About Journal of Materials Engineering

Journal of Materials Engineering

The Journal of Materials Engineering, known in Chinese as Cailiao Gongcheng (材料工程), is a Chinese-language journal of materials science and engineering published in Beijing by the AECC Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials. It was founded in 1956, which makes it one of the oldest continuously published materials journals in China, and it carries the International Standard Serial Number ISSN 1001-4381. The journal covers metallic, composite, polymer and functional materials, surface engineering and materials testing, with a long-standing focus on aviation materials inherited from its founding institute. It appears monthly — twelve issues a year — and is indexed internationally in Scopus, whose coverage records for the title run from 1993 to the present, with a recent Scopus CiteScore recorded at 1.7. For readers of this directory, the essential identification is precise: this is the Beijing aeronautical-materials journal Cailiao Gongcheng, ISSN 1001-4381, not the American Journal of Materials Engineering and Performance, a different title with which it is sometimes confused in databases. The verified record of its founding, publisher, scope and indexing is set out below.

Founding in 1956 and the aviation materials mission

The journal was founded in 1956, the year its publishing institute was established in Beijing to serve China's young aviation industry. In the 1950s, building aircraft in China required a domestic science of the metals, alloys and other materials from which airframes and engines are made, together with the testing methods to certify them. A journal founded alongside the institute gave that work a permanent printed record: research on aircraft materials, their processing and their behaviour in service could be published, circulated among the factories and design institutes that needed it, and preserved. The journal has kept that orientation through seven decades of change. Its sponsoring record states its coverage as metallic, composite, polymer and functional materials, surface engineering and materials testing, with a long focus on aviation materials — a scope that maps directly onto the departments of an aeronautical materials institute. The date matters for the journal's standing: founded in 1956, it predates most of China's materials journals, and its archive reaches back to the first generation of Chinese aviation materials research.

The AECC Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials

The publisher of the journal is the Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials, today styled the AECC Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials, reflecting its place within the Aero Engine Corporation of China (AECC). International journal databases record the publisher in the abbreviated form Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials (BIAM), with the journal's address in Beijing — PO Box 81, Beijing 100095 in serials records. The institute is one of the principal materials research establishments of China's aviation sector: it appears, for example, among the contributing organisations to China's national review of aeronautical fatigue and structural integrity research presented to the International Committee on Aeronautical Fatigue, alongside aircraft design institutes, manufacturers and universities. Its researchers publish on the advanced structural materials of aerospace — high-performance polymer materials and their composites, high-temperature and special metal structural materials, lightweight high-strength metals and their composites, and advanced structural ceramics and their composites, in the summary given by the institute's own specialists — because aerospace equipment depends on materials that are at once light, strong, heat-resistant and reliable. The Journal of Materials Engineering is the institute's journal: the venue in which that materials programme, and the work of the wider Chinese materials community, is reported in Chinese.

Scope: metals, composites, polymers and functional materials

The journal's scope, as recorded by its sponsors and summarised by international databases, spans the main families of engineering materials and the methods used to study them. Metallic materials include the alloys of aviation — aluminium, titanium, magnesium and high-temperature alloys — their composition, processing, microstructure and properties. Composite materials cover fibre-reinforced and other composite systems, metal-matrix and polymer-matrix, whose design and manufacture are a continuing theme of aeronautical research. Polymer materials appear both as structural materials and as matrices, coatings and functional components. Functional materials are those designed for a specific property or job — electronic, optical, thermal or mechanical functions — including materials for energy and sensing applications. Around these material families the journal publishes work on the processes that make materials usable: new processing techniques, computational simulation of materials and processes, and characterisation — the measurement of microstructure and properties by modern analytical methods. Journal-metric summaries describe the same territory in their own words: studies on new materials, processing techniques, computational simulation and material characterisation, alongside reviews and research letters. Surface engineering and materials testing, named in the journal's own description, complete the scope: coatings and surface treatments that protect materials in service, and the test methods by which performance and failure are established.

Surface engineering, testing and the practice of materials work

Two parts of the journal's scope deserve emphasis because they distinguish an engineering journal from a purely scientific one. Surface engineering concerns what happens at the boundary of a material: coatings that resist heat, wear and corrosion, surface treatments that extend fatigue life, and films that give a component a function its bulk material lacks. International classifications of the journal reflect this, listing it not only under metals and alloys and polymers and plastics but also under surfaces, coatings and films. Materials testing concerns proof: the mechanical tests, non-destructive evaluations and failure analyses that decide whether a material may fly. In aviation, where a failed component can cost an aircraft, that testing culture is not an accessory to research but its point. A journal published by an aeronautical materials institute naturally gives both subjects house room, and its pages serve engineers in design institutes and factories as directly as they serve laboratory scientists. Reviews and research letters, noted in database descriptions of the journal, add the survey and rapid-report functions that practising engineers use to keep current.

