About Horticultural Plant Journal

Horticultural Plant Journal

Horticultural Plant Journal (HPJ) is an international open-access journal of horticultural crop science based in Beijing, China, published by KeAi and Elsevier in association with the Chinese Society for Horticultural Science and the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Publishing since 2015, it covers all aspects of horticultural plant science — vegetable, fruit, ornamental and tea crops among them — including genomics, breeding, physiology and postharvest biology. It is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus and has reached first-quartile standing in horticulture and plant science.

Horticultural crops differ from field crops in ways that justify a journal of their own. They are high-value, often perishable, grown for quality as much as for yield, and extraordinarily diverse — from tomato and cabbage to apple, grape, rose and tea. Their science therefore runs from fruit ripening and flower development to flavour chemistry and cold-chain storage. Horticultural Plant Journal was created as the English-language, open-access home for that science from China, the world's largest producer of fruits and vegetables, and for horticultural research worldwide.

Overview and identifying details

The journal's print ISSN is 2095-9885 and its online ISSN is 2468-0141. Its standard abbreviation is Hortic. Plant J. It appears in six issues a year and is fully open access. Copyright in its articles is held by the Chinese Society for Horticultural Science (CSHS) and the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers (IVF), Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences (CAAS), with publishing services by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of KeAi Communications Co. Ltd.; published articles appear under the CC BY-NC-ND open licence, as shown on the journal's papers. Its DOI series is 10.1016/j.hpj.

Peer review is conducted under the responsibility of the Chinese Society for Horticultural Science and the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers, as stated on the journal's articles. The journal marked its tenth anniversary in 2025 — volume 11 appeared that year — with a special edition for the anniversary, a milestone that confirms its 2015 start and its establishment as a continuing title rather than an experiment.

History and development

The journal has been committed to disseminating findings in horticulture since 2015, published by KeAi in Beijing. Its Scopus coverage is recorded from 2017, the point from which its contents entered that database's continuous record, and its growth since has been marked by entry into the major selective indexes: it is indexed in SCI-Expanded (SCIE), Scopus, Biological Abstracts and BIOSIS Previews, the Directory of Open Access Journals, CABI Abstracts, Food Science and Technology Abstracts, and the Chinese databases CSCD and CSTPCD. That breadth of indexing — international citation indexes, bioscience and agriculture abstracting services, and Chinese national databases together — reflects a journal serving both world and domestic communities at once.

By the mid-2020s the journal's citation standing placed it in Q1 across multiple Scopus subject categories, including horticulture, plant science, ecology and biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology categories. For a specialist society journal launched in 2015, first-quartile positions within a decade mark a rapid rise, driven by the volume and quality of horticultural genomics and physiology now produced in China and by the journal's open-access availability to readers everywhere.

Sponsorship and institutional home

Two Beijing institutions stand behind the journal. The Chinese Society for Horticultural Science is the national learned society for horticulture in China, representing researchers across fruits, vegetables, ornamentals and tea. The Institute of Vegetables and Flowers, part of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, is a national research institute whose own work centres on vegetable and flower science — breeding, genetics, cultivation and quality. Society and institute together give HPJ both a community mandate and a research base.

The association is visible in the journal's content. Its pages carry work from institutions such as the Beijing Key Laboratory of Development and Quality Control of Ornamental Crops at China Agricultural University and flower research institutes in Yunnan — for example, a 2025 research paper on the RhSPL4–RhPRR5L module regulating flowering time in rose, a study of direct concern to the cut-flower industry. A journal whose sponsoring institute breeds vegetables and flowers, publishing the molecular control of rose flowering alongside vegetable genomics, is expressing its sponsors' combined remit.

Aims and scope

HPJ covers all aspects of horticultural crop sciences, including, as its aims and scope list them: genetics, genomics and breeding; cellular and molecular biology; biochemistry; biotechnology; plant pathology; germplasm resources; physiology; and postharvest processing. The journal's fuller descriptions add the crop groups its title embraces — vegetable, fruit, ornamental and tea science — so the scope is a matrix: every stage of plant science, applied to every class of horticultural crop.

The emphasis in practice is molecular and physiological. The journal is dedicated to advancing understanding of horticultural plants through innovative research encompassing plant biology, genetics and environmental responses, with strong emphasis on practical applications in horticulture and agriculture. Studies it highlights include the genetic and molecular basis of traits such as disease resistance, abiotic stress tolerance and fruit quality; physiological and biochemical work on photosynthesis, stress responses and metabolic pathways; and biotechnological approaches, including genome editing, aimed at enhancing crop traits and developing sustainable production.

Research areas in depth

Genetics, genomics and breeding form the largest pillar. Horticultural species were historically harder to work with than model plants — large genomes, long generation times in fruit trees, complex quality traits — and the genomics era has transformed them; the journal's literature includes genome studies such as a de novo genome of a Chinese radish cultivar among its cited work, alongside gene, transcriptome and gene-family analyses across vegetable and fruit species. Germplasm resources research underpins this work, cataloguing and evaluating the diversity from which new varieties are bred.

