About Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences)

Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences)

Overview and identity

Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) (Beijing Daxue Xuebao: Zhexue Shehui Kexue Ban (北京大学学报哲学社会科学版)) is the humanities and social sciences edition of Peking University's journal, published bimonthly by Peking University in Beijing. Its website is journal.pku.edu.cn. It is distinct from the university's natural science and health sciences editions, which are separate journals with separate remits.

The journal is based in Beijing, China, and carries ISSN 1000-5919. Those bibliographic facts matter because they distinguish this title from similarly named journals. Chinese academic publishing contains many near-identical English titles, translated titles and paired Chinese and English editions, and the ISSN, city and sponsor recorded here are the reliable means by which librarians, indexers and readers identify the exact journal described in this profile.

History and development

The journal's run began in 1964, and it has continued to the present: volume 63 appeared in 2026, with issue 4 of that volume published on 20 July 2026 according to the journal's own site. That long, continuous run through more than six decades makes it one of the senior university journals in the Chinese humanities and social sciences. Peking University, founded in 1898 as the Imperial University, is one of China's oldest and most prestigious universities and a historic centre of Chinese philosophy, literature, history and law, and its journal has carried work from that scholarly community throughout its history.

Scope and subject coverage

Its columns cover philosophy, literature, history, law, political science and sociology, as its record states, and its recent issues show the breadth in practice. Current-issue listings include sections for Xi Jinping Thought on Culture, classics, art history, literature, legal science, political science and sociology, while archive issues add philosophy, aesthetics, history and cultural dissemination and exchange among their headings. Articles range from studies of Marx and Kant and of classical Chinese thought, such as work on the Analects and on Song dynasty learning, to legal construction of the regulatory state, population and Chinese-style modernisation, and the aesthetics of Beijing School literary theory. The journal is therefore a general humanities and social sciences journal of a comprehensive university, not a single-discipline title.

Sponsorship, publishing and editorial practice

The journal is a source journal of the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index, CSSCI, the interdisciplinary citation index developed by Nanjing University's social sciences research and assessment institute and established in 2000, covering about five hundred leading Chinese humanities and social sciences journals. Universities and institutes in China use CSSCI as a basis for evaluating academic achievement and promotion, so source-journal status places the Peking University journal inside the principal national system of scholarly recognition in its fields. For readers, its value lies in the combination of that standing with the depth of Peking University's own humanities faculties, whose professors are among its natural authors.

In common with the leading Chinese academic journals, the journal operates through peer review: manuscripts are assessed by specialists before acceptance, bibliographic information is provided in English as well as Chinese where the journal is internationally indexed, and publication is on a regular schedule maintained over many years. That regularity is itself significant. Sustained publication requires a stable editorial office, a continuing flow of submissions from its research community and continuing support from its sponsor, and the journal's record demonstrates all three.

Place in Chinese scholarly communication

To understand this journal, it helps to understand the system it belongs to. China publishes thousands of academic journals, most of them in Chinese, sponsored by universities, research institutes, learned societies and professional associations, and published from the institutions where their scholarly communities are based. Within that system, national systems of recognition, including the Chinese core journal lists, the Chinese Science Citation Database for science titles and the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index for humanities and social sciences titles, identify the leading journals in each field, and inclusion affects where authors seek to publish and how universities evaluate their work.

Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) sits inside that system as a recognised specialist or institutional title. Its importance is therefore not measured only by international citation metrics, which understate the influence of Chinese-language journals whose readers publish and practise mainly in Chinese. It is measured also by its role in training graduate students to write and review research, in setting terminology and standards in Chinese in its field, and in providing the cumulative archive from which Chinese textbooks, guidelines and policy documents are built.

Readership and authorship

The journal's primary readers are researchers, teachers, graduate students and, where its field is clinical or professional, practitioners working in China in its discipline. Its authors are drawn principally from Chinese universities, research institutes, hospitals and agencies, with the sponsoring institution's own scholars naturally represented alongside contributors from across the country. For most Chinese-language journals, that national authorship is a strength rather than a limitation: it concentrates, in one venue, work on Chinese materials, Chinese patients, Chinese institutions or Chinese territory that international journals may treat as peripheral.

At the same time, English titles, abstracts and indexing records make the journal discoverable abroad. Foreign scholars who follow research in China in this field encounter the journal through the major databases and library catalogues, and can identify relevant Chinese work even when they subsequently need translation to read it in full. The journal thus functions at two levels at once: as a working tool for its domestic community, and as a bibliographic window through which the rest of the world can see that community's output.

Distinguishing this journal from similar titles

Careful identification matters for this title. As the introduction notes, paired Chinese and English editions, journals of the same association in different cities, and university journals with similar translated names all create scope for confusion in catalogues and citations. The facts anchored in this profile, the exact title, the city of publication, the sponsor or publisher and ISSN 1000-5919, should be used together to verify that a catalogue record, a citation or a submission target is indeed Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) and not a namesake.

That care is particularly important for researchers compiling bibliographies, librarians maintaining serials records and authors choosing where to submit. A manuscript sent to the wrong namesake journal, or a citation attached to the wrong ISSN, creates errors that propagate through databases. The verified identifiers given here are the safeguard against those errors, and they are the reason this profile states them prominently rather than treating them as minor technical detail.

Continuing role and significance

Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) continues to publish from Beijing as an active Chinese academic journal. Its significance lies in continuity and concentration: continuity, in that a journal maintained over many years becomes the archive of its field in China, preserving the sequence of questions asked, methods adopted and conclusions reached; and concentration, in that it gathers into a single, peer-reviewed, regularly issued venue work that would otherwise be scattered across institutional reports, conference proceedings and general journals.

For the WorldNM directory, the journal is recorded as a magazine and journal outlet of China, based in Beijing, representing the scholarly publishing sector rather than news media. That classification reflects an important truth about China's media landscape: alongside newspapers, broadcasters and news sites, the country's thousands of scholarly journals form a large, structured and long-lived publishing system of their own, sponsored by its academies, universities, societies and hospitals, and Journal of Peking University (Philosophy and Social Sciences) is one of its established titles.