Publication pattern: a monthly journal with a long archive

Serials records describe the Journal of Materials Engineering as a monthly, with a frequency of twelve issues per year. A monthly cadence sustained over a run founded in 1956 produces a very large archive: thousands of issues' worth of Chinese materials research, from the alloy studies of the 1950s to present-day work on composites, additive processes and simulation. International indexing records begin later than the founding — Scopus coverage is recorded from 1993 — which is normal for Chinese-language journals, whose international database coverage typically starts decades after their domestic publication begins; the gap is a fact about indexing history, not about the journal's existence. The journal's bibliographic identity is consistent across sources: Chinese title Cailiao Gongcheng, English title Journal of Materials Engineering, ISSN 1001-4381, publisher the Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials, country China, subject areas engineering and materials science. Authors citing the journal use the abbreviation Cailiao Gongcheng. Its postal identity in international records — Beijing 100095 — matches its publisher's location in the Chinese capital.

Indexing and metrics

The journal is indexed in Scopus. Journal-metric services drawing on Scopus data record coverage from 1993 to 2025, a CiteScore of 1.7, and a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.216, with the title's best quartile recorded as Q3: it appears in the third quartile for metals and alloys and for polymers and plastics, and in the fourth quartile for aerospace engineering, for materials science (miscellaneous) and for surfaces, coatings and films. SCImago's own historical tables show the journal publishing at a substantial, steady rate — one ranking table recorded 234 documents in a single year and 790 documents across a three-year period — figures consistent with a monthly journal carrying a full research programme. Metric services also note its listing in the UGC CARE journal list, an Indian university-grants reference list that records internationally indexed titles. Domestically, the journal belongs to the established stratum of Chinese materials periodicals distributed through the national academic journal system. The balanced conclusion from these records is that the Journal of Materials Engineering is a mid-ranked but long-established, internationally visible national journal: not one of China's English-language flagships, but a durable monthly whose contents are tracked by the world's main citation database.

Readership and authors

The journal's authors are materials scientists and engineers in Chinese research institutes, universities and industry, with a natural centre of gravity in the aviation materials community around its publishing institute. Its readers are the same constituency: researchers developing alloys, composites and functional materials; engineers responsible for selecting, processing and certifying materials for aircraft and other demanding equipment; specialists in surface engineering and testing; and graduate students entering the field. The subjects that dominate its scope — advanced structural materials for aerospace, lightweight high-strength metals, high-temperature materials, polymer composites, structural ceramics — correspond to the material systems on which modern aircraft, aero-engines and other high-end equipment depend, a dependence the institute's own reviews describe as pivotal for national defence and major engineering projects. A monthly Chinese-language journal serves this community in its working language, with full experimental and procedural detail, while its Scopus indexing makes the same work discoverable, at title and abstract level, to materials researchers worldwide. That combination — domestic depth, international visibility — has defined the journal's usefulness since long before indexing began.

A note on names: not to be confused

Materials engineering supports several similarly named journals, and directory accuracy requires the distinctions to be stated. The Journal of Materials Engineering profiled here is Cailiao Gongcheng, founded in 1956 in Beijing, ISSN 1001-4381, published by the Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials and written in Chinese. It is not the Journal of Materials Engineering and Performance, an English-language journal published by Springer in partnership with ASM International and founded in 1992 through the merger of earlier American publications; that journal's own history includes an earlier American title called Journal of Materials Engineering, which adds to the potential confusion but is a separate lineage. Nor is this journal the Journal of Aeronautical Materials (Hangkong Cailiao Xuebao), a neighbouring Beijing title from the same aviation materials field, published by Science Press under ISSN 1005-5053. Each of these journals is identified uniquely by its ISSN and publisher; where names collide, those identifiers — 1001-4381 and the Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials — are the safe guide, and they are the identifiers this profile records.

The journal's place in Chinese materials publishing

China's materials literature is large, and its senior titles divide by sponsor and speciality: society journals, university journals and institute journals. The Journal of Materials Engineering is the institute-journal archetype — founded with its institute in 1956, published from Beijing, and shaped for seventy years by the needs of aviation materials research while broadening to serve materials engineering as a whole. Its longevity is itself evidence: a journal survives from 1956 to the present only if successive generations of authors and readers find it worth sustaining, through the planned-economy decades, the reform era and the present period of rapid aerospace development. The institute behind it today sits within AECC, the state aero-engine corporation, and contributes to national reviews of aeronautical structural integrity; the journal remains that institute's public record. For WorldNM, the title earns its profile as one of the foundational periodicals of Chinese engineering: a monthly, Scopus-indexed journal whose archive embodies the development of materials science in China from the first jet-age alloys to today's composites and functional materials.

Summary

In summary: the Journal of Materials Engineering (Cailiao Gongcheng) is a Chinese-language monthly journal founded in 1956 and published in Beijing by the AECC Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Materials under ISSN 1001-4381. Its scope covers metallic, composite, polymer and functional materials, surface engineering and materials testing, with a long focus on aviation materials. It publishes research articles, reviews and research letters on new materials, processing techniques, computational simulation and characterisation. It is indexed in Scopus, with recorded coverage from 1993 to the present, a CiteScore recorded at 1.7 and a best SCImago quartile of Q3. Founded in the same era as China's aviation materials establishment and still publishing twelve issues a year, it stands as one of the oldest and most durable materials journals in China.