About Journal of Qufu Normal University

Journal of Qufu Normal University

The Journal of Qufu Normal University is the natural-science academic journal sponsored by Qufu Normal University in Qufu, Shandong Province. It carries ISSN 1001-5337 and the Chinese domestic publication number CN 37-1154/N, and it is published quarterly. The name under which it is recorded requires one clarification: the university's social-science title is not a social-science edition of this journal but a separate journal, the Qilu Journal. This journal is therefore the university's natural-science serial in its own right — the science journal of the university that stands in Qufu, the hometown of Confucius.

Identity and identifiers

The journal is identified by its sponsor, Qufu Normal University, its city, Qufu, ISSN 1001-5337 and CN 37-1154/N, in which 37 denotes Shandong and the /N class denotes a natural-science periodical. Its quarterly frequency is attested both in the candidate record assembled for this directory and in international journal directories, which list the journal — under its pinyin title, Qufu Shifan Daxue Xuebao, Ziran Kexue Ban — as a quarterly published in China. Quarterly publication gives the journal four issues a year in which to record the scientific work of the university, and its identifiers distinguish it cleanly from the university's celebrated humanities title, the Qilu Journal, with which it is sometimes confused in secondary listings.

The sponsoring university

Qufu Normal University was founded in Jinan in 1955 as Shandong Normal College. In May 1956 it was approved by the Ministry of Education for upgrading, and in September of that year it moved to Qufu and began undergraduate education there. From September 1970 to April 1974 it was merged with Shandong University to form a new Shandong University; in April 1974 Qufu Normal University was restored. In 1981 it was named one of the six key universities of Shandong Province by the provincial government and was approved among the first batch of Chinese universities authorised to recruit graduate students. In November 1985 the university changed its name to Qufu Normal University, the name it bears today. It later added a second campus in the coastal city of Rizhao.

Qufu, the hometown of Confucius

The university's location shapes its identity. Qufu is the hometown of Confucius, the philosopher and educator who founded Confucianism, and the university takes as its instructional standard Confucius's words: to retain curiosity in learning, and to teach and never become weary. The campus stands in a small city dominated by the temple, mansion and cemetery of the Kong family, among the most significant cultural sites in China. A natural-science journal may seem distant from that heritage, but at Qufu the sciences are taught inside an institution whose public mission is defined by the Confucian teaching tradition — the university is, before anything else, a normal university, a trainer of teachers, and its science journal serves the preparation of the science teachers of Shandong.

The university's journal family

Qufu Normal University publishes four academic periodicals: the Qilu Journal (Qilu Xuekan), the Journal of Qufu Normal University (Natural Science Edition) recorded here, the Middle School Mathematics journal, and Modern Chinese. The Qilu Journal is the flagship: it is among the second batch of Excellent Journals funded by the National Social Science Fund, a distinction recorded in the university's own introductions. Understanding this family matters for citation practice. The Qilu Journal is a separate social-science serial, not an edition of this journal; the Journal of Qufu Normal University is the natural-science title, and its articles must be cited under its own name and ISSN, never under the Qilu title.

Scope

As the natural-science journal of a comprehensive normal university, the journal publishes research in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biological science, geography and the allied sciences taught in the university's science colleges. Qufu Normal University's research profile gives that scope real weight: bibliometric records place chemistry at the head of its disciplines by publication volume and citations, and its physicists publish in leading international journals of high-energy and condensed-matter physics, with the university recording substantial Nature Index output in the physical sciences. The journal provides the Chinese-language, university-level record standing behind that activity — the outlet for work addressed to domestic readers, for postgraduate training in scientific authorship, and for research of regional application in Shandong.

Libraries and scholarly resources

The university's library holds, on recent figures, about 4.47 million paper volumes and 2.36 million e-books, on campuses covering more than 3,300 mu with fixed assets of about 1.75 billion yuan. Those resources sustain the literature base on which a quarterly science journal depends: its authors and referees work inside one of the larger library systems of a provincial normal university. The university is also among the first 200 undergraduate institutions in China authorised to recruit foreign students and maintains friendly relations with fifty foreign universities, giving its journals an institutional home connected to international exchange as well as to provincial teacher education.

Regional role

Southwestern Shandong — Jining, Heze and their surrounding counties — is served by Qufu Normal University as its principal institution of higher education, and the university has held provincial key-university status since 1981. Its natural-science journal circulates the region's university science to the middle schools whose teachers the university trains, to the institutes of the province, and, through national databases, to the whole Chinese scientific community. In that sense the journal performs for science the same regional service that the Qilu Journal performs for the humanities: it makes a provincial university's research a permanent part of the national record.

Publication pattern

Quarterly publication, continuous sponsorship by the university, and listing in international journal directories together mark the journal as a maintained serial. Directories record its publisher of record for international distribution and its quarterly rhythm, and its ISSN and CN numbers have remained stable identifiers of the title. For libraries, a quarterly university journal with stable identifiers is a straightforward serial to hold: four issues a year, one volume a year, catalogued under ISSN 1001-5337.

Readership

The journal's readers are scientists, science educators and postgraduate students at Qufu Normal University and across Shandong, together with researchers in the basic sciences who follow the Chinese-language journal literature. Its natural audience overlaps with that of the university's Middle School Mathematics journal — the school-teaching profession — since both titles serve a university whose central mission is the education of teachers.

Bibliometric profiles underline the scale of the research community behind the journal. Qufu Normal University records more than twelve thousand peer-reviewed articles and an institutional h-index above 160 in international citation databases, with chemistry alone accounting for over two thousand articles and more than seventy thousand citations, and with output also recorded in journals such as the Journal of High Energy Physics, Advanced Functional Materials and Applied Physics Letters. A quarterly natural-science journal is a modest part of that output by volume, but it is the part published under the university's own name, in its own city, for its own scholarly community.

How to identify the journal

Cite the journal as Journal of Qufu Normal University, ISSN 1001-5337, CN 37-1154/N, published quarterly by Qufu Normal University, Qufu, Shandong, China. Do not confuse it with the Qilu Journal, the same university's separate social-science title, or with the university's journals in mathematics education and Chinese language. The ISSN and CN number are the authoritative identifiers of this natural-science journal.