About Journal of China Agricultural University

Journal of China Agricultural University

Overview and identity

Journal of China Agricultural University (Zhongguo Nongye Daxue Xuebao) is the comprehensive agricultural journal of China Agricultural University in Beijing, China. It is identified by ISSN 1007-4333, and its editorial office is recorded at 2 Yuanmingyuan West Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100193 — the address of the university's west campus in Beijing's university quarter. OpenAlex records the journal's first publication year as 1993, and AGRIS records show it at volume 7 in 2002, a consistent picture of a journal founded in its present form in the mid-1990s volume sequence and published continuously since.

The journal covers agronomy, resources and environment, food science and agricultural engineering, together with the wider agricultural and life-science output of China's flagship agricultural university. Its own editorial office has also become, unusually, a research centre for the study of Chinese agricultural journals themselves — a fact that gives this title a distinctive place in the national publishing landscape.

The host university: founded 1905

China Agricultural University (CAU) traces its foundation to 1905, as the Agricultural College of the Imperial University of Peking, and in 2025 it celebrated its 120th anniversary. It is described in international publishing contexts as one of the most prestigious agricultural universities and one of the most significant agricultural research organisations in China and the world, carrying the motto “Tackle the problems the people face, cultivate the talents the world needs.” The university is a Double First-Class institution directly under the Ministry of Education, seated in Haidian District among Beijing's concentration of universities and Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes.

The journal is the university's comprehensive Chinese-language title. Around it, CAU has built one of the strongest journal portfolios of any Chinese agricultural university: it hosts the English-language Information Processing in Agriculture, counted among the first agricultural titles selected for the Excellence Plan's high-starting-point programme in 2019, and its College of Veterinary Medicine launched One Health Advances in 2023. The comprehensive journal remains the domestic foundation of that portfolio.

Sponsorship, publisher and editorial home

The journal is sponsored by China Agricultural University and produced by its editorial office at 2 Yuanmingyuan West Road, Haidian District, Beijing. That address is a matter of public scholarly record: it appears as the affiliation of the editorial office's own researchers in their published studies of Chinese agricultural journals, which list the “Editorial Office of Journal of China Agricultural University, 2 Yuanmingyuan West Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100193, China.” Few journal profiles can document their editorial home so precisely from primary scholarly sources.

In the Chinese system, sponsorship by the university means the institution supervises the journal's editorial direction and stands behind the title. For readers, the arrangement locates responsibility clearly: the journal of China's leading agricultural university is edited on that university's own campus, by an office embedded in the research community it publishes.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal's recorded scope spans agronomy, resources and environment, food science and agricultural engineering, and in practice the full range of a comprehensive agricultural university: crop science and breeding, soil and plant nutrition, plant protection, horticulture, animal science and veterinary medicine, agricultural water and land resources, food processing and safety, and the mechanisation and information technologies of modern farming. That breadth is the defining feature of the comprehensive university journal as a genre — the whole institution publishes in one title.

AGRIS records showing volume 7 in 2002 and continuing publication through the 2000s document the journal performing this comprehensive function across the decades in which Chinese agricultural research expanded most rapidly. The journal's presence in the Chinese Association of Agricultural Science Societies' journal environment, alongside the academy's own titles such as the Journal of Integrative Agriculture and Scientia Agricultura Sinica, places it in the core of the national agricultural publishing system rather than at its periphery.

The editorial office as a research centre on journals

A remarkable, verifiable feature of this journal is that its editorial office publishes peer-reviewed research about the Chinese agricultural journal system itself. Qin Mei, Yuan Wenye and colleagues of the Editorial Office of Journal of China Agricultural University authored the widely cited analyses “Development Status and Countermeasures of Agricultural Journals in China” (2023) and its companion reflections, which examine the 19 agricultural journals selected for the Excellence Program in 2019 and the high-starting-point new journals launched from 2019 onward.

