About Journal of Ludong University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition)

Journal of Ludong University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition)

The Journal of Ludong University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition) is the humanities and social-sciences edition of the academic journal of Ludong University in Yantai, Shandong Province. It carries ISSN 1673-8039, attested in the digital object identifiers of its articles, for example DOI 10.3969/j.issn.1673-8039.2020.06.005, and the Chinese domestic publication number CN 37-1452/C, attested in the DOI pattern 10.20063/j.cnki.CN37-1452/C.2024.01.009 of a 2024 article. It is the humanities counterpart of the university's Natural Science Edition, ISSN 1673-8020, and together the two editions constitute the journal system of Ludong University.

Identity and identifiers

Few Chinese university journals are documented by two independent identifier trails, but this edition is. Its ISSN appears inside DOIs of the 10.3969 series, while its CN number — the domestic unified publication number assigned to Chinese periodicals, here 37-1452/C, in which 37 denotes Shandong and the /C class denotes its social-science category — appears inside DOIs of the 10.20063 series. Either string identifies the Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition uniquely. A 2024 DOI in the CN series also demonstrates that the edition was registering new articles in 2024, under its current university name and from its current city.

The sponsoring university and its history

Ludong University was founded in 1930 in Laiyang as the Second Rural Normal School of Shandong Province, created in a provincial programme to spread rural normal education. Its subsequent stages include Jiaodong College, Laiyang Normal School, Laiyang Teachers College, Yantai Teachers College and Yantai Normal School, a lineage that follows the fortunes of teacher education in eastern Shandong through the twentieth century. In January 1984 Yantai Teachers College was upgraded to Yantai Normal University and began recruiting undergraduates. In 2001 the Shandong Communications School at Yantai, founded in 1978, was incorporated. In 2006 the Ministry of Education and the Shandong Provincial People's Government approved the change of name to Ludong University — the university of Ludong, eastern Shandong.

Yantai and the university today

The university is a provincial comprehensive university under the Shandong Provincial Government, located in Zhifu District of Yantai, a coastal city on the Shandong Peninsula between the Bohai Sea and the Yellow Sea and one of the first fourteen coastal cities opened to the world. It describes its structure as liberal arts and sciences as the main body with coordinated multidisciplinary development, and it holds a place among the first 200 Chinese universities authorised to enrol international students, with cooperative ties to more than fifty institutions in over twenty countries. A humanities journal published from this campus addresses a readership formed by a port city's outward-looking history as much as by the inland normal-school tradition from which the university descends.

The humanities at Ludong

The writer and former Minister of Culture Wang Meng praised the university in terms quoted on its own introduction pages, and the institution's public identity leans heavily on cultural inheritance: it presents its ninety-year history as bound up with the progressive cause of the Chinese nation. The humanities disciplines — Chinese language and literature, history, philosophy, education, law, economics and the foreign languages — are the historic core of a normal university, and the Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition is their journal. It is where the university's literary scholars, historians, education researchers and social scientists publish for the Chinese-language scholarly community.

Scope

The edition's remit is philosophy and the social sciences as taught and researched at Ludong University: philosophy, economics, law, political science, sociology, education, history, and language and literature. Regional colouring comes from its setting. Yantai and the Jiaodong peninsula have their own history — as treaty-port and coastal-defence country, as a heartland of Shandong folk culture, and as the homeland from which generations of Shandong people emigrated — and a humanities journal edited on the peninsula is a natural venue for scholarship on eastern Shandong's history, literature and society alongside general disciplinary research. The edition publishes in Chinese, and its articles are identified by the ISSN- and CN-bearing DOIs described above.

The two-edition system

This edition and the Natural Science Edition (ISSN 1673-8020) divide Ludong University's scholarship between them along the standard Chinese line between the sciences and the humanities. They are separate serials with separate ISSNs and separate readerships, and they must be cited separately. The social sciences edition's additional CN number, 37-1452/C, is specific to it and does not attach to the science edition. Together the pair performs the classic function of the Chinese university journal: to give every faculty of the university a peer-reviewed, permanently citable, Chinese-language outlet under the university's own name.

Regional role

For more than ninety years the institution that became Ludong University trained the schoolteachers of eastern Shandong. Its humanities journal extends that educational mission into scholarship: research on literature, history and education produced on the peninsula is published where the region's teachers, librarians and scholars can read and cite it. In a province with an exceptionally deep educational tradition — Shandong is the home province of Confucius and Mencius — a normal university's social-science journal also carries the cultural weight of its region, and Ludong's edition has carried it under three successive institutional names since the university's journal publishing began.

Publication continuity

DOIs attested for the edition span at least 2020 to 2024, in two registration series, showing continuous editorial operation across the present decade and a migration or duplication of DOI registration practice that itself testifies to an actively managed journal office. A title that registers a 2024 article under both its ISSN identity and its CN identity is a working serial, and the Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition is documented as such.

Readership

The edition's readers are humanities and social-science scholars, education researchers, schoolteachers and postgraduate students in Shandong and across China, together with libraries and databases that track Chinese academic serials by ISSN and CN number. For its sponsor, the journal is the humanities record of Ludong University, complementing the natural science edition's record of its laboratories.

The university's standing in teacher education frames the edition's importance. In 2014 Ludong University was approved as a postdoctoral research station in pedagogy and became one of only two universities in Shandong with a complete bachelor's, master's, doctoral and postdoctoral teacher-education system; a College of Teacher Education was established the same year on its Penglai campus. Humanities and social-science research in such an institution is never purely academic: it feeds directly into the training of the region's teachers, and the Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition is the channel through which that research is published, read by the teacher-educators who will carry it into Shandong's classrooms.

For librarians, the practical consequence of the two identifier trails is redundancy: if an ISSN-based search fails because of a transcription error, the CN-based DOI still resolves the article to this edition, and vice versa, which makes the edition's record unusually robust.

How to identify the journal

Cite the journal as Journal of Ludong University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), ISSN 1673-8039, CN 37-1452/C, published by Ludong University, Yantai, Shandong, China. Article DOIs appear in the 10.3969/j.issn.1673-8039 series and in the 10.20063/j.cnki.CN37-1452/C series. The Natural Science Edition, ISSN 1673-8020, is a different journal of the same university and must not be conflated with this one. Its sponsor's name, Ludong, literally denotes eastern Shandong, so the journal's title ties its humanities scholarship explicitly to the peninsula region that the university was renamed in 2006 to serve.