About Journal of Anyang Normal University

Journal of Anyang Normal University

The Journal of Anyang Normal University is the academic journal sponsored by Anyang Normal University in Anyang, Henan Province. It carries ISSN 1671-5330, an identifier attested in the digital object identifiers of its articles, for example DOI 10.16140/j.cnki.1671-5330.2022.04.017, from the fourth issue of 2022. Its sponsor is a provincial undergraduate university whose predecessor, a normal training institute in what was then Changde Prefecture, was established in 1908, and whose city, Anyang, is the home of the Yinxu ruins and of oracle bone script, the earliest known Chinese writing.

Identity and identifiers

The journal is identified by its title, its sponsor, its city and ISSN 1671-5330. Because the ISSN is embedded in its article DOIs under the pattern 10.16140/j.cnki.1671-5330, followed by year, issue and article numbers, every article can be traced to the journal even when its Chinese title is romanised in different ways in reference lists. The attested example, from issue four of 2022, also shows the journal publishing multiple issues within a single year in the early 2020s. In a national system with thousands of similarly named university journals — Henan alone has journals of normal universities at Nanyang, Luoyang, Xinyang and elsewhere — that embedded identifier is what keeps this title's record separate from those of its neighbours.

The sponsoring university and its origins

Anyang Normal University is a provincially affiliated undergraduate institution in Henan. Its origins lie in the Changde Prefecture Anyang Normal Training Institute, established in 1908 — also rendered in some accounts as the Anyang Normal School of Zhangde Prefecture, Zhangde and Changde being variant renderings of the same prefectural name. In 1949 it was renamed the Pingyuan Provincial Anyang Normal School, Pingyuan being the short-lived province of the early People's Republic. It became Henan Provincial Anyang Normal College in 1958 and Anyang First Normal School in 1960. A journal sponsored by such an institution belongs to a lineage of teacher-training publishing in northern Henan that long predates the modern university.

From normal college to university

The institution was restored as Anyang Normal College in 1978, after the disruptions of the preceding decades, and renamed Anyang Higher Normal College in 1992. In 2000, Anyang Higher Normal College merged with Anyang Education College and Anyang Second Normal School to form the present Anyang Normal University. Later milestones recorded in university profiles include approval in 2011 as a pilot unit for master's professional degree training, recognition in 2020 as one of Henan Province's characteristic and key universities, and authorisation in 2021 to grant master's degrees. The journal's present title dates from the university era created by the 2000 merger, following the usual practice by which a Chinese university journal is retitled when its sponsor is upgraded and renamed.

Disciplinary range

The university has developed into a comprehensive institution covering, in its own account, ten disciplines: economics, law, education, literature, history, science, engineering, management, arts and interdisciplinary studies. Published profiles note its schools in fields including history and museology, archaeology, and Chinese language and literature, and record a research output of thousands of papers in core journals, including more than a thousand in SCI, SSCI, EI and A&HCI source journals. A comprehensive sponsor of this kind supports a comprehensive journal: the Journal of Anyang Normal University is the general academic periodical of the university, not a single-subject title, and its pages are open to the full range of disciplines the university teaches.

Anyang, oracle bones and Yinxu

No profile of an Anyang academic journal is complete without its city. Anyang is described in the university's own introduction as the hometown of oracle bone inscriptions, the site of the Yin Ruins, the birthplace of Zhouyi culture and of the Hongqi Canal spirit, a national historical and cultural city, and one of the eight ancient capitals of China. Yinxu, the ruins of Yin, the last capital of the Shang dynasty, lies in present-day Anyang; more than 150,000 inscribed oracle bone fragments have been recovered there, bearing the earliest known Chinese writing, a script of some thousands of characters of which a large proportion have been deciphered. A university in the city where Chinese writing is first attested, with a school devoted to history and museology, gives its journal a natural scholarly hinterland in archaeology, ancient history, philology and the study of early Chinese civilisation.

The Hongqi Canal and the modern city

The university's self-description pairs the ancient heritage with a modern one: the Hongqi Canal, the great irrigation work cut through the Taihang Mountains from neighbouring Linzhou in the 1960s, whose 'Hongqi Canal spirit' is part of Anyang's civic identity. Zhouyi culture — the tradition of the Book of Changes, whose author King Wen of Zhou is associated by tradition with imprisonment at Youli near Anyang — is the third element the university names. Ancient capital, oracle bones, Zhouyi and the canal together define the regional studies territory in which an Anyang journal operates, alongside the general disciplines of its sponsor.

What the journal publishes

As the comprehensive journal of a comprehensive normal university, the title publishes research across the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and education. The verifiable evidence for its content is its article and citation record: articles carrying its ISSN appear in the bibliographies of later scholarship across subject areas, and its DOI record shows regular issue publication into the 2020s. Research strengths of the sponsor that are documented independently — history in particular is singled out in assessments of the university's influence, alongside its archaeology and museology provision — are the fields in which a journal of this type most visibly serves its institution, publishing the work of its own faculty alongside contributions from scholars elsewhere in China working on Anyang-related and general subjects.

Publication pattern

The attested DOI 10.16140/j.cnki.1671-5330.2022.04.017 encodes the journal's own numbering with unusual clarity: the year 2022, issue 04 and article 017 within that issue. A fourth issue carrying at least seventeen numbered articles indicates a substantial, frequently appearing periodical rather than an occasional bulletin. Chinese comprehensive university journals commonly appear bimonthly or monthly, and an issue structure of this size is consistent with that class of journal, although this profile makes no claim to a specific frequency beyond what the numbering itself shows. The DOI prefix pattern, registered through the Chinese journal system, also places the journal inside the national database infrastructure through which such titles are distributed and cited.

Place among Henan university journals

Henan is one of China's most populous provinces and supports a dense tier of prefectural normal universities, each with its journal: Luoyang, Nanyang, Xinyang, Huanghuai and others appear in the same national listings as Anyang. Within that tier, the Journal of Anyang Normal University is distinguished chiefly by its setting. No other journal in the group is published from the site of a Shang dynasty capital, in the city of the oracle bones, by a university whose own history runs back to a 1908 normal training institute. Those facts do not change the journal's formal status — it is a provincial university journal like its peers — but they shape the regional scholarship it attracts and the identity under which it is cited.

Role and readership

The journal's function is to give Anyang Normal University a peer-reviewed academic periodical of its own: an outlet for faculty and postgraduate research, a channel through which scholarship on Yinxu, oracle bone studies, Shang and Zhou history and northern Henan regional subjects reaches a national readership, and a citable record of the university's work since its formation in 2000. Its readers are the standard readership of Chinese university journals — subject researchers, other institutions' faculty, and database users across China — reached through the national journal databases in which its ISSN-bearing articles are indexed. Verified by its ISSN and DOI record and anchored in one of the most historically resonant university cities in China, it is a small but durable part of the scholarly infrastructure of Henan.