About Journal of Northeastern University (Natural Science)

Journal of Northeastern University (Natural Science)

Overview and identity

Journal of Northeastern University (Natural Science) is a comprehensive academic journal of science and technology based in Shenyang, Liaoning, China. It is directed by Northeastern University and is under the charge of the Ministry of Education of China. It started publication in 1955 and is now a monthly journal, openly issued both at home and abroad, identified by ISSN 1005-3026 and domestic number CN 21-1344/T. Its official site is the university's journal portal at xuebao.neu.edu.cn, within which the Natural Science edition is the English-presented title Journal of Northeastern University (Natural Science). This profile records the verified facts of its identity, scope, indexing and honours, and explains its role as the flagship science and technology journal of its university.

Northeastern University maintains more than one journal, and the Natural Science title should be cited by its full name and ISSN. It is the university's comprehensive outlet for science, engineering and related fields; articles it carries reflect, in the journal's own statement of purpose, the latest achievements of Northeastern University in science, engineering, management and other fields.

History and development

The journal started publication in 1955, which makes it one of the long-running university journals of northeastern China, founded when Shenyang's heavy-industrial and metallurgical research base was being built up and when a university journal was a principal channel through which engineering research reached practitioners. It is now published monthly, with 152 pages in each issue, a substantial monthly volume that reflects the breadth of the university whose work it carries. Open issuance at home and abroad, with domestic postal distribution code 8-120 and international postal distribution code M 528 recorded in its journal information, marks its standing as a formally distributed national periodical rather than an internal bulletin.

Its stated guiding principles are to play to the advantages of Northeastern University, reflect the level of Northeastern University, show the characteristics of Northeastern University and expand the impact of Northeastern University. Its task is to reflect the university's latest achievements in science, engineering, management and other fields in order to promote academic exchange and cultivate scientific and technological talents, contributing to the university's endeavour of building a domestic first-class, internationally renowned high-level university. Those formulations, published by the journal itself, define it as both a research outlet and an instrument of its university's academic development.

Sponsorship, publisher and editorial home

The journal is directed by Northeastern University and is under the charge of the Ministry of Education, the standard Chinese arrangement under which the university sponsors and supervises the title while national education authorities oversee university publishing. Its editorial office is at the university in Shenyang: the journal's published postal address is No. 3-11 Wenhua Road, Heping District, Shenyang, postcode 110819, with the editorial office reachable through the university's journal site. The journal names its leadership in its public information, listing its chief editor and the director of its editorial board, so that responsibility for the title is traceable in the usual Chinese journal manner.

Shenyang and Liaoning give the journal a distinct industrial-research setting. Northeastern University is historically rooted in metallurgy, mining, machinery and automation for China's northeast industrial base, and the journal's field list — metallurgy and materials prominent within it — reflects that inheritance, while its information science, management science and basic science coverage reflects the university's later broadening. Submissions and readership are national, as with any Chinese core journal, but the editorial centre of gravity remains the university and its region.

Scope: information, metallurgy, materials and mechanical engineering

The journal mainly carries articles in information science and engineering, metallurgy and material science, and mechanical engineering, among its leading fields. These are the disciplines in which Northeastern University's research schools are most visible, and the journal's archive shows the characteristic subjects: control theory and fuzzy systems, wireless sensor networks and rolling-process simulation and cooling control for steel plate on the information and metallurgy side; elastomer synthesis, bonded magnets and rare-earth permanent magnet powders on the materials side. Such papers are typically compact research articles reporting a defined method, model or experiment, the standard form of the Chinese university engineering journal.

For readers, this strand of the journal functions as a window on the university's engineering research as it is done, including work supported by the steel and equipment industries of the northeast, and as a citable record against which later developments in Chinese metallurgy, materials and automation can be traced.

