About Journal of Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Journal of Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Overview and identity

The Journal of Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine is the academic journal of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine in Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China. Its Chinese title is 广州中医药大学学报 (Guangzhou Zhongyiyao Daxue Xuebao). Founded in 1984, it carries the ISSN 1007-3213 and is published by the university itself. Like the journals of China's other universities of Chinese medicine, it is the institution's house journal in the best sense: a peer-reviewed periodical in which the university's own researchers publish alongside scholars from across China, covering basic and clinical research in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), Chinese materia medica, acupuncture and integrative medicine.

University journals — xuebao, in Chinese — are a central institution of Chinese academic life. Almost every Chinese university publishes one, and the xuebao of the specialist TCM universities are among the core periodicals of their field, because the universities themselves are the field's main research producers. The Guangzhou journal's identity is therefore inseparable from its university: one of China's oldest TCM institutions, rooted in the Lingnan medical tradition of the south, whose strengths in internal medicine, orthopaedics, gynaecology and the clinical foundations of Chinese medicine are reflected in the journal's pages.

The university behind the journal

Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine was established in 1956 as Guangzhou College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, built on the foundation of Guangdong College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, which had been founded in 1924. It is counted among the four oldest institutions of higher education in traditional Chinese medicine in China — the group of colleges created in 1956 in the first national formalisation of TCM higher education — and in February 1995 it was renamed Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (in English also rendered Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine). The university was among the first in China approved to confer master's and doctoral degrees, and its discipline of Chinese Medicine Science was designated a national first-level key discipline in 2007.

The university today operates two campuses in Guangzhou — Sanyuanli and the University Town campus — and has educated overseas students since 1974, training TCM practitioners for more than a hundred countries and regions. Its campus is also home to the Guangdong Museum of Traditional Chinese Medicine, with its Lingnan Famous Doctors Wall commemorating the region's medical heritage. A journal published by such a university carries that institutional weight: its editorial board draws on the university's colleges and affiliated hospitals, and its contents form part of the published record on which the university's research reputation rests.

Founding in 1984

The journal was founded in 1984, nearly three decades after the university itself. That timing is characteristic of Chinese university publishing: the great expansion of Chinese academic journals came in the late 1970s and 1980s, as research activity revived and grew and universities established or re-established their own periodicals to carry it. A xuebao founded in 1984 has since accumulated more than forty years of continuous publication, spanning the period in which Chinese TCM research was transformed by modern laboratory methods, by the growth of graduate education, and by the progressive integration of Chinese and Western medicine in clinical research.

Across those decades the journal has served as a cumulative archive of the university's scholarship. Work that began as small clinical observations in the 1980s can be followed in its pages into the larger, methodologically stricter studies of later years, and the journal's back run is one of the places where the development of Lingnan-region TCM research can be traced in detail. Continuity of this kind — a single title, a single institution, an unbroken sequence of volumes since 1984 — is exactly what librarians and bibliographers look for when assessing a university journal, and it is confirmed by the journal's stable ISSN record under 1007-3213.

Scope: basic and clinical TCM research

The journal publishes basic and clinical research across traditional Chinese medicine. Basic research includes studies of TCM theory and its classical foundations, experimental work on the mechanisms of TCM treatments, and laboratory investigation of formulas and therapeutic methods. Clinical research reports the treatment of disease with TCM and integrative approaches from the university's affiliated hospitals and from other institutions: case series, controlled studies and observational research across internal medicine, surgery, gynaecology, paediatrics and the other clinical departments of Chinese medicine. The university's designated national key disciplines — including internal medicine of Chinese medicine and the clinical foundation of Chinese medicine — indicate the areas in which its, and therefore often the journal's, research is deepest.

Publishing basic and clinical work in one journal is a deliberate feature of the xuebao model. TCM research characteristically moves between classical theory, laboratory experiment and bedside application, and a university journal that prints all three lets readers follow a single line of inquiry — a classical formula, say — from textual and theoretical discussion through pharmacological experiment to clinical report. For the university's own postgraduate students, whose theses generate much of this research, the journal is also a first publication venue held to the standards of peer review.

Scope: materia medica, acupuncture and integrative medicine

Chinese materia medica — the study of medicinal substances, their identification, chemistry, pharmacology, processing and clinical use — is a second major strand of the journal's scope, reflecting the university's strength in the discipline. Research of this kind connects botany, natural-products chemistry and pharmacology with the classical drug literature, and Guangzhou's position in the historic southern trade in medicinal materials gives the subject a local as well as a national dimension.

