About Frontiers of Engineering Management

Frontiers of Engineering Management

Overview and identity

Frontiers of Engineering Management is a journal of engineering management published by Higher Education Press with Springer under the Chinese Academy of Engineering, and based in Beijing. It is supervised by the Chinese Academy of Engineering and administered jointly by the Academy, Higher Education Press, Tsinghua University and Huazhong University of Science and Technology, and it appears quarterly in English in print and online. Its print ISSN is 2095-7513. The journal was renamed ENGINEERING Management from January 2026, continuing under a shortened title. It is indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index and in Scopus.

The Chinese Academy of Engineering sponsorship gives the journal a distinctive authority. The Academy's members are China's leading engineering figures, many of them the leaders of the mega-projects, in energy, transport, water and manufacturing, whose management is the journal's subject. A journal published under the Academy speaks to and from the top of the Chinese engineering establishment, and its contents include the reflections and analyses of practitioners who have managed engineering at the largest scale anywhere.

Scope and research territory

The journal is devoted to engineering management theory and practice. Its coverage includes engineering project management; infrastructure systems; energy and resource management; innovation management; and engineering policy. Project management addresses the planning, organisation, cost, schedule, safety and risk of major engineering undertakings. Infrastructure systems addresses the management of interdependent networks, transport, energy, water and digital infrastructure, as systems rather than single projects. Energy and resource management addresses the strategic allocation questions raised by China's energy transition and resource constraints.

Innovation management and engineering policy complete the scope, addressing how engineering organisations create and adopt new technology and how governments should plan, finance and govern engineering activity. The journal's most cited work illustrates the range: a widely cited article on the outlook of blockchain technology for construction engineering management sits alongside a review of metro construction in China covering organisation, market, cost, safety and schedule. Theory and national practice are deliberately held together, which is the journal's defining editorial stance.

Article types and audience

The journal publishes research articles, reviews, comments and a category reflecting its Academy character, accounts and analyses of super engineering, the management of exceptionally large projects. Its audience is explicitly dual: academics who study engineering management and practitioners, industry professionals and policy communities who practise it. Few journals attempt to serve both scholars and senior practitioners; the Academy's sponsorship makes the attempt credible, because the practitioners in question are the Academy's own constituency.

Editorially, the journal has been led by editors-in-chief including Jishan He, Chunfang Lu and Miroslaw Skibniewski, the last an internationally known construction-management scholar, a combination that embodies the journal's Chinese base and international ambition. Special calls for papers, such as one on next-generation smart transportation systems envisioning carbon-neutral, connected and intelligent transport, show the journal actively setting research agendas at the junction of engineering management and national strategy.

Indexing, metrics and standing

The journal is indexed in the Emerging Sources Citation Index and Scopus, and its metrics have risen markedly: SCImago records an h-index in the thirties and an SJR above 1.3, and recent impact-factor reports place it around 7 to 8, exceptionally high for an engineering-management title and indicative of heavy citation of its reviews and agenda-setting articles. Whatever the precise figure in a given year, the direction is clear: a young journal, published from 2014 under its Frontiers title, has achieved unusual visibility in its field within a decade.

That visibility reflects the subject's geography. The world's largest engineering projects, and therefore much of the world's most instructive engineering-management experience, are in China. An English journal that systematically publishes the management science and the reflective practice arising from those projects, under the national engineering academy's imprint, occupies a position no Western journal can replicate, and its citation performance is the measurable result.

Research themes in focus

Construction engineering management is a core theme: project organisation, safety management, cost and schedule performance, and the application of information technology, from building information modelling to blockchain, to construction processes. Infrastructure and transport form a second theme, including metro and rail programmes whose scale in China is unmatched. Energy and resource management, innovation systems and engineering policy form the strategic third theme, addressing how a country plans and governs decades-long engineering undertakings.

Risk, resilience and complex-systems thinking run across all three. Major engineering programmes are complex adaptive undertakings, and the journal publishes work on their risk analysis, cascading failures and organisational change. For international scholars of project management, the journal is now a standard source on the Chinese experience; for Chinese practitioners, it is a forum in which their experience is theorised and compared. That dual function sustains its growth.

The Frontiers publishing model

Higher Education Press, the journal's Chinese publisher, is a major academic publisher operating under China's Ministry of Education, and its Frontiers programme is its flagship English-language journal family. Each Frontiers title is attached to a discipline and produced to international standards, in English only, with peer review administered through Chinese scholarly institutions and, for most of the family's history, international distribution in partnership with Springer. The model was designed to give Chinese research communities journals of their own that are visible in the same databases and library systems as long-established Western titles.

For authors, the family's proposition combines a domestic editorial home that understands Chinese universities, institutes and funding programmes with international indexing and distribution. For readers abroad, the titles provide a curated, English-language entry point into research fields in which China now produces a very large share of the world's papers. The journals are therefore best understood as scholarly infrastructure: their value lies in the cumulative, reliable channel they maintain between Chinese laboratories and the international literature, issue after issue and year after year.

Readership and authorship

Readers of Frontiers of Engineering Management are principally academic researchers, graduate students and specialists in engineering management, together with librarians and research managers who encounter the journal through its indexing and its publisher's platform. Its core authorship comes from Chinese universities and research institutes, which form one of the world's largest research communities in engineering management, but the journal publishes international authors as well and addresses an international readership in English.

The journal's base in Beijing places its editorial work inside China's research system rather than offshore from it. That positioning helps the journal receive strong domestic submissions, understand the programmes and institutions behind them, and present them in a form the international literature can use. It is the same positioning that defines the wider family of China-based English journals to which the title belongs.

Assessment and continuing role

Assessed as a whole, Frontiers of Engineering Management is a durable piece of China's English-language scholarly publishing infrastructure. Its peer review, its indexing in selective international databases, its English-only publication and its continuity over many years distinguish it from ephemeral or purely domestic titles. It documents, in a form the world can read and cite, the work of a research community whose output in engineering management is now central to the global field.

The journal continues publication from Beijing. The questions within its scope remain active priorities for Chinese and international research alike, and the need for a trusted English channel edited within China persists. Frontiers of Engineering Management remains one of the established titles meeting that need.