About Journal of Dezhou University

Journal of Dezhou University

Overview and identity

The Journal of Dezhou University is the Chinese-language comprehensive academic journal of Dezhou University in Dezhou, Shandong Province. Its Chinese title, Dezhou Xueyuan Xuebao, marks it as the xuebao — the scholarly journal — of Dezhou Xueyuan, the institution known in English as Dezhou University. As a comprehensive journal it publishes across the full disciplinary range of its host, from humanities and social sciences through to science, engineering and medicine-related fields, rather than serving a single faculty.

The journal has a documented presence in scholarly citations over many years. It was cited as early as its 2007 issue 5 in connection with research on Shandong dialect — a detail that captures something essential about the journal: alongside general scholarship, it serves as a venue for the study of the language and culture of its own region of north-western Shandong. No ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here.

The host university: founded in 1971

Dezhou University is a public comprehensive university founded in 1971. It began in May of that year as Dezhou Teachers College, born, as university profiles put it, during the Cultural Revolution period, and it grew through the difficult steps of that era towards standardisation and expansion. Its modern form emerged through merger: in March 1997 Dezhou Normal College, Dezhou Education College and Dezhou City Amateur University combined to run the institution jointly as a comprehensive college.

In March 2000, with the approval of the Ministry of Education, the institution was established at undergraduate level — a step its own histories describe as a historic leap from a college to a comprehensive university-level institution and an important milestone in the development of higher education in Dezhou. The institution is directly under the Shandong Provincial Government and is a full-time comprehensive undergraduate university.

Scale and disciplinary breadth

Dezhou University is a large institution by the standards of local Chinese universities. In 2021 the number of its students was around 25,000; fuller profiles record some 26,151 full-time undergraduate students, together with students in adult education and graduate students in joint training programmes. Its faculty has been reported at 1,636 members, including 1,306 full-time teachers.

Academically, the university has been described as comprising 23 colleges and 3 research institutes, offering 72 undergraduate majors. Those majors cover eleven broad fields: economics, law, education, literature, art, history, science, engineering, agriculture, medicine and management. Undergraduate and graduate programmes are both offered, and summary descriptions of the university emphasise its provision in the liberal arts, science, engineering, the arts, pharmacy and nursing. For the journal, that breadth defines its remit: it is the single scholarly publication of a university that teaches almost everything, and its contents reflect that comprehensiveness.

Dezhou and its cultural setting

Dezhou sits in north-western Shandong, on the border with Hebei, in the plain where the Yellow River culture of the lower river plain meets the canal culture of the Grand Canal, which historically passed through the region on its way between the Yangtze and Beijing. University profiles describe the institution as rooted in the fertile soil of Qilu culture — the culture of Shandong itself — and Yanzhao culture, the culture of the neighbouring Hebei plain, while absorbing the spirit of Yellow River culture and canal culture.

That fourfold cultural inheritance is more than rhetoric for a university journal. Dialectology, regional history, folklore and the literature of the north Shandong plain are research fields grounded in exactly this territory, and the journal's early citation for Shandong dialect research shows it publishing in that tradition. A local university journal is often the primary scholarly record of its region's language: dialect features that national journals would treat as too local are, for the Journal of Dezhou University, central material.

Scope of the journal

The journal's scope is comprehensive, covering the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and applied fields taught at the university. Its recognised content strengths include dialectology, regional culture and applied science. Within the humanities, language and literature research — including the Shandong dialect studies for which it was being cited by 2007 — sits alongside history, education and the social sciences. Within the sciences, its pages serve the university's programmes in science, engineering, agriculture, pharmacy and nursing.

This comprehensiveness is characteristic of the xuebao of a Chinese comprehensive local university. Where a specialised journal can assume a specialised readership, a journal like this one must serve many readerships at once: the linguist reading dialect research, the engineer reading applied work, the education researcher reading pedagogy. Its editorial task is to hold those constituencies together in one publication that represents the whole university.

Research and student scholarship at the host

The journal is embedded in a research-active institution. University profiles record that Dezhou University has approved a total of 184 national university student innovation and entrepreneurship training programmes, and that its teachers have instructed students to publish hundreds of papers — evidence of a culture in which publication is treated as part of undergraduate and postgraduate formation, not only as a faculty duty. The university also maintains a Nature Index research profile for its output in the natural sciences, tracking its articles in leading science journals.

International cooperation adds another channel of scholarship. In 2022 the Belgorod Institute of Food Sciences was created at Dezhou University in cooperation with Belgorod State National Research University of Russia, offering bachelor programmes in chemistry, biology, biotechnology and food technology with instruction in Chinese, English and Russian, and graduates receiving diplomas from both universities. Joint institutes of that kind broaden the research community around the journal, bringing food-science and biotechnology work with an international dimension into the university's scholarly life.

Serving a regional university's mission

Dezhou University describes its mission in applied, regional terms: it aims at building a high-level, distinctive, international and application-oriented university, and city leaders visiting the campus have urged it to deepen the integration of industry and education, promote school-enterprise cooperation and better serve local development. Its facilities visited on such occasions — an intelligent manufacturing laboratory, a chemical technology laboratory, an ASEAN research centre and an employment empowerment centre — illustrate the applied orientation of its work.

The journal supports that mission from the scholarly side. Applied science published in its pages documents the university's engagement with the industries of the Dezhou region; regional culture and dialect research documents its stewardship of local heritage; education research supports the school system of north-western Shandong that the university was originally founded to serve as a teachers college in 1971.

The journal in China's university-journal system

China's xuebao system gives every university a scholarly voice, and the journals of comprehensive local universities like Dezhou perform a particular function within it. They are the journals of record for regional scholarship — for the dialect of the Dezhou plain, the history of its canal towns, the applied problems of its agriculture and manufacturing. National journals publish some of this work, but the systematic, year-by-year record accumulates in the local university journal.

The Journal of Dezhou University has been performing that function across the decades of its host's development, from teachers college to merged comprehensive college in 1997, to undergraduate university in 2000 and beyond. Its citation history — visible in dialect research as early as 2007 — shows it functioning as a working scholarly journal whose articles are used by other researchers, which is the practical test of any academic periodical.

Readership and significance

The journal's readership consists principally of Chinese scholars in linguistics, regional studies, education, the sciences and applied fields, together with Dezhou University's own large faculty and student body of around 25,000. For researchers of Shandong dialect and north China regional culture in particular, it is a source they cannot ignore, because the scholars closest to the material publish there.

In summary, the Journal of Dezhou University is the comprehensive Chinese-language journal of a public university founded in 1971 in Dezhou, Shandong, which grew through a 1997 merger into a comprehensive institution and achieved undergraduate status in 2000. With a host offering 72 undergraduate majors across eleven fields, and a journal known for dialectology, regional culture and applied science, it offers a full scholarly portrait of higher education in north-western Shandong — the material on which this profile is based.