About Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine

Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine

The Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine (JFSM) is an English-language, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published from Beijing, China, at the meeting point of forensic science, forensic medicine and the law of evidence. It is the academic journal of the Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science of the China University of Political Science and Law (CUPL), launched jointly by that institute and CUPL's Collaborative Innovation Center of Judicial Civilization. CUPL announced it as the university's first English-language international periodical and, at launch, as the only full-English international journal specialised in its field whose sponsor is located in China. The journal is published in cooperation with Wolters Kluwer, through its Medknow operation; its full text is freely available at its official website, jfsmonline.com. Its identifiers are ISSN 2349-5014 and e-ISSN 2455-0094, as given in CUPL's launch record. It should not be confused with the Journal of Forensic Medicine, a different and older Chinese forensic title: the Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine is profiled here strictly on its own record, as an English-language journal of evidence law and forensic science founded at CUPL in the mid-2010s.

Launch: CUPL's first English international periodical

CUPL's launch announcement describes the journal as "a fruitful result of the joint effort" of the Collaborative Innovation Center of Judicial Civilization and the university's Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science. The first two issues appeared in May and November of the launch year, and from the following year the journal moved to quarterly publication, a rhythm it has kept: bibliographic records trace its coverage from 2015, and its issues continue into volume 12 in 2026. The launch was a deliberate act of internationalisation. Chinese forensic scholarship had historically published overwhelmingly in Chinese, in domestic journals read by domestic practitioners; an English-language, open-access journal with an international board was built to carry that scholarship — and China's experience of judicial reform — to a worldwide readership, and to bring international forensic scholarship into conversation with Chinese practice.

Sponsors: the Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science and the CICJC

The journal's academic home is CUPL's Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science, whose staff include scholars of China's forensic system — the institute's Zhiyuan Xia, for example, is the author of the standard English-language history of China's forensic medicine education and service modes since 1949, published in 2021. Its co-sponsor at launch, the Collaborative Innovation Center of Judicial Civilization, was one of the collaborative innovation centres through which Chinese universities organised interdisciplinary research on the judicial system. The pairing is characteristic of the journal: evidence law supplies the legal frame — how scientific findings become proof in court — and forensic science supplies the methods whose reliability the law must test. CUPL, China's leading specialist university for law, provided both halves under one roof.

Editor-in-chief and editorial board

The journal's chief editor, appointed at launch and still listed as editor-in-chief in current journal directories, is Dr Li Ling (Ling Li), a forensic pathologist who serves as a medical examiner at the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in the United States and as a professor at the medical college of the University of Maryland. The appointment of a Chinese-American forensic pathologist working in a major American medicolegal death-investigation office was a statement of the journal's bridging ambition. Its editorial board was constituted with some 50 notable experts and scholars from China and abroad — roughly 30 international and 20 domestic members on CUPL's count — including two academicians of the Chinese Academy of Engineering in forensic science and forensic medicine, Professors Liu Yao and Cong Bin. A board of that composition gives the journal refereeing capacity across forensic pathology, toxicology, DNA evidence, clinical forensic medicine and evidence law.

Identifiers, publisher and publishing model

The journal's abbreviation is JFSM. CUPL's launch record gives its identifiers as ISSN 2349-5014 and e-ISSN 2455-0094; journal directories list the same pair of numbers for the title. Publication is in cooperation with Wolters Kluwer, the international publisher whose Medknow imprint operates the journal's platform; the journal is a peer-reviewed online journal with quarterly print-on-demand compilation of its issues. Its access model is fully open: the journal allows free access to its contents, permits authors to self-archive the final accepted version of their articles in any OAI-compliant institutional or subject repository, and — unusually — charges nothing at any stage: no submission fee, no processing fee and no publication fee, and no charge even for colour reproduction of photographs. For a field in which case reports depend on images, free colour reproduction is a practical as well as an economic choice.

