About Journal of Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Journal of Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Overview and identity

The Journal of Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine is the academic journal of Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, China. Its Chinese title is 南京中医药大学学报 (Nanjing Zhongyiyao Daxue Xuebao). It was founded in 1959, as the journal of Nanjing College of Traditional Chinese Medicine, and it carries the ISSN 1672-0482. It is published by the university and covers research on the basic theory of traditional Chinese medicine (TCM), Chinese materia medica, acupuncture and clinical medicine. Since 1999 it has had a companion publication, the journal's social science edition, which covers the humanities and social-scientific study of Chinese medicine under the same university imprint.

Of the university journals in this field, the Nanjing title is among the oldest. A founding in 1959 places its first issues in the same decade as the creation of China's first TCM colleges themselves, and its run therefore covers, from inside one institution, the whole modern history of academic Chinese medicine: the codification of its textbooks and terminology, the building of its research methods, and its progressive engagement with laboratory science and evidence-based clinical study. For a directory, the essential identifiers are the Nanjing imprint, the university publisher, the founding year 1959 and the ISSN 1672-0482.

The university: one of China's earliest TCM institutions

Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, established in 1954, is described by Wikipedia as one of the earliest established universities of traditional Chinese Medicine in China, and is a provincial public university affiliated with Jiangsu Province and part of the national Double First-Class construction. Its institutional ancestry runs through the Jiangsu Traditional Training School and the Jiangsu Provincial School of Traditional Chinese Medicine, through a period as part of Jiangsu New Medical College, and then as Nanjing Traditional Chinese Medicine College — the name under which the journal began — before the institution took its present university name in 1995. The university has three campuses, at Xianlin, Hanzhongmen and Taizhou, and had nearly 20,000 enrolled students as of 2018.

The university also has a notable international history that bears on its journal's character. It received its first intake of international students of TCM in 1957, among the first Chinese institutions to teach Chinese medicine to foreign students, and in 1993 it began a joint bachelor's programme with the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia — the first cooperation between a Chinese TCM university and a nationally accredited Western university in TCM higher education. An institution that has taught Chinese medicine to the world for nearly seventy years edits its journal with an awareness of that wider audience, even though the journal itself is published in Chinese for the domestic research community.

Founding in 1959 as the college journal

The journal was founded in 1959 as the journal of Nanjing College of Traditional Chinese Medicine. Its birth belongs to the founding moment of modern TCM academia. In the 1950s the new colleges of Chinese medicine were simultaneously creating curricula, compiling the first standardised textbooks and defining a research literature for a medicine that had previously been transmitted largely through apprenticeship and private practice. A college journal founded in 1959 was part of the machinery of that transformation: a place where the college's teachers could publish scholarship, exchange clinical experience and begin to build the cumulative, citable literature that academic status requires.

The journal's longevity is its own evidence. A title that begins in 1959 and continues under its university's name today has survived the renaming of its institution (from college to university in 1995), the successive reforms of Chinese higher education and publishing, and the digitisation of the Chinese journal literature. Its current ISSN, 1672-0482, belongs to the modern form of the title; bibliographers tracing its contents across the full run should expect the earlier decades to be catalogued under the college-era name, as is standard for Chinese university journals of this age.

Scope: basic theory of traditional Chinese medicine

The first named area of the journal's scope is TCM basic theory: the doctrines and classical literature that constitute the theoretical system of Chinese medicine, including the study of the medical classics, the theory of pattern differentiation, and the conceptual foundations on which clinical practice rests. Nanjing has particular historical standing in this area. The Jiangsu institutions from which the university descends were central to the standardisation of acupuncture and TCM teaching in the 1950s — the Jiangsu Provincial Chinese Medicine School produced an influential acupuncture textbook in 1957 as part of the movement toward nationally unified TCM textbooks — and scholarship on theory and classics remains a natural strength of a journal edited in that tradition.

Basic-theory publication in a modern university journal is not antiquarian. It includes textual and historical scholarship on the classics, theoretical analysis intended to guide clinical reasoning, and work connecting classical doctrine to contemporary research questions. Printed alongside laboratory and clinical papers, it keeps the discipline's foundational debates — how a classical concept should be interpreted, how theory should be taught, how traditional categories relate to modern findings — inside the same covers as the empirical literature they inform.