Those studies analyse disciplinary distribution, domestic and international influence, and the basic characteristics of new agricultural journals, and propose development strategies for the sector — including the finding that many first-class disciplines at China's leading universities still lack corresponding professional journals, and the recommendation that agricultural universities leverage their strengths in animal husbandry, agricultural engineering and food science to launch new titles. That the office of this journal produces the sector's own strategic literature is strong evidence of its centrality: the Journal of China Agricultural University is not merely a participant in the Chinese agricultural journal system but one of its recognised analysts.

History and development

OpenAlex's record of a 1993 first publication year and AGRIS's volume 7 in 2002 together place the journal's modern sequence in the 1990s, the decade in which China Agricultural University itself took its present name and form through the merger of Beijing's agricultural and agricultural-engineering universities. The journal has been published continuously since, through the period in which Chinese agricultural research output grew to world-leading volume.

Its development since 2019 must be read against the Excellence Plan era. While the university launched new English titles — Information Processing in Agriculture in the programme's first cohort, One Health Advances in 2023 — the comprehensive journal continued its domestic role, and its editorial office simultaneously documented and interpreted the transformation for the whole sector. That dual position, participant and chronicler, is unusual among university journals anywhere.

Publication pattern and article types

The journal publishes original research articles and reviews in Chinese across its comprehensive scope, in the standard format of China's agricultural journals, with bilingual titles and abstracts supporting international discovery. Its articles are recorded in AGRIS, the FAO's agricultural database, whose coverage preserves the journal's output from at least 2002 forward, and in OpenAlex, which dates its publication history from 1993.

For citation, the governing identifiers are the exact title and ISSN 1007-4333. The journal should not be confused with the Journal of Integrative Agriculture (the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences' English monthly, formerly Agricultural Sciences in China), with Scientia Agricultura Sinica, or with CAU's newer English titles — all distinct journals that a careless search for “China agricultural university journal” can conflate.

Indexing and discovery

The journal's discovery footprint runs through AGRIS and OpenAlex internationally and through the standard Chinese journal platforms and library systems domestically. Its editorial office's own publications, carried in international repositories in English translation, have the incidental effect of making the journal's name and address unusually visible in the global literature on scholarly publishing — a form of discoverability no other Chinese university journal quite shares.

Within the national system, the journal sits in the company documented by the CAASS Web of Agriculture journal list, which enumerates the core agricultural titles of the academy and university systems. Its standing, like that of its peer comprehensive journals, is anchored in domestic core-journal evaluation rather than in the international citation indexes that its English sister titles target.

Place among China's agricultural university journals

China Agricultural University is the senior institution of Chinese agricultural higher education, and its journal occupies the corresponding senior position among the comprehensive agricultural university journals — the cohort that includes the journals of Nanjing, Huazhong and Northeast Agricultural Universities and of Northwest A&F University. The cohort shares a genre, a sponsorship model and a domestic readership; what distinguishes the Beijing title is its host's flagship status and its editorial office's documented role in steering the sector's development strategy.

The Excellence Plan analyses from its own office frame the cohort's collective challenge plainly: university journals run by agricultural universities under the Ministry of Education compete with journals supervised by the China Association for Science and Technology, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the agriculture ministry system, whose affiliated institutes demonstrate strong publishing capacity. The comprehensive journals' response — documented in those same analyses — has been to build English specialist titles on top of the Chinese comprehensive base. This journal's office wrote that analysis; this journal is its base.

Readership and use

Readers are agricultural researchers and postgraduate students across China, the professional communities of the academy and ministry research systems, and — through its editorial office's English-language publications — the international community of scholarly-publishing researchers who cite its analyses of the Chinese journal system. For a directory user, the journal serves both as a primary source for Chinese agricultural research and as the institutional home of the most-cited strategic literature on China's agricultural journals.

Continuing role

As China Agricultural University marks 120 years since 1905, its comprehensive journal — published from 2 Yuanmingyuan West Road, Beijing, under ISSN 1007-4333, with a publication record documented from 1993 and volume 7 in 2002 — continues as the domestic scholarly record of China's flagship agricultural university, and as the editorial home from which the development of China's agricultural journals as a whole is studied and reported.