About Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Natural Science Edition)

Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Natural Science Edition)

Overview and identity

The Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Natural Science Edition) is the Chinese-language natural science journal of Yunnan Minzu University in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan Province. It is the science companion to the university's Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition, and together the two editions carry the research output of one of China's earliest universities founded for the country's ethnic groups. Where the philosophy and social sciences edition is known nationally for ethnology and ethnic-minority studies, the natural science edition records the same university's work in mathematics, the physical and chemical sciences, computing, engineering and the environmental sciences.

The edition has held a recognised place in China's science-journal system for more than a decade. It has been a source journal of the Statistical Source Periodicals of Chinese Science and Technology Papers — the list often described as China's core science and technology journals — continuously since 2012, and it has been rated an excellent science and technology journal of Chinese universities. An older university profile also noted that the natural science edition's impact factor ranked second among similar journals in Yunnan, a sign of the standing it built among the province's university science journals.

The sponsoring university: founded in 1951 for China's ethnic groups

Yunnan Minzu University was founded on 1 August 1951, in part to train government leaders who would assist the minority ethnic groups of Yunnan and ensure their political rights. It began as the Yunnan Nationalities Institute and was one of the earliest ethnic higher-learning institutions established in the People's Republic of China. On 16 April 2003 it was renamed Yunnan Minzu University, the name its journal now carries.

The modern university is a provincial key university jointly built by the Ministry of Education, the State Ethnic Affairs Commission and the People's Government of Yunnan Province. It has grown into a comprehensive university covering ten discipline categories — philosophy, economics, law, pedagogy, literature, history, science, engineering, management and art — with a structure that stresses the arts and sciences equally. University profiles report more than 30,000 full-time students, over 60 per cent of them from ethnic minorities, alongside more than 600 international students from over 20 countries and over 1,800 faculty members. Its campuses lie in Kunming's Wuhua District and in the Chenggong District, where the Yuhua Campus hosts its international school.

A two-edition journal

Yunnan Minzu University publishes its学报 — its university journal — in two editions, a division standard among Chinese comprehensive universities. The Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition, identified by the Chinese serial number CN 53-1191/C in its article identifiers, is a source journal of the Chinese Social Sciences Citation Index (CSSCI) and a Chinese core journal in comprehensive humanities and social sciences. The Natural Science Edition is its counterpart for the sciences.

The pairing matters for understanding the natural science edition's character. The university's public identity rests heavily on ethnology, ethnic languages and literature, and Southeast and South Asian studies, and those strengths belong to the social sciences edition. The natural science edition shows the other half of the institution: a university that also maintains schools of mathematics and computer science, of electrical and information engineering, and of chemistry and environment, and whose science faculties need a journal of record of their own.

The university's science base

The research the edition publishes grows out of identifiable science strengths at the university. Its listed schools include Mathematics and Computer Science, Electric and Informative Engineering, and Chemistry and Environment, and organic chemistry appears among the university's provincial-level key courses. Chinese-language profiles of the university list chemistry, including the chemistry of ethnic medicine, among its characteristic and advantageous disciplines — a field that joins laboratory chemistry to Yunnan's long traditions of minority medicinal plants and remedies.

That science base sits inside a university whose library holds rare collections for ethnic studies, including the Beiye Scriptures and the Dongba Scriptures, and whose research institutions include an Academy of Ethnic Studies. The natural science edition therefore operates in an institution where scientific work is continually in conversation with ethnic and regional knowledge, from the chemistry of traditional medicines to the environmental study of a mountainous, biologically rich border province.

Scope and subject coverage

As the natural science edition of a comprehensive university, the journal's scope follows the university's science and engineering faculties: mathematics and computer science, physics and electronic information, chemistry and chemical research, and environmental science. These are the disciplines its sponsoring schools teach and research, and they give the edition the broad, general-science profile typical of a Chinese university学报 natural science edition rather than the narrow focus of a specialist journal.

Within that breadth, Yunnan gives the edition regional colour that a similar journal in another province would not have. The province is one of China's most ecologically diverse, and the university's chemistry and environment school works in a setting of high mountains, major river headwaters and rich plant resources. Research on ethnic medicine and on the natural products of the province connects the edition's chemistry pages directly to the university's founding mission among Yunnan's peoples.

Standing and indexing

The edition's clearest documented distinction is its continuous presence since 2012 in the Statistical Source Periodicals of Chinese Science and Technology Papers, the statistical source list maintained from Chinese science and technology paper data and commonly treated as the core list for science and technology journals. Remaining on such a list continuously, rather than appearing once, indicates that the journal sustained the citation and publication standards the list measures across successive evaluations.

Its rating as an excellent science and technology journal of Chinese universities adds a second, peer-facing mark of quality within the university-journal sector. Together with the second-place impact-factor standing among similar Yunnan journals noted in university profiles, these records distinguish the edition from the many provincial university journals that publish without national list recognition, and they explain why the clean-file record for this title rests on indexing evidence rather than on a single identifier: no ISSN was attested in the sources consulted for this profile, and none is claimed here.

Kunming and the Yunnan setting

Kunming, the journal's home, is Yunnan's capital, known as the Spring City for its mild climate, and the seat of a university created to serve a province of exceptional ethnic diversity. Yunnan Minzu University was founded to instruct leaders for the minority peoples of that province, and it has received students and scholars from more than 80 countries across its history, with cooperative relations with universities including Baylor University and the University of Virginia in the United States, the University of Bergen in Norway and La Trobe University in Australia.

For a natural science journal, that setting is not decoration. The university's science is done in a border province adjoining Southeast Asia, in a city that hosts the university's China-ASEAN education and training functions, and among student and faculty communities drawn from the ethnic groups whose environments, medicines and resources the science often studies. The edition is where that locally rooted science enters the national Chinese journal literature.

Relationship to the social sciences edition

Read alongside its companion, the natural science edition completes the university's scholarly portrait. The Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition carries ethnology, ethnic-minority studies, history and the languages and cultures of Southeast and South Asia, and carries the CSSCI and core-journal honours described above. The Natural Science Edition carries the mathematics, computing, chemistry, engineering and environmental work of the same university and carries the science-list honours described in this profile.

Chinese university profiles themselves present the two editions together, noting that the university holds both a philosophy and social sciences edition and a natural science edition. The natural science edition should therefore not be mistaken for a minor adjunct: it is the half of the journal through which a university famous for ethnic studies demonstrates that it is also, in its own description, a comprehensive university giving equal stress to arts and sciences.

Readership and role

The edition's readers are researchers and teachers in mathematics, computer science, chemistry, electronic information and environmental science, at Yunnan Minzu University and in the national communities of those fields, together with the postgraduate students of a university that has enrolled master's students since the 1990s and doctoral students since 2013. Its Chinese-language articles form part of the national record of science at China's ethnic universities.

Catalogued as the Natural Science Edition of the Journal of Yunnan Minzu University and published in Kunming by a university founded on 1 August 1951 and renamed in April 2003, the edition stands as the science journal of one of China's first ethnic universities — continuously listed among China's statistical source science journals since 2012, and the publishing voice of the university's mathematics, computing, chemistry and environmental research in the heart of multi-ethnic Yunnan.