Scope: where forensic science meets the law

CUPL describes the journal as covering "a wide range of inter-disciplinary topics on science and medical research, overlapping with law studies." Its columns at launch were original research articles, reviews, case reports, brief communications, editorials, commentaries and letters to the editor. In practice its pages span forensic pathology and autopsy practice, forensic toxicology, forensic genetics and DNA evidence, clinical forensic medicine, forensic anthropology and odontology, injury analysis, and the legal and procedural treatment of expert evidence. The journal's own programmatic articles show the breadth: a review of the development of China's forensic science in the decade 2005–2016, published in its pages, moves between examination statistics, forensic clinical medicine, standard-setting and the institutional separation of forensic examination from the judicial system — science, administration and law in a single analysis.

The journal as a record of China's forensic system

Because its sponsor is a centre for the study of evidence and forensic institutions, JFSM doubles as a documentary source on the system it studies. Its ten-year review of Chinese forensic science records that after the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress adopted its Decision on the Administration of Forensic Examination on 28 February 2005, forensic examination was comprehensively separated from the judicial system and opened to society; that total forensic examinations grew from 266,241 in 2005 to over two million by the end of 2015 and 2.126 million in 2016; and that by the end of 2016 China had 4,750 forensic examination institutions and 53,928 registered forensic experts. The same literature in the journal's orbit records the distinctive structure Xia summarised as "three world's firsts": the world's first national undergraduate degree in forensic medicine, the first forensic medicine divisions in a national police criminal-investigation system, and the first market-oriented forensic medicine services. No other English-language journal reports this system from inside its own scholarly establishment.

Content in recent issues

The journal's current issues show the case-driven character of forensic publishing. Its September 2026 issue (volume 12, issue 3) includes a fatal ruptured cornual ectopic pregnancy case report; a forensic botany case study linking crime scene, victim and suspect; a case of sudden unexpected infant death from post-vaccinal disseminated BCG disease, with literature review; a review of vibrational spectroscopy for identifying species from body fluids; and a cross-sectional study of age estimation from a standard lead II electrocardiogram in an Egyptian population. The mixture is typical: Chinese and international authors, single-case forensic pathology beside laboratory method reviews and population studies, all of it framed for readers who must use such findings in legal proceedings. The presence of Egyptian, and in other issues Indian and other international, authorship confirms that the journal's contributor base is genuinely international rather than a domestic journal in translation.

Indexing and metrics

Journal directories record the Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine with a CiteScore of 0.5, an SJR of 0.184, an SNIP of 0.341 and an h-index of 9, placing it in the third quartile of its categories, which directories classify under law and under pathology and forensic medicine. Scopus-derived coverage records list the journal from 2015 to 2022. Those metrics are modest, as befits a young, specialised, no-fee open-access title, but they establish the essential point for directory purposes: the journal is a real, indexed, continuously published peer-reviewed periodical with a verifiable editorial structure, not a promotional or predatory outlet. Its no-charge model is funded through its institutional sponsorship rather than author fees, which aligns its incentives with its university sponsors.

Distinction from the Journal of Forensic Medicine

English-language databases contain several similarly named forensic titles, and the Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine is most often confused with the Journal of Forensic Medicine, a separate, Chinese-language forensic journal with its own, longer history, as well as with the American Journal of Forensic Medicine and Pathology and Springer's Forensic Science, Medicine, and Pathology — all different journals, with different sponsors, publishers and ISSNs. The Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine's identifying marks are unambiguous: CUPL sponsorship through the Institute of Evidence Law and Forensic Science, publication with Wolters Kluwer Medknow, editorship of Ling Li, ISSNs 2349-5014 and 2455-0094, the abbreviation JFSM, and the website jfsmonline.com. Citations to "J Forensic Sci Med" belong to this journal and to no other.

Place and significance

The journal's significance is institutional as much as bibliometric. It embodies a specific moment in Chinese legal development: the period after the 2005 forensic-examination reforms and during the judicial-civilisation research programme, when China's evidence-law scholars judged that forensic science needed an English-language forum of its own, sponsored from within China, through which Chinese forensic practice could be described to the world in the world's scholarly language — and tested against it. A decade on, with volume numbering in double figures, a functioning international board and authorship, and a complete absence of author charges, the Journal of Forensic Science and Medicine remains the journal CUPL announced: the English-language meeting place of Chinese forensic science, forensic medicine and the law of evidence.