About Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine

Overview

The Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, based in Beijing, Beijing, China, was the first English-language journal devoted to traditional Chinese medicine. That first-mover position is the central fact of its identity. At a time when most research on Chinese medicine was published for a domestic, Chinese-reading audience, this journal was created to carry clinical and theoretical work on the subject to readers abroad in English. Its subject matter, as summarised in reference listings, includes acupuncture, herbal medicine, homeopathy, massotherapy, mind-body therapies and palliative care, together with other topics in complementary and alternative medicine. Elsevier, which long hosted and sold the journal, described the English edition in stronger terms still, calling it the earliest and most authoritative traditional Chinese medicine magazine in China and the one with the largest circulation. Those are a publisher's claims rather than neutral measurements, but they reflect the standing the journal was presented as holding: not one English-language outlet among many, but the original channel through which traditional Chinese medicine research from China reached an international readership.

Origins: A Chinese Journal from 1955 and an English Edition from 1981

The journal's history is conventionally dated to 1955. Reference histories trace it to a Chinese journal established in that year under the romanised title Chung i tsa chih ying wen pan, and its sponsoring academy shares the same founding year: the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences was also established in 1955, as a comprehensive institution for scientific research, clinical medicine and medical education in traditional Chinese medicine. The English edition of the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine itself first appeared in 1981. That distinction matters for understanding the title. The 1955 date records the lineage of the parent Chinese publication; the 1981 date records the moment the journal began addressing the wider world directly in English. Elsevier's subscription description makes the same point from the publishing side, noting simply that the English edition appeared in 1981 and presenting it as the earliest publication of its kind in China. From Beijing, the journal therefore belongs to two histories at once: the post-1949 institutional building of traditional Chinese medicine inside China, and the later effort to explain and export that medicine to clinicians and researchers in other countries.

Sponsors and Beijing Base

The journal is jointly sponsored and published by the China Association of Chinese Medicine and the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, and its headquarters are in Beijing. The academy connection places the journal inside China's national research establishment for Chinese medicine. The academy, formerly known as the China Academy of Traditional Chinese Medicine and renamed the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences in 2005, is described by the Beijing municipal government as a comprehensive institution for scientific research, clinical medicine and medical education on traditional Chinese medicine, directly under the national administration for the field. Its graduate school, formally established in 1984, was approved in 2005 as the first graduate school in the traditional Chinese medicine sector. A journal sponsored by such an academy is therefore not a purely commercial venture; it is an organ of the institutions charged with researching and teaching the medicine it covers. Bibliographic listings give the journal's address as 16 Nanxiaojie, Dongzhimen Nei, Beijing 100700, China, and reference listings name Boli Zhang as its editor. Zhang is a figure of corresponding institutional weight, listed in international academy biographies as a member of the Chinese Academy of Engineering, a president of the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences and an editor-in-chief or editorial board member of more than twenty periodicals.

Scope: Clinical and Theoretical Research in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Elsevier described the journal as an international quarterly devoted to clinical and theoretical research in this branch of medicine. Its coverage is deliberately broad within that field. Alongside acupuncture and herbal medicine, the two best-known branches of traditional Chinese medicine internationally, its stated subjects include massotherapy, mind-body therapies, palliative care and homeopathy, and other complementary and alternative medicine topics. Chinese materia medica — the study of medicinal substances used in Chinese practice — is a recurring part of that coverage. The breadth reflects the nature of traditional Chinese medicine itself, which is not a single technique but a system encompassing drug therapy, needling, manual therapy and forms of supportive and palliative care. A general journal for the field therefore has to move between laboratory investigation of medicinal materials, clinical observation of treatments in patients and theoretical discussion of how the traditional system explains health and disease. The Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine was structured to do all three, reporting, in the words of its own description, clinical and theoretical research rather than restricting itself to one method, one disease area or one type of study.

Columns and Forms of Content

The journal's internal organisation, as described by Elsevier, shows how that broad scope was handled in practice. Its main columns included Experts' Forum, Clinical Observation, Basic Investigation, Reviews, Lectures, Teaching Round, and Questions and Answers. Taken together, those headings map the working life of a clinical discipline. Experts' Forum provided a place for authoritative opinion; Clinical Observation reported what practitioners saw in patients; Basic Investigation carried laboratory and theoretical work; Reviews surveyed a field; and Lectures, Teaching Round and Questions and Answers gave the journal an explicit teaching function for practising clinicians. The columns particularly involved acupuncture, massotherapy and Chinese materia medica. Elsevier added that papers by outstanding clinicians, acupuncturists and researchers provided readers with the latest information on the development of the discipline, and called the journal indispensable reading for clinical practitioners and others interested in basic medical research. That combination — research reports, expert commentary and teaching material in the same issue — distinguishes a professional journal serving a practising medical community from a purely academic research title.

