About Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Science Edition)

Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Science Edition)

Overview and identity

Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Science Edition) is the natural-science edition of the journal of Sichuan University, based in Chengdu, Sichuan, in western China. It is identified by ISSN 0490-6756. Its Chinese title is rendered in citations as Sichuan Daxue Xuebao, Ziran Kexueban, and its articles carry DOIs in the form 10.19907/j.0490-6756, embedding that ISSN in the persistent identifier of each article. The journal publishes natural-science research, including physics and work touching nuclear science, as its long record in international physics and nuclear information systems shows.

This edition must be understood as one member of a family of Sichuan University editions, and this profile is concerned only with the natural-science member of that family. Its sponsor university is a large, comprehensive, research-oriented institution in Chengdu; its subject is the natural sciences; and its documentary trail — in the International Nuclear Information System, in OSTI records, in EBSCO listings and in present-day citations — runs from at least volume 28 in 1991 through volume 61 in 2024. Those attested points, rather than any assumed founding date, form the factual spine of this profile. No founding year for the journal itself is asserted here, because none is supplied by the verified sources used.

Documentary record in INIS, OSTI and later indexes

The journal is attested in INIS and OSTI records at volume 28 in 1991, volume 36 in 1999 and volume 39 in 2002. INIS, the International Nuclear Information System, records literature in nuclear science and technology and its related fields, so the presence of this general natural-science journal in that system is informative in two ways. It shows that the journal was publishing, in a regular annual volume sequence, by the early 1990s. It also shows that part of its contents — physics and nuclear-related research — fell within the collecting scope of an international nuclear information system, which does not index general journals indiscriminately.

The volume sequence implied by those points is coherent. Volume 28 in 1991, volume 36 in 1999 and volume 39 in 2002 advance by roughly one volume per year. Later citations continue the same arithmetic: volume 56 in 2019, volume 59 in 2022, volume 60 in 2023 and volume 61, issue 2, in 2024, the last attested in an EBSCO record for an article on graphene field-effect transistors, with the DOI 10.19907/j.0490-6756.2024.024004. A journal whose volumes can be followed, year by year, across more than three decades of independent records is a journal with a demonstrable publishing continuity, whether or not a formal founding statement is available.

Sichuan University: the sponsoring institution

Sichuan University is a national key university directly under the administration of the Ministry of Education, described in its own and related accounts as a high-level, research-oriented comprehensive university in western China, located in Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan and a famous historical and cultural city. It has three campuses — Wangjiang, Huaxi and Jiang'an. Its origins, and its claim to be the earliest modern university in south-west China, reach back to 1896, when the former Sichuan University was founded by Lu Chuanlin, governor of Sichuan, under the special order of the Guangxu Emperor, as the Sichuan Chinese and Western School.

The present university was formed by two mergers. In 1994 the former Sichuan University and the former Chengdu University of Science and Technology, one of the first multi-disciplinary engineering colleges established during the reorganisation of colleges in new China, merged to form Sichuan Union University, later renamed Sichuan University. In 2000 Sichuan University merged with the former West China University of Medical Sciences, whose origins lay in the West China Union University founded in Chengdu in 1910. A natural-science edition of the university journal sits inside an institution reshaped twice in that decade — first toward engineering, then toward medicine — while retaining science at its centre. That context helps explain both the breadth of the edition and the need, addressed below, to distinguish it carefully from the university's medical edition.

Scope in the natural sciences

The edition's scope is the natural sciences of a comprehensive university. Sichuan University states a complete range of disciplines covering twelve categories, including literature, science, engineering, medicine, economics, management, law, history, philosophy, agriculture, education and art, with, in a Nature feature on the university, its science disciplines concentrated in schools of mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences and electronic information. Chemistry is identified in that feature as a traditional strength, with the College of Chemistry tracing its start to 1907, and mathematics and physics are listed among the university's disciplines ranked in global top categories in Essential Science Indicators at that time.

Articles attested in later literature show that scope in operation. Citations record work in the journal on the theoretical enhancement of the optical response of graphitic carbon nitride in volume 56 in 2019; on the dissolution behaviour of vermiculite in volume 60 in 2023; on stochastic resonance in time-delayed fractional oscillators in volume 59 in 2022, published on the university's science site with an English abstract alongside the Chinese text; and, in volume 61 in 2024, on characterisation and modelling of high-frequency equivalent noise in graphene field-effect transistors, taking contact resistance into account. Physics of materials, chemistry of minerals, applied mathematics and electronic devices are different subjects, pursued by different methods. Their common home is a general natural-science edition, not a specialty journal.

A bibliometric study of fractional-order research in China, using China National Knowledge Infrastructure data for 2001 to 2020, listed the Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Science Edition) among the journals with more publications in that field, with 49 publications counted in its table. A single mathematical topic producing that volume of work in one general edition illustrates how such a journal functions for a large science faculty: as the regular, local, peer-reviewed outlet in which a continuing line of work can accumulate, article by article, alongside work from every other natural-science discipline in the university.