Scope: resources, civil engineering and management science

A further group of fields in the journal's stated coverage is resources and civil engineering and management science. Resources engineering connects the journal to the mining and mineral-processing research of its region, while civil engineering covers the structural, geotechnical and construction research of the university's schools. Management science sits alongside them because the journal's remit, in its own words, extends to the university's achievements in management as well as in science and engineering; its archive accordingly includes management and economics subjects such as institutional distance, information asymmetry and international merger performance alongside purely technical papers.

The inclusion of management science in a natural science edition is a feature of the comprehensive Chinese university journal model: the title is comprehensive rather than single-discipline, and its unity comes from the institution and from shared standards of peer review and presentation, not from a narrow subject boundary.

Scope: mathematics, physics and chemistry

The journal also carries mathematics, physics and chemistry. Basic science papers provide the theoretical substrate for its engineering content — stability analysis for fuzzy and nonlinear systems, mathematical models for industrial cooling processes, and chemical synthesis and materials characterisation all appear in its pages — and they ensure that the university's science faculties have a home outlet of core-journal standing. The journal describes itself as a comprehensive academic journal of science and technology, and this basic-science strand is what makes that description accurate rather than honorary.

Taken together, the eight named fields — information science and engineering, metallurgy and material science, mechanical engineering, resources and civil engineering, management science, mathematics, physics and chemistry — define a wide but coherent territory centred on one research university. Authors considering the journal should match their work to those fields; readers should expect a monthly cross-section of a large technological university's output rather than a specialist's single-subject diet.

Indexing, honours and recognition

The journal is a Chinese Core Journal and an Ei Compendex core journal. The papers or abstracts it publishes are included in 10 internationally known databases such as EI, Scopus, CSA, CA and EBSCO, and in 15 national-level databases or abstract publications, according to the journal's own information. That combination — Ei Compendex core status for engineering retrieval, Scopus coverage internationally, and Chinese core status domestically — is the standard profile of a leading Chinese university engineering journal, and it determines both who submits to the journal and where its articles are found.

Its honours, as listed by the journal, are extensive: a Nomination Award of the second National Periodical Award of the General Administration of Press and Publication; the 100 Key Journals Award of the third National Periodical Award; the title of One Hundred China Outstanding Academic Journals, won four times; the Chinese University Excellence Journals of Science and Technology Award for five consecutive times; the title of Chinese Excellent Academic Journals with International Influence for five consecutive years since 2012; RCCSE recognition for four consecutive times; the title of Excellent Online Journal of Chinese Scientific Papers from 2009 to 2015, for seven consecutive years; and an Outstanding Websites Award of Chinese Sci-Tech Periodicals for three consecutive years since 2011, among further editorial awards. This accumulation of national periodical honours over many years is itself evidence of continuity and editorial stability.

Readership and access

The journal is openly issued at home and abroad and is distributed by post under the domestic and international codes noted above, while its current contents, archives and submission information are presented on the university's journal website. Its readership is the Chinese engineering and science community in the first instance — researchers for whom Chinese Core Journal and Ei Compendex status carry weight in evaluation — together with international readers who encounter its papers through EI, Scopus and the other indexing services in which its abstracts appear.

For librarians and researchers, the practical identifiers are stable and should be used exactly: Journal of Northeastern University (Natural Science), ISSN 1005-3026, CN 21-1344/T, monthly, Shenyang. Back issues on the journal site run back through decades of volumes, making the title a usable archive of one Chinese technological university's research from 1955 onward.

Place in Chinese scholarly publishing

Journal of Northeastern University (Natural Science) exemplifies the comprehensive university journal at its most established: founded in 1955, monthly, core-listed at home and Ei-indexed abroad, carrying the full spread of its university's science and engineering from metallurgy and information science to mathematics and management science, and decorated repeatedly in national periodical evaluations. Its verified identity — a Ministry of Education-supervised, Northeastern University-directed title edited in Shenyang under ISSN 1005-3026 — and its long honours record mark it as a durable institution of Chinese academic publishing rather than a transient outlet, and its record will continue to grow issue by issue from its base in Shenyang, Liaoning.