About Journal of Northwest A&F University (Natural Science Edition)

Journal of Northwest A&F University (Natural Science Edition)

Overview and identity

Journal of Northwest A&F University (Natural Science Edition) is the Chinese-language natural science journal of Northwest A&F University, based in Yangling, Shaanxi, China. It is identified by ISSN 1671-9387, and its articles carry DOIs in the form 10.13207/j.cnki.jnwafu, a prefix pattern that records its place in China's national journal registration system. The journal publishes research in crop science, soil and water, and agricultural engineering, together with the wider range of agricultural and life-science work produced at its host university. EBSCO records show the journal at volume 53 in 2025, which indicates a long-running archive reaching back over five decades of volume numbering.

As the natural science edition of a university journal, the title belongs to a large and well-defined family in Chinese scholarly publishing: the comprehensive journal of an agricultural university, in which the institution's own research communities — agronomy, horticulture, plant protection, animal science, forestry, food science and water engineering — publish side by side. Yangling is not an incidental address. It is China's best-known agricultural science city, home to the university and to several national research institutes, and the journal's contents reflect that concentration of dryland-farming expertise.

History and development

The journal's history is inseparable from that of Northwest A&F University itself. The university traces its origins to 1934, when the National Northwest Senior College of Agriculture and Forestry was founded in Yangling as the first high-level institution for modern agricultural education in northwest China. The present university was formed on 11 September 1999 by merging seven institutions in Yangling — including Northwest Agricultural University, Northwest Forestry College, the Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, the Northwest Institute of Water Resource Sciences, the Shaanxi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, the Shaanxi Provincial Academy of Forestry and the Northwest Institute of Botany — into a single comprehensive university.

A university journal carried through such a merger necessarily consolidates earlier institutional publishing traditions, and the volume numbering visible in current records — volume 50 in 2022, volume 51 in 2023 and volume 53 in 2025 — shows a title that has continued without interruption into the present decade. Individual articles from recent volumes illustrate the continuity of subject matter: a 2022 article in volume 50, issue 9 studied the spatiotemporal heterogeneity of land-use change in the arid northwest using Yaozhou District of Tongchuan, Shaanxi as its case, while a 2023 article in volume 51, issue 11 examined morphological variation among populations of the prawn Exopalaemon carinicauda. Land, water and animal production — the historic strengths of Yangling — remain the journal's centre of gravity.

Sponsorship, publisher and editorial home

The journal is the journal of Northwest A&F University, a national key comprehensive university directly under the jurisdiction of China's Ministry of Education and co-administered with other ministries and with Shaanxi Province. In the Chinese system, a university journal of this kind is sponsored by the university, which stands behind the title, supervises its editorial direction and houses its editorial office on campus. That arrangement gives readers a clear line of responsibility: authors, editors and sponsoring institution are all identifiable from the journal's own records.

The university is a member of the national Project 211 and Project 985 groups and was selected in 2017 for the Double First-Class construction list. It describes itself as the high-level university with the most complete disciplinary coverage across agriculture, forestry and water conservancy in China, with 26 colleges, departments and the graduate school, seven national key disciplines — plant pathology, soil science, agricultural soil and water engineering, clinical veterinary medicine, pomology, animal genetics, breeding and reproduction, and agricultural economics and management — and particular depth in wheat breeding, entomology, agricultural resource management, horticulture, plant protection and enology. The journal draws its authorship and its refereeing community from exactly this institutional base, supplemented by submissions from across China's agricultural research system.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal's recorded scope centres on crop, soil, water and agricultural engineering research, and in practice a comprehensive university natural science edition ranges across the full disciplinary map of its host. Recent content confirms the breadth: land-use change and regional land policy in dryland Shaanxi sits alongside aquaculture genetics, and both sit within a title whose sponsoring university works on everything from pomology and viticulture to veterinary medicine and food science.

Three emphases recur. The first is dryland agriculture: Yangling sits on the Loess Plateau margin, and water scarcity, soil conservation and drought-adapted cropping are the defining research problems of the region. The second is soil and water engineering, reflecting the merged Institute of Soil and Water Conservation, whose work on the Loess Plateau is internationally known. The third is production agriculture in the broad sense — crop breeding, plant protection, animal husbandry and horticulture — reported as original experimental research rather than commentary.

