About Chinese Medical Sciences Journal

Chinese Medical Sciences Journal

The Chinese Medical Sciences Journal is an English-language, peer-reviewed general medical journal based in Beijing, China. It is the academy journal of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (CAMS), published in association with Peking Union Medical College, and it exists to carry Chinese medical research to readers around the world. Rather than serving a single specialty, it reports work across the breadth of the medical sciences, from laboratory investigation to clinical practice, prevention and health policy. For international readers who cannot follow China's large Chinese-language medical literature, a journal of this kind performs a distinct function: it presents work from China's national medical research establishment in English, under international peer-review and publishing-ethics standards, and alongside the Chinese titles and abstracts that connect each article back to its domestic audience.

Identity and bibliographic record

The journal's print ISSN is 1001-9294 and its online ISSN is 2352-4014. Its Chinese domestic publication number is listed as CN 11-2752/R. In citations it is abbreviated Chin Med Sci J, the form used in PubMed records, where individual articles from the journal appear with their volume, issue and page details and PubMed identifiers. A published guide to Chinese biomedical journals for epidemiologists listed the title at four issues per year, recorded its first year of publication under its current title as 1991, and gave its National Library of Medicine identifier as 9112559. The journal's own site is hosted under the domain of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, and its articles are also presented through ScienceDirect and the KeAi publishing platform. Copyright in the journal as a whole is held by the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences, while publishing services are provided by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd.

That combination of identifiers matters because the title is easy to confuse with a different Beijing publication, the Chinese Medical Journal. The two are separate journals: the Chinese Medical Journal is a publication of the Chinese Medical Association with its own ISSN, whereas the Chinese Medical Sciences Journal belongs to the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College. Directory entries that keep the academy, the ISSN 1001-9294 and the abbreviated title Chin Med Sci J together are describing this journal.

The academy behind the journal

The Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences was established in 1956. The KeAi journal page describes it as China's only national-level comprehensive institution for medical research, dedicated to multidisciplinary biomedical research spanning basic medicine, clinical medicine, pharmacy, public health and a range of interdisciplinary fields, and to driving innovation in medical science and technology to advance human health and well-being. A journal issued by such an institution is not a commercial title searching for a subject; its subject is, in effect, the work of the academy itself and of the wider Chinese medical research community that the academy leads.

Peking Union Medical College, the journal's partner institution, is older. It was founded by the Rockefeller Foundation in 1917, its hospital was opened in 1921, and it was modelled on the Johns Hopkins Medical School. Accounts of the college record that it initiated the eight-year clinical medical education programme, higher nursing education, a resident training system and early public health practice in China. In 1957, a year after the academy was founded, CAMS and Peking Union Medical College came under a unified management system, and they have operated together since as China's leading centre for medical research and medical education. Yale University's summary of the partnership notes that CAMS and PUMC were merged in 1957 and are interdependent and complementary, with research institutes, affiliated hospitals and schools combining medical care, education and scientific research. The journal sits inside that combined institution in Beijing.

Mission and scope

The journal states its mission plainly. It is dedicated to publishing reliable research, strictly adhering to international publishing ethics and maintaining a stringent peer review process, and its purpose is to disseminate the latest scientific findings and disciplinary advancements in the medical sciences, thereby fostering academic exchange and collaboration worldwide. In other words, the journal measures itself in two directions at once: inward, as a record of medical science produced in China, and outward, as a channel through which that work can be read, assessed and cited internationally.

Its scope follows the structure of the academy behind it. The journal encompasses fundamental medicine, clinical medicine, preventive medicine and public health, biomedical engineering and traditional Chinese medicine. It declares special interests in emerging interdisciplinary research and in cutting-edge developments at the intersections of medical science. Earlier instructions for authors described the same breadth in slightly different terms, reporting on all aspects of basic and clinical medicine and pharmacology in China while welcoming contributions from abroad. That welcome is an important part of the journal's character: although it is an academy journal rooted in Beijing, its stated remit is not limited to academy authors, or even to authors in China.

What the journal publishes

The current guide for authors sets out the journal's article types with unusually specific requirements. A research article is a complete academic investigation covering a significant advance in a specialty, with a structured abstract of under 300 words, a full text of under 3,500 words and no more than seven figures and tables. A review article addresses a particular subject and provides a comprehensive look into a field, highlighting unresolved questions and historical perspectives and setting out developmental trends or directions for investigation; the category covers both narrative reviews and systematic reviews, runs to 4,000 to 5,000 words, uses a non-structured abstract within 250 words, allows three to five figures and tables and up to 100 references, and unsolicited offers of reviews are considered.

