About Journal of Clinical Hepatology

Journal of Clinical Hepatology

Overview and identity

The Journal of Clinical Hepatology is a Chinese-language medical journal devoted to liver and biliary disease, based in Changchun, Jilin, China. Its Chinese title is Linchuang Gandanbing Zazhi, a name that translates literally as the journal of clinical liver and gallbladder diseases, and it is published by the Editorial Board of Jilin University. The journal is identified by ISSN 1001-5256, and its official website is lcgdbzz.org, where current issues, article archives and author services are presented in Chinese with English-language article pages and abstracts. For readers of this directory, the most important point of identity is that this is a long-established, university-published Chinese hepatology journal, distinct from English-language titles with similar names published elsewhere.

Hepatology in China carries a particularly heavy clinical workload. Chronic viral hepatitis, cirrhosis and its complications, fatty liver disease and liver cancer have long been major causes of illness and hospital care in the country, and a specialist journal that publishes in Chinese, for Chinese clinicians, has a direct line into everyday practice in liver units, infectious disease departments and gastroenterology services. The Journal of Clinical Hepatology occupies exactly that position: it is a place where national guidelines, consensus statements, original clinical studies and reviews in hepatology appear in the language in which most of its readers work.

History and development

The journal's volume numbering provides a clear record of its longevity. Its archive reached volume 38 in 2022 and volume 40 in 2024, which places its first volume in 1985, and volume 41 followed in 2025. A journal that has published continuously since 1985 has therefore accompanied almost the entire modern history of hepatology in China, from the era when viral hepatitis dominated liver practice, through the introduction of antiviral therapies for hepatitis B and C, to the present period in which fatty liver disease and metabolic liver disease account for a growing share of the caseload.

That continuity matters because liver medicine has changed repeatedly over those four decades. Screening and vaccination reduced the future burden of hepatitis B, direct-acting antivirals transformed hepatitis C care, and imaging, endoscopy and interventional techniques changed how portal hypertension and liver tumours are managed. A journal founded in 1985 and still publishing monthly-scale output in the 2020s has documented each of those transitions in Chinese, building an archive that clinicians can search when they need precedent, local data or a Chinese-language synthesis of a fast-moving topic.

Publisher, place and editorial home

The journal is published by the Editorial Board of Jilin University in Changchun, the capital of Jilin Province in north-eastern China. Jilin University is one of China's large comprehensive universities, and university publication gives the journal an academic home rather than a purely commercial one. Changchun is also a useful reminder that important Chinese medical publishing is not confined to Beijing and Shanghai: provincial university centres sustain specialist journals that serve national readerships.

The journal's website, lcgdbzz.org, takes its name from the pinyin initials of the Chinese title, Linchuang Gandanbing Zazhi. Through the site, readers can browse issues by year and volume, read articles such as the guideline and consensus papers discussed below, and follow the journal's current article output, which in 2025 included, for example, the National Health Commission's guidelines for the diagnosis and treatment of primary sclerosing cholangitis (2025 edition), published in volume 41, issue 8, pages 1507-1511.

Scope and subject coverage

As its title states, the journal covers clinical hepatology in the broad sense: diseases of the liver and the biliary system. The verified core of its scope includes viral hepatitis, cirrhosis, fatty liver disease, liver cancer and portal hypertension. Articles in a single recent issue, volume 40, issue 4 (2024), illustrate that breadth concretely: a review of the current status of hepatitis C virus infection in China and the process of its elimination; an analysis of the changing burden of liver cirrhosis in the Chinese population from 1990 to 2019; a review of endoscopic techniques in the diagnosis and treatment of liver diseases, including endoscopic ultrasound-guided liver biopsy and endoscopic treatment of portal hypertension; a study of eliminating hepatitis C infection among people receiving haemodialysis; and experimental work on genistein in a mouse model of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.

That mixture is characteristic of the journal. Clinical epidemiology sits alongside endoscopy and intervention, traditional Chinese medicine prescriptions are evaluated in conditions such as hepatitis B cirrhosis with severe oesophagogastric varices, and laboratory studies appear when they bear on liver disease mechanisms. The journal therefore serves readers whose work ranges from ward-based hepatology to endoscopy suites, dialysis units and research laboratories.

