About Computer Science

Computer Science

Overview and identity

Computer Science (Chinese: 计算机科学; pinyin: Jisuanji Kexue) is a Chinese-language computer science journal published in Chongqing. Founded in 1974, it carries ISSN 1002-137X and is listed in the China Science Citation Database (CSCD). It publishes research across the discipline — computer theory, software, artificial intelligence, networks and information security — and is produced by its own editorial office in Chongqing, with directory records listing the publisher as the Editorial Office of Computer Science and the language as Chinese, with blind peer review.

The journal's founding date commands attention. A computer science journal launched in China in 1974 — before the personal computer, before China's reform and opening, when computing in the country meant a small number of mainframe installations — is among the earliest computer periodicals in the People's Republic. That it still publishes today, from Chongqing in the southwest, makes Computer Science a survivor from the discipline's first Chinese generation.

History and founding

The journal was founded in 1974, in the final years of the Cultural Revolution period, when China's scientific publishing was only beginning to revive. Its sponsor community was the computing research establishment of Chongqing — then part of Sichuan province — and the journal gave the southwest's computer researchers a publication of their own in a field whose national centres were Beijing and Shanghai.

Survival across the following half-century is the journal's defining historical fact. It published through the arrival of microcomputers, the internet, mobile computing and the artificial-intelligence era, renaming nothing and moving nowhere: the title is still simply Computer Science, the city still Chongqing. Directory services record it as an active, peer-reviewed title with a substantial publication cycle, and its listing in the CSCD — China's national science citation database of core journals — certifies its continuing place in the research system.

Chongqing and the journal's community

Chongqing, a direct-controlled municipality in southwestern China since 1997 and one of the country's largest cities, is a major centre of manufacturing, electronics and increasingly software and data industries. The journal is sponsored by the Chongqing computer research community and serves the universities and institutes of the southwest as well as authors nationwide.

A regional base with national reach is a common and healthy pattern in Chinese journal publishing: the editorial office is local, the authorship and readership national. Computer Science's Chongqing identity distinguishes it from the Beijing academy journals that dominate the field's prestige hierarchy, and its longevity shows that a well-run journal outside the capital can hold a national community for fifty years.

Scope: theory, software and artificial intelligence

The journal publishes across computer science, beginning with its foundations: algorithms and theory of computation, and the software disciplines — programming, software engineering, databases and data management. Its contemporary scope, as described in the candidate record, explicitly includes artificial intelligence, which in current Chinese practice spans machine learning, knowledge representation, intelligent systems and their applications.

A generalist scope is the natural design for a journal of this age. Founded when 'computer science' in China was a single small community, the journal grew as the discipline differentiated, keeping all of its branches in one tent rather than spawning specialist offshoots. The result is a journal in which a theory paper, a database paper and an AI paper can appear in the same issue — a cross-section of the discipline as its Chinese community practises it.

Scope: networks, security and applications

The journal's applied half covers computer networks, information security and the application of computing across science and industry. Network research — protocols, distributed systems, the architecture of connected computing — and security research — cryptography in application, system and network security, privacy — are both standing parts of its remit, reflecting their weight in the modern discipline.

For the journal's readers, this breadth has practical value: a Chongqing-published general journal that a software engineer, a network researcher and a security specialist can all read and publish in. In an era of hyperspecialised venues, the general disciplinary journal remains the place where a field talks to itself as a whole, and Computer Science performs that function for its community.

Indexing and standing

The journal is listed in the China Science Citation Database (CSCD), the citation database maintained in the Chinese Academy of Sciences system that covers China's core science and engineering journals — about 1,200 titles — and is used nationally for research evaluation and literature retrieval. Directory records for Jisuanji Kexue list its publisher as the Editorial Office of Computer Science, language Chinese, with blind peer review.

Its standing should be described precisely: this is a respected national core-listed journal of long standing, not one of the small set of academy flagship titles. Its distinction is different — age, continuity and regional rootedness. Researchers should also distinguish it from the many unrelated journals abroad titled 'Computer Science' or similar; the Chongqing journal is identified by its Chinese title 计算机科学 and ISSN 1002-137X.

Peer review and publication

Directory information describes the journal's editorial review as blind peer review, the standard for Chinese academic journals, under which submissions are assessed by external specialists before acceptance. Articles are published in Chinese, following the national journal format with English titles and abstracts, making contents retrievable through the CSCD and the national journal platforms.

The journal's publication operation, run from its Chongqing editorial office, has sustained a regular schedule across five decades of technological and institutional change — through the print era, the online-submission era and the current platform era of Chinese scholarly publishing. That operational continuity, unglamorous as it is, is what fifty years of monthly-or-regular issues actually consists of.

Readership and authors

Readers are computer scientists and engineers in universities, institutes and the software industry — researchers who need a Chinese-language archival venue and a survey of the discipline beyond their own speciality. The journal's general scope suits libraries and departments as much as individuals: it is the kind of title a computer science department keeps because its whole faculty can use it.

Authors are drawn nationally, with the southwest's strong universities — in Chongqing, Chengdu and beyond — naturally prominent in its community. For early-career researchers in the region, a CSCD-listed hometown journal of fifty years' standing is both a first publishing target and a professional institution in its own right.

Place in Chinese computer publishing

Chinese computer science has older and more famous titles — the academy's Chinese Journal of Computers dates from 1978 — which makes the 1974 founding of Chongqing's Computer Science a genuine distinction: it predates the field's flagship. Founded when Chinese computing was embryonic, published ever since from the southwest, and still CSCD-listed, it is one of the discipline's founding-generation journals.

In the WorldNM directory it is profiled as a Chongqing-based Chinese-language magazine-category journal. Its profile should be read as that of a pioneer: not the largest or most cited Chinese computer journal, but one of the first, and one that never stopped.

The journal's survival is also a publishing-history point. Many Chinese journals founded in the 1970s were renamed, merged or closed as the system modernised; Computer Science kept its original one-word-concept title — the name of the discipline itself — and its original city for fifty years. Holding the generic title 计算机科学 in a national journal system is a quiet distinction: there is only one journal in China that is simply called Computer Science, and it is the Chongqing journal of 1974, ISSN 1002-137X.