Scope: Chinese materia medica and acupuncture

Chinese materia medica is the second named strand: the study of medicinal substances, from their identification, cultivation and processing to their chemistry, pharmacology and clinical application. Jiangsu and the lower Yangtze region have a long association with the trade and study of Chinese drugs, and materia medica research gives the journal a laboratory-facing profile — natural-products chemistry, quality standards and pharmacological experiment — alongside its theoretical and clinical content. Work of this kind is also where TCM research most directly meets international science, since the chemical and pharmacological characterisation of a medicinal substance can be read and tested by researchers with no knowledge of Chinese.

Acupuncture, the third strand, covers clinical and experimental studies of acupuncture and moxibustion. The Nanjing connection here is again historical: acupuncture was one of the first TCM subjects to receive a standardised national textbook treatment, with Nanjing's predecessor school playing a documented part in that process in the 1950s, and the journal continues to publish acupuncture research — clinical evaluations, mechanism studies and scholarship on acupuncture teaching and standards — as one of its standing areas.

Scope: clinical medicine

Clinical medicine completes the journal's remit: research from the wards and clinics, reporting the diagnosis and treatment of disease with Chinese medicine and with integrative Chinese–Western approaches. The university's affiliated hospitals supply much of this material, as they do for every TCM university journal, and the clinical literature of the journal spans the departments of a Chinese medicine hospital — internal medicine prominent among them — in the form of controlled studies, case series, experience summaries and reviews.

The combination of the four strands is the point. A single journal carrying basic theory, materia medica, acupuncture and clinical medicine reproduces, in periodical form, the structure of the university itself, whose degree programmes span exactly those fields — the university offers undergraduate, master's and doctoral programmes across Chinese medicine, materia medica and integrative medicine. Students and staff of the institution can find the whole of their discipline in its journal, and outside readers get a representative sample of what a major TCM university researches.

The social science edition, founded 1999

In 1999 the journal gained a companion: the Journal of Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine (Social Science Edition), 南京中医药大学学报(社会科学版). The social science edition applies the humanities and social sciences to Chinese medicine — its history, literature, philosophy, education, law, management and place in society — rather than to its laboratory and clinical content. Its own ISSN is 1009-3222, visible in the article numbering of its published papers, and its run has continued in parallel with the parent journal, reaching volume 27 in 2026; its articles address such subjects as the legal definition and regulation of TCM practices, TCM education policy and the international development of Chinese medicine.

The creation of a social science edition in 1999 reflects a real expansion of the field's self-understanding at the end of the twentieth century: as Chinese medicine became a regulated profession, an export and an object of cultural as well as medical interest, the questions asked about it were no longer only clinical and pharmacological. A university with Nanjing's strength in medical history and literature — fields in which the social science edition regularly publishes — needed a venue for that scholarship that would not displace the natural-science content of the original journal. Directory users should note that the two editions are separate serials with separate ISSNs sharing a title stem: citations to the social science edition, ISSN 1009-3222, should not be merged with the parent journal, ISSN 1672-0482.

Place among the TCM university journals

China's major TCM universities each publish a xuebao, and the Nanjing journal belongs to the senior group of those titles by virtue of its 1959 founding — older than the Guangzhou university journal (1984) and contemporary with the first generation of the colleges themselves. In the ecology of Chinese TCM publishing, these university journals, together with the national society and academy journals, form the discipline's core literature: peer-reviewed, Chinese-language, indexed in the national databases through which Chinese scholarship is disseminated, and fed by the research of the institutions that train the profession. The Nanjing journal's contribution to that literature is distinguished by its age, by its university's standing as one of the earliest TCM institutions and a Double First-Class university, and by the breadth — theory, drugs, acupuncture, clinic, and, in its companion edition, society and history — that its combined titles cover.

Readership and continuing role

Readers of the journal are the Chinese TCM academic community: the university's own staff and postgraduate students, researchers and clinicians at other TCM universities and hospitals, and specialists following its theory, materia medica and acupuncture content. Its authors come from the same community, with the host university's colleges, institutes and affiliated hospitals as the core contributor base. For international users, the journal is identified by its English title, its Nanjing, Jiangsu imprint, its publisher Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, its 1959 founding and its ISSN 1672-0482.

Sixty-seven years after its founding as a college journal in 1959, the Journal of Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine continues to publish the research of one of China's founding institutions of academic Chinese medicine. Its long run is itself a historical source for the discipline, and its present issues — theory, materia medica, acupuncture and clinical research from a university that has taught Chinese medicine at home and abroad since the 1950s — keep it a standard title in the field's periodical literature.