About Chinese Journal of Spine and Spinal Cord

Chinese Journal of Spine and Spinal Cord

Overview and identity

The Chinese Journal of Spine and Spinal Cord is a Chinese-language journal of spine surgery and spinal cord medicine, published in Beijing, China. It was founded in 1991 by Professor Zhang Guangbo and colleagues, together with the Spine and Spinal Cord Professional Committee of the Chinese Rehabilitation Medicine Association, which was established in the same year. The journal is identified by ISSN 1004-406X. It is described as China's only national-level spinal cord journal, and it is recognised as a core journal in the clinical medicine category of the Chinese Core Journals Overview. It covers spinal surgery, spinal deformity, spinal cord injury and rehabilitation, and it has been the central scholarly forum of China's spine and spinal cord professional community for more than three decades.

Founding and Professor Zhang Guangbo

The journal's founding is unusually well documented because of the eminence of its founder. Zhang Guangbo (born 1930, in Laoting County, Hebei Province) was a pioneering figure in Chinese spinal cord medicine. In order to disseminate advanced techniques in spine and spinal cord care, conduct academic exchange and raise China's level in the field, Zhang and other experts jointly founded both the Spine and Spinal Cord Professional Committee of the Chinese Rehabilitation Medicine Association and the Chinese Journal of Spine and Spinal Cord in 1991. Under the leadership of Zhang Guangbo, Cai Qinlin and Hou Shuxun, the professional committee grew into one of the most important and dynamic committees of the Chinese Association of Rehabilitation Medicine. As editor-in-chief, Zhang devoted some twenty years to the journal — famously revising manuscripts on overnight trains after work — and under his care its distribution covered all provinces and autonomous regions, including Hong Kong and Macao, with its electronic version reaching twenty countries in Europe and America. The journal thus began, characteristically for its generation of Chinese specialty journals, as the creation of a founding editor who built a specialty's institutions — society and journal together — from the ground up.

The professional committee

The journal is the organ of the Spine and Spinal Cord Professional Committee of the Chinese Rehabilitation Medicine Association. That parentage shapes its scope: unlike a purely orthopaedic spine journal, it unites spine surgery with spinal cord medicine and rehabilitation, reflecting the Chinese rehabilitation association's concern with the whole course of spinal disorders, from injury and deformity through surgery to functional recovery. The committee's basic research group for spine and spinal cord, assembled from 2014, is active within the Chinese spine research community, whose publications have accounted for a large share of China's musculoskeletal research output. The journal serves this combined surgical, medical and rehabilitation community as its national platform.

Scope and content

The journal publishes clinical and basic research on the spine and spinal cord: cervical, thoracic and lumbar degenerative disease; spinal deformity, including scoliosis, on which Chinese surgeons have conducted screening surveys since 1986 and developed internationally cited classification and correction work; spinal trauma and spinal cord injury, including its experimental treatment and rehabilitation; spinal tumours and infection, including spinal tuberculosis; minimally invasive and endoscopic spine surgery, whose preliminary Chinese reports appeared in this journal as early as 1998; imaging, biomechanics and surgical technique; and spinal cord protection, regeneration and functional reconstruction. Its papers range from operative series and technique descriptions to epidemiology — the large Chinese scoliosis screening literature, beginning with the Peking Union screening of more than twenty thousand Beijing schoolchildren, illustrates the population research that surrounds its clinical core.

Standing as a national core journal

The journal is described in its founder's record as the only national-level spinal cord journal in China, and it is officially included in the clinical medicine category of the Chinese Core Journals Overview, the Peking University-compiled core list that carries great weight in Chinese academic evaluation. Core status makes publication in the journal valuable for Chinese spine specialists' academic advancement and ensures a strong submission flow from the country's major spine centres. Its national distribution — in print across all provinces and electronically abroad — matches that standing. Among Chinese spine publications it is the senior general title of the field, complemented by subspecialty and English-language outlets.

Historical development

Founded in 1991, the journal spans the modern transformation of Chinese spine surgery: the introduction and domestic development of pedicle screw instrumentation in the 1990s, the growth of deformity correction to world-leading volumes, the spread of minimally invasive and then endoscopic techniques after 2000 — a field in which Chinese surgeons became prolific innovators, holding national symposiums from 2010 that drove a boom in endoscopic practice — and the contemporary era of navigation, robotics and regenerative research on spinal cord injury. The journal's archive records that progression from within the specialty's own institutions. Its continuity under its founding professional committee gives it an institutional memory that newer titles lack.

Readership and authorship

The journal's authors are spine surgeons, spinal cord physicians, rehabilitation specialists and researchers in China's university hospitals, specialist orthopaedic and neurosurgical centres and rehabilitation institutions — including the leading Beijing centres associated with its founders, such as the departments led by Hou Shuxun and his colleagues. Its readers are the national spine community across orthopaedics, neurosurgery and rehabilitation medicine. It is published in Chinese, serving domestic professional communication, while its core-journal status and the international activity of its community mean its contents are known to and cited by researchers following Chinese spine surgery, one of the most productive national literatures in the field.

Relationship to other journals

The Chinese Journal of Spine and Spinal Cord should be distinguished from the Journal of Spine Surgery, the AME-published English-language title in which historical reviews of Chinese endoscopic spine surgery have appeared; from Orthopaedic Surgery, the Chinese Orthopaedic Association's English journal, which publishes spine work among all orthopaedics; from the Chinese Journal of Orthopedics, the senior general orthopaedic title; and from international spine journals such as Spine and the European Spine Journal. Its unique marks are its joint spine-and-spinal-cord scope, its rehabilitation association parentage, its 1991 founding by Zhang Guangbo and its national core status.

How to cite and identify the journal

The reliable identifiers of the Chinese Journal of Spine and Spinal Cord are its exact title, ISSN 1004-406X, its founding in 1991 by Professor Zhang Guangbo and colleagues with the Spine and Spinal Cord Professional Committee of the Chinese Rehabilitation Medicine Association, its Beijing base, and its standing as China's national-level spinal cord journal and a Chinese core journal. Cited by title and ISSN, it uniquely identifies the journal described in this profile.

The journal's influence is visible in the subsequent development of the specialty it created a forum for. The professional committee founded alongside it in 1991 grew into one of the most dynamic committees of the Chinese Association of Rehabilitation Medicine, and its members — including the basic research group of the Spine and Spinal Cord Committee formed in 2014 — are prominent in the international spine literature, in a period when spine research has accounted for roughly forty per cent of China's musculoskeletal research publications. The journal's founding generation, led by Zhang Guangbo with Cai Qinlin and Hou Shuxun, thus built more than a periodical: the committee-and-journal pairing gave Chinese spinal cord medicine an academic home whose effects are still visible in the specialty's research output and organisation.