About Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University

Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University

Overview and identity

Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University is the comprehensive agricultural journal of Nanjing Agricultural University in Nanjing, Jiangsu, China. It is identified by ISSN 1000-2030, published quarterly by the Editorial Department of Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University, and classified in international indexing under agricultural and biological sciences, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, and environmental science. Scopus-derived services record its coverage history in recent years as continuous from 2019 into the mid-2020s, with a CiteScore of 0.5 and an SJR in the fourth quartile of its categories — modest international metrics for a Chinese-language university journal whose real standing is domestic.

Nanjing Agricultural University is one of China's oldest and strongest agricultural institutions, founded in 1902 and celebrating its 120th anniversary in 2022. Its journal is the comprehensive Chinese-language record of a research system that also produces internationally prominent English-language titles, and the contrast between the two layers of that portfolio is essential to understanding this journal's role.

The host university: founded 1902

Nanjing Agricultural University was founded in 1902 under the Ministry of Education and is a leading institution in agriculture-related disciplines in China and internationally. By its 120th anniversary the university hosted 66 provincial-, ministerial- and national-level research platforms, including the National Engineering and Technology Center for IT-based Agriculture, and its researchers were prominent enough in fields such as smart agriculture for international journals to mark the anniversary with dedicated special issues showcasing its work on sensor-based agriculture.

A university of this age and weight generates research across the full agricultural spectrum — crop science, animal science, veterinary medicine, plant protection, horticulture, food science, agricultural engineering, resources and environment — and its comprehensive journal exists to publish that breadth in Chinese. The journal's classification across agricultural and biological sciences, biochemistry and genetics, and environmental science in Scopus mirrors the university's own disciplinary map, in which molecular and environmental work has grown around a classical agricultural core.

Sponsorship, publisher and editorial home

The journal's publisher of record is the Editorial Department of Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University — in the Chinese system, the university's own journal editorial office in Nanjing. Sponsorship and publishing are thus united in the host institution: the university founds the title, houses its editors, supervises its direction and issues it under its own name. Readers can trace responsibility for any article from its authors through the Nanjing editorial office to the university itself.

This is the standard structure for a Chinese university journal, and it has a practical consequence for quality control: the editorial office sits inside the research community it serves, drawing referees from the university's colleges and from the national agricultural research system, and its reputation rises and falls with the university's own. Nanjing Agricultural University's standing — a Double First-Class university with agricultural characteristics — is therefore directly relevant context for the journal's domestic authority.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal covers agricultural and biological sciences in the broad sense recorded by its candidate description and confirmed by its Scopus subject classification: agricultural and biological sciences, biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, and environmental science. In practice, a quarterly comprehensive journal of an agricultural university publishes original research across crop production and breeding, soil and plant nutrition, plant protection, animal production and veterinary topics, horticulture, food and agricultural product science, and the resource and environmental dimensions of farming.

The quarterly rhythm shapes the scope in one important way. With four issues a year — and recent bibliometric listings recording well over a hundred documents annually — each issue is substantial, and the journal can sustain breadth without the pressure of a monthly schedule. Reviews and research reports from across the university's colleges appear side by side, making a single issue a cross-section of the institution's current science.

Publication pattern and metrics

The journal is published quarterly with ISSN 1000-2030 recorded as both its print and electronic identifier in international journal directories. Journal-ranking services that draw on Scopus data record its recent trajectory in detail: coverage from 2019 onward in their windows, a CiteScore of 0.5, an SNIP of 0.21, and placement in the fourth quartile (Q4) of the environmental science and agricultural categories, with one service computing growth in its two-year impact measure from 0.285 to 0.760 between 2020 and 2025.

These figures require honest framing. They describe how a Chinese-language comprehensive university journal performs inside an English-dominated international citation system, where language alone suppresses citation counts; they do not describe the journal's standing at home, where its role is defined by the Chinese core-journal and citation-database ecosystem. This profile records the international metrics because they are verifiable, and records equally clearly that they are not the measure by which the journal's domestic community judges it.

Indexing and discovery

Internationally, the journal is visible through Scopus-derived services — SCImago, Researcher.Life, Resurchify and similar directories all carry records under ISSN 1000-2030, naming the Editorial Department of Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University or Nanjing Agricultural University as publisher and China as the country of publication. That visibility means the journal's articles, though published in Chinese, are counted and surfaced in the global bibliometric infrastructure.

Domestically, the journal belongs to the standard discovery environment of Chinese agricultural scholarship: university library collections, the national journal platforms, and agricultural indexing through systems such as AGRIS, which carries records for the journal family's output. For a directory user, the practical discovery route is the ISSN: searching 1000-2030 retrieves this journal and only this journal, separating it from the university's English-language titles and from similarly named journals of other Nanjing universities.

The wider Nanjing portfolio: a necessary contrast

Nanjing Agricultural University hosts or sponsors several internationally visible English-language journals launched under China's journal Excellence Plan, including Horticulture Research, Plant Phenomics and BioDesign Research. National analyses of excellent agricultural journals single out Horticulture Research, hosted by Nanjing Agricultural University, alongside Information Processing in Agriculture and the Journal of Forestry Research, as examples of Double First-Class university journals that achieved international standing quickly.

None of those titles is this journal. The Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University is the older, comprehensive, Chinese-language foundation title of the same institution. The distinction matters for citation and for collection-building alike: the English specialist journals publish relatively small numbers of articles for global audiences, while the comprehensive journal publishes the broad domestic record. A complete account of the university's publishing must hold both layers at once, and this profile concerns the foundation layer.

History and development

The journal's history runs with the university's: an institution founded in 1902, reorganised through the twentieth century's successive restructurings of Chinese agricultural education, and emerging as a modern research university whose publishing expanded with it. The journal's continuous presence in contemporary indexing — with Scopus-window coverage recorded from 2019 through the mid-2020s and document counts above 140 in a recent year — documents a title in active, stable publication rather than a legacy archive.

Two developments frame its recent history. First, the molecular turn: the journal's classification under biochemistry, genetics and molecular biology, alongside classical agricultural categories, records how completely molecular methods have been absorbed into the agricultural sciences its pages carry. Second, the portfolio turn: the university's launch of English specialist journals since 2019 has repositioned the comprehensive journal as the domestic base of a two-tier system, a role it shares with the comprehensive journals of China Agricultural University and Huazhong Agricultural University.

Readership and use

The journal's core readership is China's agricultural research community: university and academy scientists, postgraduate students, and the professional readership of Jiangsu's economically significant agricultural and food industries. Nanjing's position — a provincial capital dense with universities and Chinese Academy of Sciences institutes — gives the journal a large local scholarly audience as well as a national one.

For international users, the journal is most useful as evidence and as a discovery layer: its English-language bibliographic presentation and Scopus presence make its contents findable, and its articles document Chinese agricultural research programmes — breeding, soil, plant protection, smart agriculture — that are otherwise reported mainly in the university's English titles at a later, more selective stage. Cited by its exact title and ISSN 1000-2030, it is an unambiguous source.

Continuing role

Nanjing Agricultural University's stated goal of building a world-class university with agricultural characteristics depends on both halves of its publishing system: the internationally competitive English journals that carry its name abroad, and the comprehensive Chinese journal that records its full research life at home. The Journal of Nanjing Agricultural University — quarterly, Nanjing-based, published by the university's editorial department under ISSN 1000-2030 — continues to perform the second of those functions, as it has through the university's development from its 1902 foundation to its 120th anniversary and beyond.