Alongside those main categories, the journal publishes perspectives, which present a personal opinion or fresh insights into new advances in an important and topical subject, suggested at around 2,000 words with one or two figures or tables and 15 references. Its Think Tank Forum presents authoritative, policy-oriented and advisory perspectives on critical topics related to healthcare policies, at 2,500 to 4,000 words with two to four figures and tables and a 150-word abstract, and both free submissions and invited contributions are welcome there. Case reports also appear in the journal's issues, documenting individual clinical cases from hospitals in China. The December 2025 issue visible on ScienceDirect illustrates the mixture in practice, carrying research articles, a review article and case reports side by side, each marked as open access.

Peer review and publishing ethics

The journal follows a double anonymized review process. A submission is first assessed by the editors to determine its suitability for the journal; if it is deemed suitable, it is typically sent to a minimum of two reviewers for an independent expert assessment of its scientific quality, and the decision on acceptance or rejection is taken by the editors and is final. The guide sets out safeguards around conflicts of interest: editors are not involved in making decisions about papers they have written themselves or that were written by family members or colleagues, and submissions connected to an editor, a guest editor or a board member are handled independently by another member of the editorial team.

Other parts of the author guide show the same standards-based approach. The journal follows the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors' clinical trials registration guidelines, under which clinical trials must be registered in a public trials registry, while purely observational studies in which the assignment of a medical intervention is not at the investigator's discretion do not require registration. Submissions to KeAi journals are automatically screened using iThenticate's CrossCheck software within the editorial system to detect plagiarism and overlapping text, and papers with high similarity are desk rejected. Authorship is defined by contribution: all authors should have made substantial contributions to the conception and design of the study, the acquisition of data, or analysis and interpretation, together with drafting the article or revising it critically and approving its final form. The journal also supports the use of ORCID identifiers at submission.

Open access and the publishing arrangement

The Chinese Medical Sciences Journal is a peer-reviewed, full open access journal. All articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download. To provide that access, the journal operates an article publishing charge, payable by the authors or on their behalf by a research funder or institution; the guide notes that the charges for publications in the current year can be waived. Permitted third-party reuse is defined by a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial (CC BY-NC) licence. Under the licensing agreement used for open access publishing, the journal owner retains copyright in the overall compiled journal and its compiled issues, while for a single article the authors retain copyright alongside scholarly usage rights, and KeAi Communications Co. Ltd. is granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights. Authors are asked to complete a publishing agreement after acceptance.

The publishing structure behind those arrangements reflects a wider pattern in Chinese scientific publishing. KeAi is the platform through which the journal is published with Elsevier: the journal's ScienceDirect pages state that publishing services are provided by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd., and copyright rests with the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences. The academy therefore remains the journal's owner and institutional home in Beijing, while distribution, the submission system and the author guide are handled through the KeAi and Elsevier infrastructure that international readers and authors already use for many other China-based journals.

Language, presentation and readership

English is the journal's language of publication, which is the core of its purpose as a window on Chinese medical science for international readers. At the same time, it maintains a deliberate link to its domestic setting: all publications are presented with a Chinese title and abstract on the journal's website. A reader arriving from a PubMed record or a citation therefore encounters an English article whose bibliographic identity is given in both languages, reflecting an author base and a subject matter that are substantially Chinese even though the readership addressed is worldwide.

The journal's natural readers follow from its scope and its article types. Researchers in basic and clinical medicine can follow complete investigations and systematic or narrative reviews; clinicians can read case reports drawn from Chinese hospital practice; and readers concerned with health systems can use the Think Tank Forum's policy-oriented pieces, which are explicitly advisory in character. Because the journal is fully open access, none of that reading requires a subscription, which suits a title whose stated mission is dissemination and academic exchange rather than circulation within a closed membership. Its presence in PubMed records, illustrated by articles carrying PubMed identifiers and Medical Subject Headings, also makes its contents discoverable through the database searches that biomedical researchers routinely perform.

Place in Beijing's medical publishing landscape

Beijing concentrates China's national medical institutions, and it concentrates their journals as well. What distinguishes the Chinese Medical Sciences Journal within that crowded landscape is the particular institution it speaks for. The Chinese Medical Association, the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and the capital's medical universities each publish English-language titles, but this journal is the one attached to the academy founded in 1956 as the state-level centre for medical sciences and to the college founded in 1917 that pioneered the eight-year medical curriculum in China. Its breadth — basic, clinical, preventive, pharmaceutical, engineering and traditional Chinese medicine interests all under one title — mirrors the academy's own multidisciplinary structure rather than the remit of a single specialty society or hospital.

That makes the journal a useful source in a specific way. A specialist title tells a reader what one field in China is doing; this academy journal shows what China's national medical research institution and its wider community choose to put before an international audience across all fields at once, from ultrasound screening consensus work and healthcare dataset standardisation to analyses of disease burden in China, all of which appeared among its recent research articles. Read over time, its issues form a record of Chinese medical science presenting itself in English — peer reviewed, openly accessible, and issued from Beijing by the institution charged with leading that science nationally.