About Journal of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (Natural Science Edition)

Journal of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (Natural Science Edition)

Overview and identity

The Journal of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (Natural Science Edition) is the Chinese-language natural-science journal of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in Hohhot, capital of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Its Chinese title is Neimenggu Nongye Daxue Xuebao, and bibliographic records in FAO AGRIS, the International System for Agricultural Science and Technology, carry it under ISSN 1009-3575. The AGRIS records, supplied by the Institute of Agricultural Information of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, describe a journal published in Chinese with summaries in Chinese and English, a format that has made its contents discoverable to agricultural researchers outside China even though the full text is written for a domestic readership.

The words Natural Science Edition in the title matter. Like most large Chinese universities, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University separates its scholarly journal into disciplinary editions, and this edition is the home for the university's work in the agricultural, biological and environmental sciences and in the engineering that supports them. It is distinct from the university's social-science publishing, and its identity is tied closely to the institution that sponsors it: a university built, from its first day in 1952, around grassland animal husbandry, farming and forestry in China's great northern pastoral region.

The sponsoring university

Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, often shortened to IMAU, is a public, multi-disciplinary university under the authority of the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region government. University profiles describe it as a multi-disciplinary institution focusing on agriculture and forestry and with a particular focus on grassland animal husbandry, organised across eight disciplines including agriculture, engineering, science, economics, management, literature, law and art, and operating a complete higher-education system from higher vocational colleges through bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees. In 2012 it became a university jointly built by the People's Government of the Autonomous Region and the State Forestry Administration, a status that reflects how central forestry and grassland questions are to its mission.

That institutional breadth is the journal's foundation. A natural-science edition sponsored by a narrow specialist institute could cover only a narrow field; a journal sponsored by IMAU can draw, legitimately, on agronomy, veterinary medicine, animal science, forestry, ecology, food science, water engineering and agricultural machinery at once, because all of those subjects are taught and researched inside the same university. The journal's wide contents, documented below, are therefore not eclecticism for its own sake but a direct map of its sponsor's structure.

Origins of the host institution in 1952

The university's own historical account, repeated consistently across its profiles, begins in 1952. In that year the animal husbandry and veterinary medicine department of the former Hebei Agricultural College and of Pingyuan Agricultural College, together with the veterinary specialism of Shanxi Agricultural College, were reorganised and moved to Guisui, now Hohhot, to form the Inner Mongolia Animal Husbandry and Veterinary College. The profiles stress the significance of that founding: it was the first undergraduate higher school in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. A further tradition records that the university was established in 1952 with its first president appointed by Chairman Mao Zedong, a detail retained in the institution's own presentation of its history.

Two later dates complete the pre-history of the present university. In 1958 the Inner Mongolia Forestry College was established, described in university profiles as the first higher forestry college established by New China in an ethnic-minority area. In 1960 the animal husbandry and veterinary college changed its name to the Inner Mongolia College of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry, widening its stated remit from livestock alone to farming and livestock together. For four decades the agriculture-and-animal-husbandry college and the forestry college developed side by side in Hohhot, and the scholarly record that eventually fed into the present journal was produced across both of them.

The 1999 merger and the modern university

In 1999 the Inner Mongolia College of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry and the Inner Mongolia Forestry College merged to form Inner Mongolia Agricultural University in its present shape. The merger is the single most important fact for understanding the journal, because it joined, in one institution, the two research traditions that dominate the natural-science edition's pages: the grassland, livestock and crop sciences of the older college, and the forestry and ecological sciences of the forestry college. Work on steppe ecosystems, on desertification and on the forests of the Greater Khingan range could thereafter appear under one university name and in one university journal.

The modern university that resulted is large. One recent university profile counts 22 colleges and more than 34,000 full-time students, including over 2,700 doctoral and master's students, and records that over more than sixty years the school has trained more than 120,000 graduates, most of whom have become leaders and technical backbones in the agricultural, animal husbandry, forestry, water, grass, milk and sand industries of the autonomous region. Other profiles put the offer at over 100 undergraduate degree programmes and postgraduate courses. Whichever snapshot is used, the picture is the same: the journal is backed by one of the largest agricultural research communities in northern China.

Colleges and research base behind the journal

The university's academic departments explain the journal's range in concrete terms. Its colleges include Animal Science, Veterinary Medicine, Agronomy, Forestry, Ecology and Environmental Science, Grassland, Resources and Environment, Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Water Resources and Civil Engineering, Food Science and Engineering, Life Science, Computer Science and Information Engineering, Energy and Transportation Engineering, and Science, alongside colleges for economics, management, humanities and foreign languages whose work belongs mainly to the university's other editions. Profiles also record ministry-level key laboratories, a key laboratory of the state forestry authorities, regional key laboratories, a state-level open field observation station and engineering research centres.

That research base is oriented, deliberately, to the production problems of Inner Mongolia. University accounts list national and industry technology integration and demonstration work undertaken by the school on the grassland green meat industry, on the optimisation of production and ecological life in pastoral areas, on modern production technology for traditional dairy products, on continuous high-yield and high-efficiency technology for spring corn and wheat in Inner Mongolia, and on water-saving technology for grain and oil crops in the Hetao Irrigation District. The natural-science edition is the natural first home, in Chinese, for peer-reviewed papers arising from programmes of exactly this kind.

