About Chinese Journal of School Health

Chinese Journal of School Health

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of School Health is a Chinese-language public health journal devoted to the health of children and adolescents in educational settings, published from Bengbu, Anhui, China. It is identified by ISSN 1000-9817 and domestic number CN 34-1092/R, the CN prefix 34 confirming its Anhui registration. Its publisher is recorded internationally as the Journal Office of Chinese School Health (Bengbu), its official website is cjsh.org.cn, and its articles carry DOIs in the form 10.16835/j.cnki.1000-9817 followed by a year and article number. It is, in short, China's specialist journal for school health as a discipline: the health of students, the services schools provide for that health, and the environments schools create.

School health sits between medicine and education, and the journal reflects that position. Its readers include school doctors and nurses, public health researchers, education administrators and academics studying child and adolescent health. In a country with a very large school population, a dedicated monthly journal gives that dispersed professional community a shared literature: surveillance findings, intervention studies, policy discussions and practical guidance can all be published, read and cited in one place.

History and development

The journal's volume numbering dates it clearly. It reached volume 45 in 2024, which places its first volume in 1980, so it has published for more than four decades. A guide to Chinese journals prepared for epidemiologists, using 2006 data, already listed it as an established title with 12 issues in that year, responsible authority the Ministry of Health, sponsor the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association, ISSN 1000-9817 and CN 34-1092/R, and it marked the journal as a Chinese core journal in the 2004 list. That combination — founded in 1980, monthly by the mid-2000s, and recognised in the national core-journal list — shows a journal that was already central to its field well before the recent expansion of interest in adolescent mental health, myopia and healthy schools.

Its development since then can be followed in its own pages. By 2023 and 2024 the journal was publishing programmatic articles on implementing China's healthy school construction plan and on telling the story of Chinese school health research through the unity of research and application, themes taken up in the scope section below. The journal's archive at cjsh.org.cn presents full recent volumes, including the twelve monthly issues of 2024, with English titles and abstracts for individual articles.

Sponsorship, publisher and place

The journal is sponsored by the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association under the Ministry of Health, the responsible authority recorded in bibliographic guides. The Chinese Preventive Medicine Association is one of China's national public health societies, and sponsorship by it places the journal inside the country's preventive medicine establishment rather than in a single university or hospital. Day-to-day publication is handled by its own journal office in Bengbu, Anhui — the publisher named in international databases as Journal Office of Chinese School Health (Bengbu).

Bengbu is a prefecture-level city in northern Anhui, and the journal's presence there is a reminder that Chinese specialist publishing is geographically dispersed. Content in the journal is nonetheless national: a 2021-2022 study of dental caries among preschool children with disabilities in Bengbu itself appears alongside province-wide studies from Zhejiang and national policy analyses, all within the same journal.

Frequency, format and identifiers

The journal is monthly, with 12 issues a year, a frequency already recorded in 2006 and still evident in its 2024 volume, which runs from issue 1 through issue 12. Monthly publication suits a field driven by school-year rhythms, surveillance cycles and policy roll-outs, where findings lose value if they wait a year to appear. Each article is assigned a DOI under the prefix 10.16835 with the journal's ISSN embedded in the suffix, for example 10.16835/j.cnki.1000-9817.2024020 for a January 2024 editorial article in volume 45, issue 1, pages 1-5. That consistent identifier practice makes the journal's Chinese-language articles individually citable and traceable in international reference lists, where it is normally cited in abbreviated form as Chin J Sch Health.

Scope: child and adolescent health

The journal's core scope is the health of children and adolescents, studied in and around schools. Recent articles show what that means in practice. The journal has published work on collective health literacy in schools, on the health management of children and adolescents as a comprehensive task spanning physical, psychological, social and environmental factors, on sleep duration and body mass index in primary and middle school students in Zhejiang Province followed from 2017 to 2019, and on the oral health of preschool children with disabilities. Nutrition is a standing part of the scope, covering student nutrition, eating behaviour and the school food environment, as is the prevention of common school-age conditions, notably myopia, which the journal discusses as a problem requiring comprehensive measures.

Mental and behavioural health, physical activity, sedentary behaviour and screen-related risks also recur. A 2024 editorial article in the journal drew attention to new environmental and behavioural risk factors affecting adolescent health, and the journal has published reviews of how physical activity load in preschool children is assessed, a topic that connects school health to sports science measurement methods. Infectious disease control in schools remains part of the remit as well: journal content includes analyses of influenza vaccination and school absenteeism among primary and secondary students, with an overall preventive effect on absenteeism reported at 26.52 percent, and of latent tuberculosis infection preventive treatment acceptance among college freshmen.

Scope: school health services and healthy schools

A second strand of the journal concerns the services themselves: school medical rooms, health personnel, and the organisation of care. The journal has summarised the main problems in building school medical teams in China, including the mismatch between the allocation of health personnel in universities and in primary and secondary schools and actual educational needs, and has proposed development paths for a higher-quality school health work system. It has likewise reported survey findings on university hospitals, including departmental configurations and requirements for professional promotion among health staff.

The healthy schools programme gives this strand its policy frame. The journal published Ma Yinghua and colleagues on implementing the healthy school construction plan to promote students' health and well-being in 2023 (volume 44, issue 3, pages 325-329, 334), situating the work against the Healthy China Action (2019-2030) and the Ministry of Education's 2022 notice on implementing the national healthy school construction plan. A 2024 article on improving collective health literacy in schools and comprehensively promoting the construction of healthy schools continued the same line. The journal also responds to education policy beyond health: it has assessed elementary students' daily learning time in the context of the Double Reduction policy, which reduced homework and off-campus tutoring burdens. Few journals anywhere publish school medicine, health promotion and education policy analysis side by side; that combination is this title's signature.

Indexing and standing

International databases record the Chinese Journal of School Health with coverage from 2019 to 2025 in Scopus-derived listings, subject areas spanning health professions, medicine and social sciences, and an H-index recorded at 11 to 14 depending on the service and year consulted. Its status as a Chinese core journal dates to at least the 2004 core list, as noted above. For researchers outside China, the practical access route is the journal's own website, cjsh.org.cn, which carries the full archive of recent issues with English-language article pages, supplemented by the citation records in Scopus and EBSCO-style indexes.

Readership and use

The journal is written for the people who run and study school health in China: school physicians and nurses, child and adolescent health researchers, maternal and child health and disease-control staff, physical education and health education specialists, and officials in education and health administrations. Its articles are used in several distinct ways — as surveillance evidence for provincial programmes, as evaluations of interventions such as vaccination campaigns, as staffing and service standards discussions, and as commentary on national plans for healthy schools. Authors citing it should use the exact title and ISSN 1000-9817, because China also publishes a Chinese Journal of School Doctor and other education-health titles whose records are separate.

Why the journal matters

The Chinese Journal of School Health matters because it is the long-running, monthly, nationally sponsored record of a discipline that touches every Chinese family: the health of students. Founded in 1980, sponsored by the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association, published from Bengbu, recognised as a Chinese core journal, and still setting out the research and policy agenda for healthy schools in its 2024 volume 45, it combines bibliographic stability with direct practical relevance. This profile records the verified facts of that identity — its identifiers, sponsor, publisher, place, frequency and scope — so that readers can find it, cite it and distinguish it with confidence.