Foreign-Language Editions and International Circulation

English was not the journal's only foreign language. Editions in German, Italian, Spanish, French and Portuguese were also published. Elsevier's account says those editions appeared successively, in that order of languages, and credits them with making still greater contributions to the development of traditional Chinese medicine and to international academic exchange. The existence of five further language editions is unusual for a specialist Chinese medical journal and underlines the purpose for which the English edition had been created in 1981. The journal was an instrument of international communication, intended to present Chinese clinical experience and research to practitioners in many countries, not only to Anglophone academics. That multilingual history also helps explain why the title became a standard point of reference abroad: for readers in Europe and Latin America who could not read Chinese, a local-language edition of the Beijing journal could serve as an accessible introduction to how traditional Chinese medicine was practised and studied in China itself, rather than as interpreted by writers outside the Chinese medical system.

Publishing History, Frequency and Identifiers

The journal's publishing arrangements have changed over time, and its records preserve more than one description of its frequency and numbering. Elsevier's long-standing description called it a quarterly, while later reference listings describe it as bimonthly, at six issues a year — a pattern visible in its 2018 ScienceDirect volumes, which ran from Issue 1 in February through Issue 6 in December of that year. Readers checking older and newer listings should therefore expect the quarterly description in historical publisher material and the six-issue pattern in later bibliographic records. As of 1 January 2019, Elsevier announced that the journal had been transferred back to its owner, the Traditional Chinese Medicine Periodical Press; ScienceDirect likewise notes that it was transferred back to the society as of 2019, while continuing to show production and hosting by Elsevier and copyright held by the Traditional Chinese Medicine Periodical Press. Its identifiers also appear in two forms in different records. Many article citations and bibliographic listings use ISSN 0255-2922, including clinical articles indexed in MEDLINE-derived records, while the ScienceDirect and Elsevier subscription records use ISSN 0254-6272. Reference listings also give its CODEN as JTCMEC, its standard abbreviation as J. Tradit. Chin. Med. and its OCLC number as 08676745.

Indexing, Categories and Standing

Whatever the differences between individual listings, the journal's presence in the major biomedical databases is consistent. It is abstracted and indexed in EMBASE, MEDLINE, the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, and other journal listings add PubMed and Web of Science coverage. Scopus-based listings place its coverage from 1996 onward and classify it in Complementary and Alternative Medicine and in Medicine (miscellaneous), with its best quartile recorded as Q2 in complementary and alternative medicine in some recent listings. SCImago's China ranking for complementary and alternative medicine likewise places the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine second among the Chinese titles it lists in that category, with an SJR of 0.502. Such rankings move from year to year and differ between providers, so they are best read as evidence of a sustained, indexed presence in the international literature rather than as a fixed score. For a journal founded to make Chinese medicine visible abroad, inclusion in MEDLINE, Scopus and the Science Citation Index Expanded is the practical measure of success: it means its articles can be found, cited and checked through the same systems researchers use for the rest of world medicine.

The Research in Its Pages

The individual articles indexed from the journal show the range described above in concrete form. Its clinical research has included a randomised controlled trial, published in 2014, of Chinese herbs combined with in vitro fertilisation and embryo transfer in 433 women and couples with infertility, carried out at a Beijing reproductive centre, and a multicentre, prospective, single-blind randomised trial of Western medication plus traditional Chinese medicine preparations in chronic heart failure. Smaller clinical studies have examined a modified Lingguizhugan decoction combined with weekend fasting in twenty-one patients with metabolic syndrome, and five-element music therapy in fifty elderly residents of a Beijing nursing home with seasonal affective disorder. Its basic investigation has included animal studies of the anti-anxiety activity of Angelica archangelica extracts in rats, of the hot characteristics of fuzi, a prepared aconite medicine, using animal thermotropism behaviour, of a Wenxiao II decoction's effects on atherosclerosis markers in rabbits, and of lingzhi, or Ganoderma lucidum, spores in mice. A 2013 theoretical article on the logical thinking involved in pattern differentiation — the diagnostic reasoning at the heart of Chinese medicine — illustrates the journal's continued attention to theory alongside experiments and trials.

Distinguishing the Journal and Its Significance

The journal needs to be distinguished from several similarly named titles. It is not the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medical Sciences, a separate quarterly sponsored by Beijing University of Chinese Medicine and Tsinghua University Press and supervised by China's Ministry of Education, nor the Chinese Journal of Integrative Medicine, a different Beijing journal concerned with combining traditional Chinese and modern medicine. The Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine is the older, sponsor-backed Beijing title whose Chinese lineage reaches back to 1955 and whose English edition began in 1981. Its significance rests on that combination of age, sponsorship and language. It carried the authority of the China Association of Chinese Medicine and the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, it spoke to foreign readers in English and in five other languages, and it presented the whole field — acupuncture, materia medica, massotherapy, mind-body and palliative therapies, clinical observation and basic investigation — in a single journal. For historians of Chinese medicine and for practitioners outside China, it remains one of the principal records of how traditional Chinese medicine presented itself to the world in the decades after 1981.