About Chinese Journal of Rice Science

Chinese Journal of Rice Science

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Rice Science is a Chinese-language academic journal devoted entirely to rice, published in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China. Its official website is at ricesci.cn. It carries the ISSN 1001-7216 and the Chinese serial number CN 33-1146/S, the suffix indicating an agricultural science serial registered in Zhejiang. First published in 1986, it is a bimonthly journal — six issues a year — sponsored by the China National Rice Research Institute in Hangzhou. It primarily publishes original, unpublished research papers focusing on rice, in Chinese with English abstracts, and it is described in Scopus-derived listings as a publication of the China National Rice Research Institute covering agricultural and biological sciences, with Scopus coverage recorded from 2016 onwards.

A journal devoted to a single crop may sound narrow, but in China rice is not a narrow subject. Rice is the country's principal food grain, the focus of a national research institute, of state key laboratories and of breeding programmes whose results feed hundreds of millions of people. The journal's own statement of purpose says it is committed to advancing academic exchange and flourishing scientific research in rice, tracking global frontiers in rice science and technology, exploring future development directions, monitoring disciplinary trends and disseminating innovative achievements, with the ambition to be a first-class platform and window for academic exchange and collaboration in the field. The Chinese Journal of Rice Science is the domestic, Chinese-language record of that research effort.

Distinction from Rice Science

This journal must be distinguished clearly from Rice Science, its English-language sister title. Rice Science is an international peer-reviewed bimonthly journal also sponsored by the China National Rice Research Institute in Hangzhou, but it is hosted by Elsevier, published in English, and carries entirely different identifiers — print ISSN 1672-6308 and online ISSN 1876-4762. It descends from the Chinese Rice Research Newsletter and exists to introduce advances in Chinese rice research to the world and to attract submissions from outside China. The Chinese Journal of Rice Science, by contrast, dates from 1986, carries ISSN 1001-7216, is published through the institute's own journal operation at ricesci.cn, and publishes its articles in Chinese with English abstracts for the domestic research community.

The two titles share a sponsor and overlapping subject matter — both cover breeding and genetics, molecular biology, germplasm resources, agronomy, physiology, pest management, soil and fertilizer management, ecology, cereal chemistry and post-harvest processing — but they are separate serials with separate archives, separate ISSNs and separate readerships. Facts, metrics and indexing claims that belong to the Elsevier-hosted English title should never be attributed to the Chinese journal, and vice versa. This profile concerns only the Chinese-language journal of 1986.

The sponsor: China National Rice Research Institute

The China National Rice Research Institute, abbreviated CNRRI, is a non-profit national research institute in Hangzhou. It was established in Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province, as approved by the Chinese State Council in June 1981, under the leadership of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. CNRRI describes itself as an integrative national research institute of rice science, whose major research fields include rice genetics and breeding, rice germplasm resources, rice farming techniques and environment, and rice genomics, among other areas of rice biotechnology, cultivation and variety resources.

The institute's international role gives the journal additional context. Since its establishment in 1981, CNRRI has built up cooperation with companies, organisations and countries around the world, hosting dozens of international cooperation projects in rice biotechnology, genetics and breeding, agricultural cultivation and variety resources. In 2005 the China-IRRI Joint Research Center on Rice Quality and Nutrition was founded, with the approval of the Ministry of Agriculture, through the efforts of CNRRI and the International Rice Research Institute. The institute was also approved in 2001 as a demonstration base for China super rice cultivation and production technology. A journal sponsored by such an institute is not a general agricultural periodical that occasionally prints rice papers; it is the house journal of China's national rice institute, founded five years after the institute itself.

History and development

The journal was first published in 1986. That date places its founding in the decade when Chinese rice science was being reorganised around dedicated national institutions and when hybrid and high-yielding rice research was a national priority. CNRRI itself had been created in 1981; a specialist journal followed in 1986 as the institute's research output — and that of rice institutes and agricultural universities across China — required a dedicated national outlet. Notably, the scholarly record shows the journal in use from its first year: a 1986 paper on Chinese hybrid rice by Longping Yuan was published in China Rice Science, the journal's abbreviated citation form, in its first volume.

Over the following decades the journal grew with its field. Its official history records a succession of national honours, detailed below, and its website now makes full texts of all published articles available for free download in its archives and current issue sections — a retrospective digitisation that turns a print journal founded in the 1980s into an openly searchable record of Chinese rice research. In 2024 the journal gained inclusion in China's Excellence Action Plan for Sci-Tech Journals, a national programme intended to strengthen leading Chinese scientific journals, marking its continuing official standing nearly forty years after its first issue.

Scope: the whole science of one crop

The journal's stated coverage is comprehensive within its crop. Major areas include molecular biology and bioinformatics; genetics, breeding and germplasm resources; soil, fertilizer and plant nutrition; cultivation, farming systems, plant physiology and biochemistry; grain quality, storage and processing; rice chemistry; agro-meteorology, modelling and remote sensing; plant protection; ecological engineering; intelligent equipment for rice production; and rice industry economics. It also covers related fields such as biotechnology, biomathematics and biophysics applied to rice. Other descriptions of the journal summarise the same scope as genetics and breeding, germplasm resources, agronomy, bioengineering, plant protection, soil and plant nutrition, plant physiology, cereal chemistry and processing, agricultural economics and paddy field development, and agricultural engineering.