Editorial presence and university science culture

Direct evidence of the journal's place in the university's working life appears in the records of its own academics. The College of Chemistry profile of Professor Fei Song, a professor at Sichuan University since 2017 working on sustainable and bio-based polymeric materials, lists service from 2020 as a youth editorial board member of the Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Science Edition). That single, verifiable line matters for a profile of this kind. It shows the edition operating, in the present period, with an editorial board structure that includes a youth board drawn from the university's active researchers, rather than existing only as a name in older indexing records.

More generally, a university of Sichuan's scale — with, in its published accounts, dozens of discipline-based colleges, doctoral authorisation across many first-level disciplines, post-doctoral stations and national key disciplines — needs internal scholarly infrastructure as well as international outlets. Its researchers publish extensively abroad; the Nature Index records a large annual output for Sichuan University across the natural sciences. A home natural-science edition performs a different function: it records work, often in Chinese with English abstracts, for a domestic readership, trains younger researchers in the disciplines of submission and peer review through structures such as a youth editorial board, and preserves a volume-by-volume account of the university's science that international specialty journals, selecting only a fraction of that work, cannot provide.

Language, citation and the form of articles

Articles in the edition are cited in later literature as appearing in Chinese, in some cases expressly noted as in Chinese with an English abstract, and the university's own article pages present Chinese and English abstracts together. That bilingual presentation at abstract level is characteristic of Chinese university journals of this generation: the full text serves its domestic readership, while the English title and abstract make the work discoverable and citable internationally. Readers who find this journal through an English-language citation should expect that pattern, and should not assume that an English abstract implies an English full text.

Citation forms vary. Later authors render the title as Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Science Edition), Journal of Sichuan University (natural Science Edition) with differing capitalisation, Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Sciences Division) in one EBSCO record, or by its abbreviated form J. Sichuan Univ. (Nat. Sci. Ed.). The romanised Chinese title, Sichuan Daxue Xuebao-Ziran Kexueban, also appears. None of those variants creates a different journal. The stable elements by which a record should be matched are ISSN 0490-6756, the volume, issue and year, and, for recent articles, a DOI beginning 10.19907/j.0490-6756.

Distinction from the Medical Science Edition and other Sichuan titles

The essential distinction for this title is from the Journal of Sichuan University (Medical Science Edition). That is a separate journal, with its own ISSN 1672-173X, its own subject areas in biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology and medicine, its own coverage record from 2003 in indexing sources, and its own publishing history connected with the West China medical tradition that entered Sichuan University in the 2000 merger. Articles, metrics and coverage dates belonging to the medical edition do not belong to the natural-science edition, and vice versa, even though both carry the name of the same university and both originate in Chengdu.

Two further distinctions are worth recording. Sichuan University also publishes an Engineering Science Edition, listed in international journal lists with ISSN 1009-3087; engineering-edition records are not natural-science-edition records. And the Journal of Sichuan Normal University, Natural Science, is the journal of a different institution in the same city, Sichuan Normal University, not of Sichuan University. In each case the ISSN settles the question: 0490-6756 identifies the journal profiled here.

Readership and use

The edition serves, first, the natural-science community of a large western-China university and its counterparts in other Chinese institutions working in mathematics, physics, chemistry, life sciences, electronic information and related fields. Its presence in INIS shows a second, international readership for its physics and nuclear-related contents, reached through a specialist information system rather than through general circulation. Its English abstracts provide a third route, by which a researcher anywhere can identify a relevant article — on vermiculite dissolution, on a graphene device model, on a fractional oscillator — and decide whether to pursue the full Chinese text.

For librarians and researchers assembling a record of Sichuan University's science, the volume sequence is the most practical tool. Volumes attested from 28 in 1991 to 61 in 2024 allow a holding or a citation to be checked for internal consistency: a claimed volume far outside the sequence implied by its year should prompt a second look, and a record in medicine should prompt a check that the medical edition, not this one, is intended.

Assessment

Assessed strictly on verified evidence, Journal of Sichuan University (Natural Science Edition), ISSN 0490-6756, is a long-running general natural-science journal of a major Ministry of Education university in Chengdu, attested in international nuclear and scientific records at volume 28 in 1991 and still publishing at volume 61 in 2024, with articles carrying DOIs built on its ISSN and covering subjects from fractional-order mathematics and stochastic resonance to carbon nitride, vermiculite chemistry and graphene transistors. Its editorial life is visible in the present, in the youth editorial board service recorded by its own College of Chemistry.

No verified founding year, impact factor or editor-in-chief for this edition is supplied by the sources used, and none is claimed in this profile. That restraint does not leave the journal ill-defined. Sponsor city, subject, ISSN, DOI pattern, language pattern, documentary span and its necessary distinctions from the medical and engineering editions of the same university and from Sichuan Normal University's journal together identify it precisely — as the natural-science record of a university founded in 1896, reshaped by mergers in 1994 and 2000, and still reporting its science, volume by volume, in Chengdu.