About Journal of Nursing Science

Journal of Nursing Science

The Journal of Nursing Science (护理学杂志) is a Chinese-language nursing journal published in Wuhan, Hubei Province, by Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. Founded in 1986, it carries the ISSN 1001-4152 and is recognised as a Chinese core journal. Its pages cover nursing education, clinical nursing, nursing management and community nursing, and for four decades it has been one of the principal scholarly outlets through which Chinese nurses report research, quality-improvement work and professional experience.

The journal's longevity mirrors the development of nursing as an academic discipline in China. When it was founded in the mid-1980s, university-level nursing education in China was being rebuilt and the profession was defining its scholarly base. A journal anchored at Tongji Medical College — one of China's historic centres of medical education — gave nurses a publication of their own at precisely the moment the discipline needed one.

History and Founding

The journal was founded in 1986. Huazhong University of Science and Technology's School of Nursing records the founding directly in its own institutional history: the school founded the Journal of Nursing Science (《护理学杂志》) in 1986, and the journal is a source journal for Chinese scientific and technical paper statistics. That institutional continuity has been maintained through the successive reorganisations of its host — Tongji Medical University became part of the newly formed Huazhong University of Science and Technology in 2000, and the journal continued under Tongji Medical College of the new university.

Volume numbering traces the unbroken run: volume 25 appeared in 2010, volume 30 in 2015, volume 35 in 2020 — one volume for each year since 1986. Issue numbering in sampled years runs well beyond twelve numbers a year — issue 21 appeared within volume 25 in 2010 and issue 13 within volume 28 in 2013 — reflecting the frequent, semi-monthly rhythm with which the journal has served a large practising readership. Few Chinese nursing periodicals can match that combination of age, frequency and continuity.

Publisher and Institutional Home

The journal is published in Wuhan by Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology. The college's School of Nursing is a substantial academic unit: it was approved to offer a professional master's degree in nursing, gained an academic doctoral programme, and holds a first-level discipline doctoral authorisation in nursing, with research directions recorded by the university including chronic disease management, critical care nursing, maternal and child health, accelerated-recovery nursing, nursing management, nursing education, geriatric and community nursing, and humanistic and psychological nursing. The journal sits within that research environment and draws editors, reviewers and authors from it.

The school's wider assets reinforce the journal's clinical grounding. Its teaching and practice bases include the affiliated Tongji Hospital, Union Hospital and Liyuan Hospital among the university's affiliated hospitals, together with community health service centres. Faculty of the school hold editorial roles across Chinese nursing journals and lead national nursing textbook programmes, and the school's researchers publish extensively in the Journal of Nursing Science itself — studies from Tongji Hospital's intensive care and nursing departments appear regularly in its pages.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The journal's stated coverage comprises nursing education, clinical nursing, nursing management and community nursing. Clinical nursing is the largest territory: articles report studies and practice innovations from medical, surgical, intensive care, geriatric, paediatric and other specialty settings. Published examples include the construction and application of an ICU sedation and analgesia management strategy based on fault-tree theory and the eCASH concept (2020, volume 35), family-like continuing nursing care for discharged stroke patients, insulation care for postoperative patients, and systematic psychological intervention for elderly hospitalised patients.

Nursing management coverage addresses the organisation of nursing work: the establishment of high-quality nursing service demonstration units in internal medicine departments, the use of quality control circles to manage insulin injection site rotation, and shift-system design under nursing responsibility systems have all appeared in the journal. Community and continuing care form a third strand, with literature reviews and studies on continuity of care, chronic wound care quality of life, and home-based care for older patients — topics of growing weight as China's population ages and care shifts toward community settings.

Nursing Education and Workforce Research

Education is a founding pillar of the journal and remains prominent. The journal publishes work on nursing curricula, clinical teaching, specialist nurse training and the professional development of the nursing workforce. Examples from its author community include the construction of a training model for ICU specialist nurses based on the ADDIE instructional-design framework, and research on nurse occupational career management — both reflecting a profession that has been building structured postgraduate and specialist pathways.

