title from Beijing, and China Preventive Medicine is the CPMA's separate six-issue-a-year journal, ISSN 1009-6639. The Chinese Journal of Public Health is the monthly, Shenyang-based, CPMA core journal — the identifiers settle it.

Place in China's public-health literature

The epidemiologists' guide divides China's journals in this field into tiers: at the top, the Medline-indexed flagships of the Chinese Medical Association and the China CDC; alongside them, the national journals of the CPMA series, of which this journal and China Preventive Medicine are the named examples; and below them, the provincial preventive-medicine journals that only a minority of provinces publish. The Chinese Journal of Public Health sits squarely in that national CPMA tier — broader in subject than any specialty title, monthly where many peers publish six issues a year, and core-listed for more than two decades. For this directory it is the essential Shenyang entry in China's public-health press: the journal in which the country's preventive-medicine association publishes population-health research and health-policy scholarship for the profession that staffs its public-health system.

Key facts

Journal: Chinese Journal of Public Health. Chinese title: Zhongguo Gonggong Weisheng. Place of publication: Shenyang, Liaoning, China. Sponsor: Chinese Preventive Medicine Association (CPMA series); responsible authority recorded as the Ministry of Health. ISSN: 1001-0580. CN: 21-1234/R. DOI prefix: 10.11847/zgggws. Frequency: monthly, twelve issues a year. Language: Chinese. Standing: Chinese core journal (2004 list); 2005 VIP impact factor 0.3828 as tabulated in the peer-reviewed guide to Chinese epidemiology journals. Scope: population health, epidemiology, preventive medicine and health policy. Official website: zgggws.com. Not to be confused with the Chinese Journal of Preventive Medicine (Chinese Medical Association) or China Preventive Medicine (CPMA, ISSN 1009-6639).