About Chinese Journal of Traumatology

Chinese Journal of Traumatology

The Chinese Journal of Traumatology is a peer-reviewed, English-language medical journal devoted to traumatic medicine, based in Chongqing, China. Launched in 1998 and carrying ISSN 1008-1275, it is published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of the Chinese Medical Association and is authorised by the Chinese Association of Trauma of the Chinese Medical Association. Its abbreviated title is cited as Chin J Traumatol, and its articles are also identified in journal records by the abbreviation CJTEE, for Chinese Journal of Traumatology (English Edition). Multidisciplinary by design, the journal was created to provide current and relevant information for both clinical and basic research in trauma, and it has done so continuously from Chongqing for more than a quarter of a century.

Launch and identity

Elsevier's aims and scope statement records the founding facts plainly: the journal, abbreviated CJT, was launched in 1998 and is a peer-reviewed English journal authorised by the Chinese Association of Trauma, Chinese Medical Association. That English-language identity is central to its role. Rather than serving only a domestic Chinese-language readership, the journal was positioned from the start to carry Chinese trauma research to clinicians and researchers worldwide, and to bring international work into the same conversation. The journal is presented on ScienceDirect as an open-access title, with copyright held by the Chinese Medical Association and publishing by Elsevier B.V. Its online ISSN is given as 1008-1275. Volume numbering visible on ScienceDirect illustrates the continuity of the run: volume 15 reached issue 5 in October 2012, and volume 27 reached issue 6 in December 2024, a six-issue volume pattern consistent with the six issues recorded for the journal in earlier bibliographic guides.

A Chongqing home at Daping Hospital

The journal's editorial home is in Chongqing, in south-western China. Peer review is handled under the responsibility of Daping Hospital and the Research Institute of Surgery of the Third Military Medical University, the institution now known as the Army Medical University. That responsibility is printed in the journal's own aims and scope statement on ScienceDirect. The connection is also visible in the journal's own editorial writing: the authors of its annual reviews for 2019 and 2020 were affiliated to the Research Institute of Surgery, Daping Hospital, Army Medical University, Chongqing 400042, China, and the editorial office was described in the same terms in the minutes of the journal's first international editorial board meeting, published in the journal in 2016. The current editor-in-chief listed by ScienceDirect is Lian-Yang Zhang of the Army Medical Center of PLA, Chongqing, China. The journal is therefore not edited at a distance from clinical practice. Its peer-review base sits inside a major military medical centre in Chongqing with a long institutional focus on surgery and trauma.

Scope across the whole course of trauma care

The stated scope follows an injury from the moment it happens through to recovery. According to Elsevier, topics cover trauma system and management, surgical procedures, acute care, rehabilitation, post-traumatic complications, translational medicine, traffic medicine and other related areas. ScienceDirect classifies the journal's subject areas as surgery; orthopedics, sports medicine and rehabilitation; and critical care and intensive care medicine. In practice, its annual reviews show that breadth at work: the 2019 volume covered traffic medicine, wound healing, bone trauma and emergency care, while the 2020 papers ranged across trauma-related basic research, psychological trauma, traffic injuries and the clinical management of vascular trauma, head trauma and chest trauma. Infection after trauma, disaster medicine and the administration of traumatic complications also appear in those reviews. The journal's framing, stated in its 2019 annual review, is that trauma is the leading cause of death in people under the age of 45 years, a fact the editors cite as the reason the field has gained wide attention from academics worldwide.

Article types and editorial emphasis

The journal primarily publishes expert forums, original papers and case reports, and its issue contents also include review articles, systematic reviews and meta-analyses, short communications and special-topic sections — volume 27, issue 6, in December 2024, for example, was organised around a special topic on brain injury and hematoma alongside those other article types. Elsevier stresses a strongly practical emphasis: the journal especially emphasises clinical application, technique, surgical video, guidelines and recommendations for more effective surgical approaches. That emphasis helps explain the prominence of consensus and guideline material in its pages. Readers are not offered research in isolation; the stated editorial purpose is to help trauma clinicians work more effectively, whether through a described technique, a video of a procedure, or a formal recommendation drawn from expert consensus.

A distinctive strength in traffic medicine

Traffic medicine is named in the journal's scope, and it has been one of its most distinctive concerns. The link runs through its editorial history. The journal's 2019 annual review noted that, with Professor Zheng-Guo Wang — described there as the immediate past president of the International Traffic Medicine Association — as editor-in-chief, the journal had attracted a large number of authors at home and abroad to share their views on road traffic safety. Wang's standing in the field is recorded independently by the Tan Kah Kee Science Award Foundation: born in 1935, a graduate of China Medical University in 1956 and an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering from 1994, he was one of the founders of research on blast injury, wound ballistics and traffic medicine in China, served as president of the Chongqing Research Institute of Traffic Medicine and as chairman of the Chinese Society of Traffic Medicine, and edited the 1997 book Traffic Medicine. The journal's traffic coverage reflects that inheritance. In 2019 it published three original articles on motorcycle crashes from Indonesia, Malaysia and Iran, analysing risk factors and injury mechanisms, alongside work on child safety seats in Shanghai and on the economic factors affecting road traffic safety. Its 2020 review returned to road traffic collisions, regional differences in death rates, problems in crash data collection, and the argument that prevention and a well-established trauma care system save more lives.