This educational content serves a practical function. China's nursing workforce is trained across universities, colleges and hospital schools, and a widely read national journal is one of the channels through which teaching innovations and training standards diffuse. The journal's Wuhan base contributes here as well: its host school runs training bases for clinical specialist nurses in Hubei Province and participates in national nursing education, so the journal's education coverage is informed by direct training experience.

Clinical Research Highlights

The journal's clinical research is characteristically pragmatic: studies test whether a nursing intervention, protocol or organisational change improves outcomes that nurses can influence. Critical care is a visible strength, consistent with its host institution's profile — Tongji Hospital's intensive care leadership publishes in the journal on sedation practice, airborne precautions for bedside bronchoscopy in COVID-19 patients, and specialist nurse training. Geriatric nursing is another recurring theme, including studies of cognitive function, daily living activities, anxiety and depression among hospitalised older people, and occupational therapy effects on symptoms and mood in elderly patients with functional dyspepsia.

Chronic disease and rehabilitation nursing appear through work such as the literature review of quality of life in patients with chronic wounds, and psychological nursing through studies of early systematic psychological intervention and self-efficacy in elderly inpatients. Together these examples show a journal oriented toward the bedside problems of a large hospital system, reported by the nurses who manage them.

Indexing, Recognition and Standing

The journal is a Chinese core journal, the national standing recorded in its directory listing, and its host school records that it is a source journal for Chinese scientific and technical paper statistics — the statistical system through which Chinese science and technology journals are evaluated. Core and statistical-source status together mark it as one of the established titles of Chinese nursing, in a field where the Peking University core list for nursing has historically contained only a handful of journals.

Its influence is visible in citation practice: articles in the Journal of Nursing Science are cited across the Chinese nursing literature and in international journals when Chinese nursing research is reviewed. The journal's English-language presence is maintained through the citation form Journal of Nursing Science with year, volume, issue and page numbers — a form that appears, for example, in the publication lists of Huazhong University of Science and Technology's own nursing faculty, whose staff publish in it alongside SCI-indexed international journals.

Distinguishing the Journal from Similar Titles

Chinese nursing publishing contains several titles with similar English names, and accurate identification matters. This journal — 护理学杂志, ISSN 1001-4152, Wuhan, Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, founded 1986 — is distinct from the Journal of Nursing (护理学报) based in Guangzhou at Southern Medical University, founded in 1994 under Guangdong provincial supervision, which shares a similar English rendering. It is also distinct from the Chinese Journal of Nursing of the Chinese Nursing Association and from Taiwan's Hu Li Za Zhi — The Journal of Nursing (ISSN 0047-262X). Citations should therefore always be checked against the ISSN and the Wuhan publisher.

Readership and Professional Role

The journal's readers are China's practising nurses, nurse managers, nursing educators and postgraduate students. For clinicians it offers tested protocols and experience reports from comparable hospitals; for managers, studies of staffing, quality control and service organisation; for educators, teaching research from leading schools; and for the profession as a whole, a cumulative record of how Chinese nursing has developed since 1986. Its frequent publication schedule suits a practice discipline, keeping the interval between submission of practice innovations and their national dissemination short.

The journal also documents the profession's response to national events. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Wuhan was the first epicentre, and the journal's pages carried work from the city's frontline nursing teams — including airborne precaution recommendations for bronchoscopy in COVID-19 patients from Tongji Hospital's intensive care nurses — giving its archive a particular historical as well as scientific value.

Conclusion

Founded in 1986 and published in Wuhan by Tongji Medical College of Huazhong University of Science and Technology, the Journal of Nursing Science (ISSN 1001-4152) is one of the senior core journals of Chinese nursing. Covering nursing education, clinical nursing, nursing management and community nursing with a frequent schedule and a strongly clinical orientation, it remains an essential source for understanding nursing research and practice in China — and, through its Wuhan institutional base, a record of the discipline written from one of the country's leading medical centres.