Acupuncture and tuina form a third strand: clinical and experimental studies of needling and related manual therapies, their indications and their mechanisms. A fourth strand is integrative medicine, the combination of Chinese and Western medicine that is institutionalised in China in dedicated departments, degree programmes and hospitals. Integrative studies in the journal typically evaluate TCM treatments alongside conventional therapy, or examine how the two systems' diagnostic and therapeutic approaches can be combined for conditions in which each alone is incomplete. Together, the four strands — basic and clinical TCM, materia medica, acupuncture and integrative medicine — define the journal's stated coverage and match the teaching and research structure of its parent university.

The Lingnan medical tradition

The journal's own description notes that it publishes work from the Lingnan medical tradition and beyond, and that regional identity is one of its distinguishing features. Lingnan — the lands south of the Nanling mountain range, centred on Guangdong and its capital Guangzhou — has a distinctive medical history shaped by a hot, humid subtropical climate, a distinctive local materia medica, and centuries of maritime trade through Canton that brought foreign drugs and medical ideas into Chinese practice. Lingnan physicians developed characteristic approaches to the damp-heat conditions of the south, to herbal teas and dietary therapy, and to bone-setting, and Guangzhou's physicians occupy a recognised place in the history of Chinese medicine — a heritage the university commemorates physically in its museum and its wall of famous Lingnan doctors.

A journal edited in Guangzhou is therefore a natural home for research on Lingnan medicine: studies of its historical physicians and texts, of regional medicinal plants, and of clinical approaches adapted to southern conditions. At the same time the journal is a national publication, not a regional bulletin; "and beyond" in its remit means that authors and topics come from across China, with the Lingnan material providing local colour and specialisation within a general TCM programme.

The xuebao in Chinese academic publishing

To place the journal correctly, a reader should understand the standing of university journals in China. The leading xuebao of the TCM universities are treated as serious national journals: they are peer-reviewed, they are included in the Chinese journal databases through which almost all Chinese-language scholarship is now read, and the best of them appear in the national core-journal listings for their disciplines. For many Chinese TCM researchers, the realistic choice of publication venue is among a set that prominently includes these university journals and the journals of the national societies and academies, and the Guangzhou journal competes in that company on the strength of its university's research output.

The journal also plays an internal academic function that purely commercial or society journals do not. It is part of how the university presents itself to the Chinese academic system: visiting scholars, evaluators and prospective postgraduate students can read in its pages what the institution actually researches. The requirement, common across Chinese universities, that postgraduate research be published gives the xuebao a steady flow of manuscripts rooted in the university's laboratories and affiliated hospitals, grounding the journal in current work rather than in solicited material alone.

Readership and authorship

Authors in the journal come principally from Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine — its colleges, research institutes and affiliated hospitals — together with TCM universities, hospitals and research institutes elsewhere in China. Readers are correspondingly the national TCM research community: clinicians seeking treatment experience, laboratory researchers following materia medica and mechanism studies, acupuncturists, and postgraduate students across the discipline. Because the journal is published in Chinese, its detailed readership is domestic, while its bibliographic identity — title, university, Guangzhou imprint and ISSN 1007-3213 — makes it traceable in international library catalogues and serials directories.

For an international directory user, the essential facts are these. The Journal of Guangzhou University of Traditional Chinese Medicine is the peer-reviewed journal of Guangzhou University of Chinese Medicine, published in Guangzhou, Guangdong, since 1984, ISSN 1007-3213, covering basic and clinical TCM, Chinese materia medica, acupuncture and integrative medicine, with a particular connection to the Lingnan medical tradition of southern China. It should not be confused with the journals of the other TCM universities — Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Chengdu and the rest — each of which publishes its own similarly titled xuebao; the Guangzhou title, city and ISSN identify this one uniquely.

Continuing role

More than forty years after its founding, the journal continues as its university's principal periodical in its own discipline. The university it serves has grown from a 1956 college into a doctoral-granting university with a national key discipline, two campuses and an international student body, and the journal's run from 1984 to the present is the printed thread through that growth. For researchers of Chinese medicine — and especially for those interested in the southern, Lingnan stream of the tradition — it remains a standard source: a university journal in the full Chinese sense, combining institutional record, peer-reviewed research outlet and regional scholarly forum in a single continuing title.