About Chinese Journal of Reparative and Reconstructive Surgery

Chinese Journal of Reparative and Reconstructive Surgery

Overview and identity

Chinese Journal of Reparative and Reconstructive Surgery (Zhongguo Xiufu Chongjian Waike Zazhi (中国修复重建外科杂志)) is a Chinese-language surgery journal based in Chengdu, Sichuan, associated with West China Hospital of Sichuan University. Its site is english.rrsurg.com, and its publisher is identified on its own site as West China Medical Publisher. It publishes research on reparative and reconstructive surgery and is indexed in MEDLINE.

The journal is based in Chengdu, China, and carries ISSN 1002-1892. Those bibliographic facts matter because they distinguish this title from similarly named journals. Chinese academic publishing contains many near-identical English titles, translated titles and paired Chinese and English editions, and the ISSN, city and sponsor recorded here are the reliable means by which librarians, indexers and readers identify the exact journal described in this profile.

History and development

The journal's record runs from the late 1980s: volume 5 appeared in 1991, and it was formerly titled, in transliteration, Xiufu Chongjian Waike Zazhi. Its MEDLINE record, with National Library of Medicine identifier 9425194, shows continuous publication through the decades since, with volume 21 in 2007, volume 24 in 2010 and volume 39 in 2025, the last including work on minimally invasive repair of Achilles tendon injury. That sequence demonstrates an unbroken run of nearly four decades serving the reconstructive surgery community centred on West China Hospital in Chengdu, one of China's largest hospital and medical university complexes.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal publishes research on reparative and reconstructive surgery, tissue engineering, bone and joint repair and microsurgery, as its record states. Its MEDLINE-indexed contents show the scope in practice: studies of mesenchymal stem cells and scaffold materials for tissue repair, including chitosan-alginate scaffolds for spinal cord injury and tissue-engineered bone for large bone defects; surgical effectiveness studies of fracture and joint reconstruction, including acetabular fracture surgery and total hip arthroplasty; and work on tendon repair and islet cell isolation for transplantation. The journal therefore spans the laboratory science of regeneration and the operative practice of restoring form and function after injury, disease or congenital difference.

Sponsorship, publishing and editorial practice

Indexing in MEDLINE, the United States National Library of Medicine's principal bibliographic database, gives the journal's Chinese-language articles, with their English abstracts, international discoverability through PubMed; the sample records above are all retrieved from that system. Few Chinese-language surgical journals achieve and sustain MEDLINE selection, which requires assessment of editorial quality and scientific merit. For reconstructive surgeons, orthopaedic researchers and tissue-engineering scientists in China, the journal provides a national, MEDLINE-visible forum in Chinese, edited from Chengdu, that connects operating-theatre practice with the rapidly developing science of tissue repair.

In common with the leading Chinese academic journals, the journal operates through peer review: manuscripts are assessed by specialists before acceptance, bibliographic information is provided in English as well as Chinese where the journal is internationally indexed, and publication is on a regular schedule maintained over many years. That regularity is itself significant. Sustained publication requires a stable editorial office, a continuing flow of submissions from its research community and continuing support from its sponsor, and the journal's record demonstrates all three.

Place in Chinese scholarly communication

To understand this journal, it helps to understand the system it belongs to. China publishes thousands of academic journals, most of them in Chinese, sponsored by universities, research institutes, learned societies and professional associations, and published from the institutions where their scholarly communities are based. Within that system, national systems of recognition, including the Chinese core journal lists, the Chinese Science Citation Database for science titles and the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index for humanities and social sciences titles, identify the leading journals in each field, and inclusion affects where authors seek to publish and how universities evaluate their work.

Chinese Journal of Reparative and Reconstructive Surgery sits inside that system as a recognised specialist or institutional title. Its importance is therefore not measured only by international citation metrics, which understate the influence of Chinese-language journals whose readers publish and practise mainly in Chinese. It is measured also by its role in training graduate students to write and review research, in setting terminology and standards in Chinese in its field, and in providing the cumulative archive from which Chinese textbooks, guidelines and policy documents are built.

Readership and authorship

The journal's primary readers are researchers, teachers, graduate students and, where its field is clinical or professional, practitioners working in China in its discipline. Its authors are drawn principally from Chinese universities, research institutes, hospitals and agencies, with the sponsoring institution's own scholars naturally represented alongside contributors from across the country. For most Chinese-language journals, that national authorship is a strength rather than a limitation: it concentrates, in one venue, work on Chinese materials, Chinese patients, Chinese institutions or Chinese territory that international journals may treat as peripheral.

At the same time, English titles, abstracts and indexing records make the journal discoverable abroad. Foreign scholars who follow research in China in this field encounter the journal through the major databases and library catalogues, and can identify relevant Chinese work even when they subsequently need translation to read it in full. The journal thus functions at two levels at once: as a working tool for its domestic community, and as a bibliographic window through which the rest of the world can see that community's output.

Distinguishing this journal from similar titles

Careful identification matters for this title. As the introduction notes, paired Chinese and English editions, journals of the same association in different cities, and university journals with similar translated names all create scope for confusion in catalogues and citations. The facts anchored in this profile, the exact title, the city of publication, the sponsor or publisher and ISSN 1002-1892, should be used together to verify that a catalogue record, a citation or a submission target is indeed Chinese Journal of Reparative and Reconstructive Surgery and not a namesake.

That care is particularly important for researchers compiling bibliographies, librarians maintaining serials records and authors choosing where to submit. A manuscript sent to the wrong namesake journal, or a citation attached to the wrong ISSN, creates errors that propagate through databases. The verified identifiers given here are the safeguard against those errors, and they are the reason this profile states them prominently rather than treating them as minor technical detail.

Continuing role and significance

Chinese Journal of Reparative and Reconstructive Surgery continues to publish from Chengdu as an active Chinese academic journal. Its significance lies in continuity and concentration: continuity, in that a journal maintained over many years becomes the archive of its field in China, preserving the sequence of questions asked, methods adopted and conclusions reached; and concentration, in that it gathers into a single, peer-reviewed, regularly issued venue work that would otherwise be scattered across institutional reports, conference proceedings and general journals.

For the WorldNM directory, the journal is recorded as a magazine and journal outlet of China, based in Chengdu, representing the scholarly publishing sector rather than news media. That classification reflects an important truth about China's media landscape: alongside newspapers, broadcasters and news sites, the country's thousands of scholarly journals form a large, structured and long-lived publishing system of their own, sponsored by its academies, universities, societies and hospitals, and Chinese Journal of Reparative and Reconstructive Surgery is one of its established titles.