Physiology, biochemistry and postharvest science form the second pillar, and the one most distinctive to horticulture. Fruit development and ripening, flesh quality, flowering, dormancy and stress responses determine what growers harvest and what consumers receive; postharvest processing and storage determine how much of it arrives in condition. Research in the journal on topics from fruit flesh and titratable acidity to shoot development, rootstocks and grafting reflects this quality-centred science. Plant pathology completes the applied span, addressing the diseases that horticultural crops' intensive, high-value production makes especially costly.

Crops covered

The journal's crops are the plants of gardens, orchards, greenhouses and tea fields rather than broad-acre fields. Vegetables — including tomato, cabbage and other brassicas, cucurbits, radish and leafy crops — are central, matching the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers' remit. Fruits include apple, grape, citrus, strawberry and other tree and soft fruits. Ornamental plants and flowers, from rose to chrysanthemum and orchids, form a third major group, and tea — a horticultural crop of particular importance in China — is named in the journal's scope alongside vegetables, fruit and ornamentals. Medicinal and other specialty horticultural plants appear within the same broad church.

This breadth matters because horticultural science transfers across its crops: a transcription factor controlling flowering in rose, a ripening mechanism in tomato and a stress pathway in cabbage are instances of shared biology. A single journal for all horticultural plants lets those connections be seen, which is precisely the function HPJ's sponsoring society exists to serve.

Article types and peer review

HPJ publishes original research articles, reviews and short communications. Original articles report full studies in horticultural genetics, physiology, pathology and postharvest science; reviews consolidate fast-moving areas such as the genomics of a crop group or the regulation of a quality trait; short communications carry concise findings of immediate interest. The journal states that its strict peer-review procedure guarantees a high academic level and credits that procedure with the journal's admission to its many indexes — peer review here is presented, accurately, as the mechanism by which a young open-access journal earned selective-index trust.

Special content marks the journal's development: the special edition for its tenth anniversary in 2025 gathered work reflecting a decade of publication. Anniversary and thematic collections in society journals serve to take stock of a field — in HPJ's case, a field in which Chinese horticultural science moved, within the journal's own lifetime, to world-leading scale in genomics-assisted breeding and quality research.

Open access and indexing

As an international open-access publication, the journal's articles are freely available on ScienceDirect and through KeAi, published under open licences that permit sharing with attribution and without commercial or derivative use on the terms shown. Open access suits horticulture particularly well: its readers include not only university researchers but institute scientists, extension-linked specialists and industry researchers in breeding and production companies, many outside subscribing institutions.

The indexing list is unusually complete for a journal of its age: SCIE and Scopus for international citation tracking; Biological Abstracts and BIOSIS Previews for life-science discovery; DOAJ as the registry of its open-access status; CABI Abstracts and Food Science and Technology Abstracts for the agricultural and food-science communities; and CSCD and CSTPCD for Chinese research evaluation. An author publishing in HPJ is therefore visible simultaneously to plant scientists, horticulturists, food scientists and the Chinese national system — the four audiences the journal was built to reach.

Place in horticultural publishing

Horticulture's established English journals are largely society titles from Europe, Japan and North America, many of them decades old. Horticultural Plant Journal is the Chinese entry in that company: younger than its peers, but backed by the world's largest horticultural production base and research effort, fully open access, and already Q1-ranked in its categories. Within the China-based plant journals in this inventory it is the horticulture specialist — distinct from the general plant biology of JIPB, the biodiversity focus of Plant Diversity and the field-crop breadth of The Crop Journal — completing the set of English platforms through which Chinese plant science now speaks.

Its Beijing base, its society and institute sponsorship, and its KeAi–Elsevier publishing model are the standard architecture of China's successful new English journals; what HPJ adds is subject identity. Ten years after its 2015 launch, it is the journal of record for horticultural plant research from China and an international venue for the science of fruits, vegetables, ornamentals and tea wherever it is done.

Readership and authors

Readers include horticultural scientists in universities and academies, breeders and biotechnology researchers working on vegetable, fruit and ornamental improvement, plant physiologists and biochemists studying development and quality, plant pathologists, postharvest technologists, and germplasm specialists. Authors are drawn heavily from China's extensive horticultural research system — CAAS institutes, agricultural universities and provincial academies — and from international groups working on the same crops.

For those authors, the journal offers specialist peer review under its society and institute, open-access distribution on ScienceDirect, and indexing across the plant, agriculture and food-science databases. Published in Beijing by KeAi and Elsevier for the Chinese Society for Horticultural Science and the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers, the Horticultural Plant Journal gives the science of horticultural plants — their genes, growth, quality and keeping — a dedicated international home.