Scope of the natural-science edition

Within that setting the edition's scope covers the natural sciences of agriculture and the land. The core subjects attested throughout its bibliographic record are agronomy and crop science; animal husbandry and veterinary medicine; grassland science, known in the Chinese literature as prataculture; forestry; ecology and environmental science; and the study of desertification and its control, a subject of existential importance in a region that borders the Gobi and contains large areas of sandy land, including the Mu Us desert country of the Ordos. Food science, dairy science, agricultural machinery and water and soil questions appear as supporting fields, reflecting the colleges that stand behind the title.

The scope should be understood regionally as well as disciplinarily. The journal is not a general agricultural journal in the abstract; it is a journal of agriculture as practised on the Inner Mongolian steppe, in the Hetao irrigation plain along the Yellow River, in the farming country of the region's south and in the forests of its north-east. Its authors study Leymus chinensis steppe, cashmere goats, desert shrubs and boreal forest animals because those are the organisms of the territory its sponsor serves, and its readership values precisely that territorial specificity.

Evidence from its published record

The AGRIS bibliographic record gives an unusually concrete picture of what the journal has actually published, because individual articles were indexed with their subjects over many years. In volume 22, in 2001, the journal carried work on developing the forestry and prataculture of Inner Mongolia to establish an ecological line of defence in the north of the country, on the in situ conservation of rare and endangered animals in the Da Xing'an, or Greater Khingan, forest, on the anatomy of the skull bones of the reindeer, and on genetic diversity detected by RAPD markers in three Inner Mongolia cashmere goat breeds. Volume 23, in 2002, included the effect of an active enzyme in chloroplasts under water stress on apple tree leaves and the design and parameter study of a plastic-film mulch dibbler and fertiliser ejector, an implement for the region's dry farming.

The record continues in the same pattern. Volume 25, in 2004, carried studies on the biological properties of lactic acid bacteria from milk and milk products in the Mu Us desert, on the seeding character of seven shrubs introduced from America, and on frequency conversion for alternating-current motor drives; volume 26, in 2005, carried a study of air-power noise and its control in automobile engines, from the university's mechanical and electrical engineering college. As late as volume 34, issue 4, AGRIS records an article on the effect of an electric field on the ultraweak photon emission of wheat seed, at pages 101 to 103, still under ISSN 1009-3575. Taken together these records demonstrate continuity over more than a decade, a consistent subject profile, and a journal that publishes laboratory science, field ecology and agricultural engineering side by side.

Grassland, livestock and desertification research

Three themes deserve separate emphasis because they are the university's declared characteristics and the journal's most distinctive contribution. The first is grassland animal husbandry: the breeding, feeding, health and genetics of the sheep, cattle and goats, including the region's famous cashmere goats, on which the pastoral economy rests. The second is grassland ecology itself, the survey, dynamics and stability of the steppe ecosystem, its degradation under grazing pressure and its restoration. The third is desertification control, the science of the sand industries named in the university's own account of its graduates' employment: selecting and establishing drought shrubs, stabilising sandy land and defending northern China ecologically, the theme of the journal's 2001 article on an ecological line of defence for the north.

These themes connect the journal to questions far larger than one university. Grassland degradation, pastoral livelihoods and desertification in Inner Mongolia are matters of national environmental policy in China and of international dryland science, and a Chinese-language journal that has published on them from Hohhot for decades is a primary source for anyone tracing how that science developed inside the region itself, rather than as reported from outside it.

Language, indexing and bibliographic presence

The journal publishes in Chinese, with summaries in Chinese and English recorded for its indexed articles, and its bibliographic life is documented in FAO AGRIS, where its records were provided by the Institute of Agricultural Information of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. AGRIS is the international information system for agricultural science coordinated by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, and inclusion there has a practical consequence: a herdsman-economics or steppe-ecology paper published in Hohhot becomes retrievable, by subject, in the same search system that indexes agricultural literature from every other country. The records preserve volume, issue, pagination, language and subject descriptors, which is why the journal's contents can still be audited, article by article, for volumes published in the early 2000s.

No stronger indexing claim is made here than the evidence supports. The verified international presence of this edition is its AGRIS record and its stable ISSN identity, 1009-3575, held consistently across the volumes indexed from 2001 to 2013 and beyond. For a Chinese-language university natural-science edition, that combination, a fixed international identifier plus systematic indexing by the national agricultural information institute into a United Nations system, is the normal and sufficient channel of international visibility.

Readership and role

The journal's readership is, in the first instance, the research community of its own fields inside China: university scientists, institute researchers and graduate students in agronomy, animal science, veterinary medicine, forestry, grassland science and ecology, together with the extension and production specialists in the autonomous region's agriculture, animal husbandry, forestry, water, grass, milk and sand sectors whom the university explicitly serves. For those readers the edition performs the classic function of a university journal: it provides a peer-reviewed, promptly accessible outlet for the sponsor's own research programmes while also carrying work from other institutions on the same northern dryland subjects.

Assessed as a whole, the Journal of Inner Mongolia Agricultural University (Natural Science Edition) is best understood as the printed record of a distinctive scientific institution: the first undergraduate school of its region, founded for livestock and veterinary work in 1952, joined with the first forestry college of China's minority areas in 1999, and centred ever since on the grassland world of Inner Mongolia. Its pages, as the indexed record shows, move from cashmere goat genetics to reindeer anatomy, from steppe conservation to mulch-sowing machinery, without ever leaving that world. That fidelity to place, backed by ISSN 1009-3575 and an international AGRIS record, is the journal's identity and its continuing value.