Research character: the dryland brief

What distinguishes this journal from the dozens of other Chinese agricultural university journals is the aridity of its home territory. Northwest A&F University exists, historically, to solve the agricultural problems of China's dry northwest: low and variable rainfall, erodible loess soils, and the water demands of irrigation districts along the Yellow River system. Articles on land-use change in Shaanxi counties, on soil and water conservation, and on water-saving cultivation therefore carry a regional specificity that a reader can verify against the map. The journal functions, in part, as the published record of a research system built for one of the world's most demanding farming environments.

That regional anchoring does not make the journal parochial. Dryland farming problems — water productivity, soil organic matter decline, erosion control, drought tolerance — are shared across Central Asia, northern Africa and other semi-arid zones, and methods developed and tested at Yangling are routinely cited in that wider literature. The journal's Chinese-language format keeps it closest, however, to the domestic community of researchers, extension specialists and graduate students who work on these problems directly.

Publication pattern and article types

The journal appears in numbered volumes with multiple issues per volume — volume 50 reached at least issue 9 in 2022 and volume 51 at least issue 11 in 2023, a pattern consistent with monthly publication in recent years. Articles are presented as full research papers with structured objectives, methods and results; the EBSCO records for recent articles show the standard Chinese journal article architecture of objective, method, result and conclusion summaries, given in both Chinese and English so that the work is discoverable internationally even though the full text is Chinese.

Each article carries a DOI under the journal's registered prefix, which makes individual papers permanently citable and traceable through Crossref-style resolution. For a directory profile, the practical point is citational hygiene: the journal should be cited by its exact title and ISSN 1671-9387, and not confused with the university's other periodicals or with the English-language journals the university has launched more recently under the national journal Excellence Plan.

Indexing, evaluation and recognition

The journal's standing in China's domestic evaluation systems is documented by a specific honour: in the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China's 2017 release of the 100 Outstanding Academic Journals of China, the Journal of Northwest A&F University (Natural Science Edition) was named among the top 100, an award the university itself announced publicly. Selection exercises of this kind are competitive across several thousand Chinese science and technology journals, and inclusion marks the title as one of the stronger university journals in the country.

The journal is also recorded in international article-level services: EBSCOhost carries its articles with full bibliographic records, including ISSN, volume, issue and DOI, which is how much of the journal's recent content is encountered by readers outside China. Within China, university journals of this standing are standard fixtures of the core-journal and citation-report ecosystems through which libraries and researchers navigate the domestic literature.

Place among China's agricultural university journals

China's agricultural universities each maintain a comprehensive journal, and the titles form a recognisable cohort: the journals of China Agricultural University, Nanjing Agricultural University, Huazhong Agricultural University, Northeast Agricultural University and Northwest A&F University, among others, collectively publish a large share of the country's Chinese-language agricultural research. Analyses of China's excellent agricultural journals prepared by the editorial office of the Journal of China Agricultural University treat these university journals as a distinct and important stratum of the national system — supervised variously by the Ministry of Education, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the agriculture ministry system — and Northwest A&F's journal belongs squarely to that stratum.

Since 2019 the same universities have also been launching new, often English-language, specialist journals under the Excellence Plan's high-starting-point programme. Those new titles do not replace the comprehensive university journals; they sit alongside them. The Natural Science Edition remains the general record of the university's research output in Chinese, while the newer specialist titles target narrower international audiences.

Readership and use

The journal's primary readers are researchers and postgraduate students in Chinese agricultural universities and academies, extension and land-management professionals working in the northwest, and librarians building collections in dryland agriculture. For a land-policy researcher, an article such as the Yaozhou District land-use study offers county-level empirical material that is rarely available in English. For a soil scientist, the journal is a route into the Loess Plateau literature. For bibliographers, its stable ISSN, continuous volume sequence and DOI registration make it a reliably citable source.

Users should note the bilingual presentation convention: titles, abstracts and keywords are given in English, full texts in Chinese. That convention, standard across China's university journals, means the journal's contents are searchable by non-Chinese readers even where the full argument requires translation.

Continuing role

Northwest A&F University's stated mission — to serve agriculture, forestry and water science for China's arid and semi-arid regions — continues to generate the experimental work the journal publishes. With volume 53 reached in 2025, an ISTIC top-100 honour on its record, and its host university investing in new specialist titles around it, the Journal of Northwest A&F University (Natural Science Edition) remains what it has long been: the comprehensive Chinese-language research journal of China's dryland agricultural science capital, published from Yangling under ISSN 1671-9387.