Guidelines and special topics in practice

The journal's record in specific years shows how its model works. In 2019 it published 69 articles — 62 original articles and 7 case reports — from 12 countries. That year it carried what its editors described as the first guideline in the world on the application of vacuum sealing drainage (VSD) in abdominal trauma, issued by the Chinese Trauma Surgeon Association, and it reported six special topics: VSD for trauma surgery; transportation safety and efficiency; trauma care and emergency workflow; fracture nonunion; elbow fracture; and emergency care. In 2020 it published 72 papers, identified a special topic for each issue, published guidelines for surgical operations under the threat of COVID-19 infection, and organised a special issue on vascular trauma. The guideline tradition continued after those reviews: the Chinese consensus for surgical treatment of traumatic rib fractures (2021), organised by the Chinese Society of Traumatology of the Chinese Medical Association and the Chinese College of Trauma Surgeons of the Chinese Medical Doctor Association, was published in the journal in November 2021, with graded recommendations on imaging, surgical indications, timing, methods and fixation. ScienceDirect's latest-articles listing in 2026 likewise leads with a Chinese expert consensus on tetanus prophylaxis in major trauma (2026 edition), alongside research on the global burden of tetanus and a nationwide Chinese survey of post-traumatic immunisation — evidence that consensus work remains a live part of the programme.

Open access on a subsidised model

The journal is a peer-reviewed, subsidised open-access journal. Elsevier's open-access information states that Daping Hospital and the Research Institute of Surgery of the Third Military Medical University pay the publishing costs incurred by the journal, and that authors do not have to pay any article processing charge or open-access publication fee. All articles published open access are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download, copy and distribute. Articles in PubMed Central appear under the CC BY-NC-ND licence, with production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of the Chinese Medical Association. For authors, that model removes a common financial barrier to open publication; for readers — including clinicians in the developing countries from which, the journal noted in 2019, most of its submissions came — it means the full text is available without a subscription.

Indexing, metrics and reach

ScienceDirect lists the journal's abstracting and indexing as Scopus, Medline, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), PubMed Central, the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI), PubMed and Embase. The same publisher page gives a CiteScore of 3.8 and an Impact Factor of 2.5, and lists publishing timelines of 3 days from submission to first decision, 115 days from submission to decision after review, and 130 days from submission to acceptance. Its own history shows a journal building that reach over time: the 2020 annual review recorded that the journal had been included among the high-quality academic journals of the China Association for Science and Technology, that submissions had increased by about 60 per cent with more countries and regions covered, that usage in the ScienceDirect database had exceeded one million, and that its CiteScore had risen to more than 2.0 for the first time. PubMed records more than 2,100 results under the journal title Chin J Traumatol, reflecting the size of the indexed archive built up since 1998.

Who the journal serves

The journal is written for the clinicians and researchers who treat, study and try to prevent traumatic injury: trauma and acute-care surgeons, orthopaedic and critical-care specialists, emergency physicians, rehabilitation specialists, and researchers working on the basic and translational science behind injury care. Its combination of original research, expert forums and case reports serves readers who need evidence, while its guidelines, consensus statements, techniques and surgical videos serve readers who need usable guidance at the point of care. Its international authorship — articles from 12 countries in 2019 alone, with submissions rising sharply the following year — shows that, although it is authorised in China and edited in Chongqing, its intended conversation is global, with particular attention to the traffic-injury and trauma-system problems faced by developing countries.

Place in Chinese medical publishing

Within China's English-language medical journals, the Chinese Journal of Traumatology occupies a specific and durable niche: a specialist title, running since 1998, devoted entirely to wounds and injuries, anchored in the trauma and field-surgery tradition of Daping Hospital and the Research Institute of Surgery in Chongqing, and carried internationally by Elsevier on behalf of the Chinese Medical Association. It has been rated, its editors recorded in 2016, as among the most internationally influential Chinese academic journals, and its subsequent record — rising submissions, more than a million ScienceDirect uses in a year, a CiteScore that passed 2.0 in 2020 and stands at 3.8 on the current publisher page — supports a picture of steady international growth rather than a purely domestic circulation. For anyone tracing how trauma care, traffic medicine and trauma systems have developed in China, and how Chinese specialists have presented that work to the world in English, this Chongqing journal is one of the principal records.