Guidelines and consensus statements

A defining feature of the Journal of Clinical Hepatology is its role as a carrier of Chinese national guidance in liver disease. Most prominently, it published the Chinese Society of Hepatology, Chinese Medical Association guidelines on the management of liver cirrhosis in 2019, in volume 35, issue 11, pages 2408-2425 (DOI 10.3969/j.issn.1001-5256.2019.11.006). That guideline became a standard reference for the staging, diagnosis and treatment of cirrhosis in China, and it is still routinely cited in later Chinese studies, which state explicitly that their patients were managed according to the 2019 Hepatology Branch guideline.

The journal's guideline role did not end there. It published the Chinese Society of Hepatology's guidelines on the management of hepatic encephalopathy in cirrhosis in 2018 (volume 34, issue 10, pages 2076-2089), the society's guidelines on the diagnosis and management of primary sclerosing cholangitis in 2022 (volume 38, issue 1, pages 50-61), and the Chinese Society of Gastroenterology's Chinese consensus on clinical diagnosis and therapy of liver cirrhosis in 2023 (volume 39, issue 9, pages 2057-2073). When the Chinese Society of Hepatology later revised its cirrhosis guidance for 2025, the revision's own account traced a family of related updates that had appeared in this literature in the intervening years, including guidance on variceal bleeding in cirrhotic portal hypertension, ascites and hepatic encephalopathy. For a clinician asking where Chinese cirrhosis practice is codified, this journal is one of the first places to look.

Article types and DOI practice

Alongside guidelines, the journal publishes original research articles, reviews, clinical analyses and case-based work, with English titles and abstracts that make individual articles discoverable to non-Chinese readers even though the full text is in Chinese. Its digital object identifiers show a change of practice over time that helps date its archive: older articles carry DOIs in the form 10.3969/j.issn.1001-5256.year.issue.number, as in the 2019 cirrhosis guideline, while recent articles carry the shorter form beginning 10.12449/JCH, as in the 2024 volume 40 articles and the 2025 volume 41 articles indexed in international databases. Both forms resolve to the same journal and the same ISSN.

Indexing and bibliometric presence

International journal databases record the Journal of Clinical Hepatology with publisher Editorial Board of Jilin University, country China and ISSN 1001-5256. Scopus coverage of the journal is recorded for 2019-2025, and services that compute metrics from Scopus and SCImago data list the journal in the medicine field, with an H-index of 20 recorded in 2025. EBSCO's academic indexes carry extensive article-level records for the journal, including the 2024 and 2025 volumes, which is how many librarians and researchers outside China encounter its contents.

Those records also help prevent a common confusion. China has several liver journals with overlapping English names, including Zhonghua Ganzangbing Zazhi, published by the Chinese Medical Association Publishing House, and the English-language Journal of Clinical and Translational Hepatology, owned by the Second Affiliated Hospital of Chongqing Medical University. The Journal of Clinical Hepatology profiled here is the Changchun title, ISSN 1001-5256, Chinese title Linchuang Gandanbing Zazhi, and citations should use that ISSN to keep the records separate.

Readership and professional role

The journal's natural readership is the Chinese liver-medicine community: hepatologists, gastroenterologists, infectious disease physicians, liver surgeons, endoscopists and researchers working on hepatitis, cirrhosis, fatty liver disease and liver cancer. Because it publishes the Chinese Society of Hepatology's guidance, its readership extends beyond subscribers to any clinician in China whose cirrhosis, hepatic encephalopathy or cholestatic liver disease practice follows national recommendations. Its articles are also read in dialysis and public health settings, as its hepatitis C elimination content shows.

Why the journal matters

The Journal of Clinical Hepatology matters for three verifiable reasons. First, it has published continuously since 1985 from a major university base in Changchun, giving Chinese hepatology a stable, long-running record. Second, it covers the full clinical range of liver and biliary disease, from viral hepatitis and fatty liver disease to portal hypertension and liver cancer, in the language of its practising readership. Third, and most distinctively, it is one of the journals in which China's national hepatology guidelines and consensuses actually appear, including the widely cited 2019 cirrhosis guideline. A directory profile that records its ISSN, publisher, website and guideline role therefore captures the facts a reader most needs to identify, cite and use this journal correctly.