That list maps the life of the crop from gene to market. Genetics, breeding and germplasm work addresses the variety itself; molecular biology and bioinformatics supply its modern tools; soil, fertilizer and nutrition research addresses the paddy environment in which rice uniquely grows in flooded fields; cultivation and farming systems research addresses how crops are actually planted and managed at scale; plant protection addresses the pests and diseases of the paddy; physiology and biochemistry explain yield formation; grain quality, storage, processing and rice chemistry address what happens after harvest; and agro-meteorology, remote sensing, intelligent equipment and industry economics connect the crop to climate, mechanisation and policy. A general agriculture journal might touch each of these in a year; this journal is organised around all of them, for one species, in every issue.

Sections and article types

The journal features sections including Research Reports, Research Notes, Experimental Techniques, Academic Treatises and Reviews. Scopus-derived descriptions likewise note that it features original research, reviews and experimental techniques related to rice. The combination is characteristic of a mature disciplinary journal: full research reports carry new experimental results; research notes allow shorter findings to enter the record quickly; the experimental techniques section spreads methods — a vital function in a field where laboratory and field protocols determine whether results can be reproduced across China's very different rice-growing regions; and reviews and treatises let senior specialists synthesise fast-moving areas such as molecular breeding or germplasm evaluation for the wider community.

The stated readership matches those sections. The journal serves researchers, educators, production specialists and management personnel engaged in rice-related work both in China and internationally. Production specialists and managers are named alongside researchers because rice science in China is an applied system: a breeding or cultivation result published in Hangzhou is expected to be read by the provincial institutes and extension services that will test and deploy it.

Honours and national recognition

The journal's official introduction records an unusually full list of honours. Among numerous awards at national and regional levels, it was twice honoured as a National Outstanding Sci-Tech Journal and won the Third National Periodical Prize in the Top 100 Key Journals category. It has been selected for the "Double Hundred" Journals of the China Periodical Matrix, named among China's Fine Sci-Tech Journals and among the Top 100 Outstanding Chinese Academic Journals, and listed among China's Top 100 Newspapers and Periodicals in 2013, 2015 and 2017. Its inclusion in the Excellence Action Plan for Sci-Tech Journals in 2024 continued that pattern into the present decade.

These distinctions are competitive national evaluations of Chinese periodicals, not publisher's claims in isolation, and their repetition across three decades indicates sustained editorial quality rather than a single successful period. Together with its sponsorship by the national rice institute, they explain why bibliometric services classify the journal in agronomy and crop science, plant science and soil science — in Scopus-derived quartile listings, the third quartile in each of Agronomy and Crop Science, Plant Science and Soil Science — and why it is treated within China as the leading domestic journal of its crop.

Indexing and access

The journal states that it is indexed by over thirty databases and abstracting services at home and abroad. Scopus-derived listings record its Scopus coverage from 2016 to 2026 and a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.329 as reported by those services; such figures are recalculated periodically and are best read as evidence of continued international indexing rather than as fixed values. Its long presence in agricultural abstracting is also visible in the FAO AGRIS system, which holds records of journal articles from as early as 1990 — for example, genetic analysis of cold tolerance at the seedling stage in early rice, by authors at the China National Rice Research Institute — showing the journal feeding the international agricultural literature long before its recent Scopus coverage window.

Access is through the journal's own website, ricesci.cn, where full texts of all published articles are available for free download from the archives and current issue sections, and through the institute's WeChat platform, which publishes tables of contents, full-text articles, news and announcements and pushes brief versions of selected outstanding papers. Free full-text availability from the publisher is significant for a Chinese-language journal: it means the domestic archive — breeding reports, germplasm evaluations, cultivation trials and quality studies accumulated since 1986 — can be read by any rice researcher or extension worker with an internet connection.

Place in Chinese and world rice research

China is the world's largest rice-producing and rice-consuming country, and its research system — national institute, provincial academies, agricultural universities and the super rice and hybrid rice programmes — generates a volume of rice science that requires dedicated serials. The Chinese Journal of Rice Science is the longest-established of the institute's journals and the principal Chinese-language one. Its pages are where Chinese rice science talks to itself: where a germplasm evaluation from one province can be compared with trials in another, where cultivation systems for single, early and late rice can be debated in the language of the farmers and technicians who use them, and where the methods sections document how Chinese field and laboratory rice research is actually done.

In summary, the Chinese Journal of Rice Science (ISSN 1001-7216; CN 33-1146/S) is a bimonthly journal founded in 1986, sponsored by the China National Rice Research Institute in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, and devoted to original rice research across genetics and breeding, germplasm, agronomy, soil and nutrition, physiology, plant protection, grain quality and processing, and the economics and engineering of rice production. Repeatedly honoured at national level, indexed by more than thirty services, freely available in full text from its own site, and clearly distinct from its English-language sister journal Rice Science, it remains the core domestic record of rice science in China.