About Metabolism and Diseases

Metabolism and Diseases

Metabolism and Diseases is a peer-reviewed, open-access medical journal published by Ningxia Medical University in Yinchuan, Ningxia, China, with publishing services provided by Elsevier on behalf of KeAi Communications. Its stated aim is to highlight metabolic alterations and how different metabolic and related diseases interact with each other. The journal primarily covers current research developments on metabolic diseases across basic, clinical and preventive disciplines, and sets out to serve as a high-quality platform for the field; manuscripts go through a rigorous peer-review process. It is hosted on ScienceDirect, where its copyright line reads © Ningxia Medical University, its online ISSN is 3051-3073, and its articles carry DOIs in the journal's own series — the archive already extends to articles numbered into 2026.

The journal's premise reflects a shift in modern medicine. Metabolic disturbance — in glucose, lipids, energy balance and nutrition — is now understood to sit upstream of many of the world's most burdensome conditions, from diabetes and cardiovascular disease to fatty liver, neurodegeneration and cancer. A journal organised around metabolism itself, rather than around a single organ or specialty, can publish the interactions between those conditions: how cardiovascular metabolic disease relates to endocrine disorder, how tumours rewire metabolism, how environment and traditional medicine bear on metabolic health. Metabolism and Diseases was created by a medical university in China's northwest to host exactly that conversation, in English, for an international readership.

Ningxia Medical University: The Publishing Institution

The journal's owner and publisher is Ningxia Medical University, located in Yinchuan, the capital of the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region. The university was founded in 1958 as Ningxia Medical College. In 1972, Shanghai Railway Medical College relocated to Yinchuan and merged with the medical college of Ningxia University to rebuild the institution; Ningxia Health School and Ningxia Nursing School were incorporated in 2002, and the School of Medicine of Ningxia Normal University followed in 2014. In 2008, with the approval of China's Ministry of Education, the college was promoted to a comprehensive medical university under its present name. It is the only higher medical education institution in Ningxia. According to the university's own introduction, it comprises 17 secondary schools, 11 teaching and scientific research assistant departments, 12 affiliated hospitals, 14 teaching hospitals and 120 practical teaching bases, offers undergraduate majors alongside master's and doctoral programmes, and enrols more than 20,000 students in total, including international students from countries across Asia and Africa — a substantial clinical and academic base from which to run a specialist journal.

Scope: Ten Areas of Metabolic Research

The journal's coverage is organised into ten areas. They are: cardiovascular metabolic diseases; endocrine, nutritional metabolism and diseases; metabolic disorders of the nervous system; tumour and metabolism; pharmaceutical research on metabolic diseases; metabolism and diseases of the digestive system; metabolic disorders of muscles and bones; traditional medicine on metabolic diseases; environmental factors and metabolic diseases; and other metabolism-related research. The list maps the field's modern breadth — heart, hormones, brain, gut, muscle and bone — and two inclusions are distinctive. Traditional medicine is given its own area, reflecting both the university's setting, where traditional Chinese medicine coexists with Western medicine in teaching and practice, and a wider research interest in traditional approaches to metabolic conditions. Environmental factors likewise receive a dedicated area, acknowledging that air, diet environments, chemicals and lifestyle surroundings shape metabolic risk.

Article Types and Article Lengths

Metabolism and Diseases publishes four article types, each with specified requirements in its guide for authors. Original research articles run to 5,000–7,000 words excluding references, with abstracts of up to 250 words and at least 35 references; they are structured into abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusions and references, a maximum of ten authors is permitted on the byline, and additional contributors are listed in an appendix. Reviews run to 4,500–6,000 words excluding references, with at least 45 references; they open with a general summary in abstract form, put the study into context, concentrate on the most recent developments in the field, and must clearly describe the search strategy followed — keywords, inclusion and exclusion criteria and search engines. Frontier Express pieces, of about 2,000–2,500 words and without an abstract, discuss recent publications or events and include book reviews with critical analysis. Short Commentaries run to 1,000–2,000 words with abstracts of no more than 250 words and at least 20 references.

Editors-in-Chief and Editorial Leadership

The journal's Editors-in-Chief are Yideng Jiang of Ningxia Medical University and Tianru Jin of the University of Toronto in Canada — a pairing that anchors the journal in Yinchuan while giving it a senior editor in North American diabetes and metabolism research. The Executive Editor-in-Chief is Zhihong Liu of Ningxia Medical University. The deputy editors-in-chief form an international group: Bisen Ding of West China Second Hospital of Sichuan University in Chengdu; Gary F. Lewis of Toronto General Hospital's Department of Medicine and Department of Physiology; Wenhua Ling of Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou; Hani El-Nezami of the University of Eastern Finland; Ji Wu and Jian Zhang of Shanghai Jiao Tong University; Changhao Sun of Harbin Medical University; Dingbo Lin of Oklahoma State University in the United States; Yong Sun of China Food Publishing Co. in Beijing; and Yuhong Zhang of Ningxia Medical University. The journal also names a scientific editor, Lei Hao of Indiana University of Pennsylvania.

Editorial Board

The wider editorial board extends across China, North America and Europe. Members include Baisong Lu of Wake Forest School of Medicine and Hong Wang of Temple University School of Medicine in the United States; Zhaoping Li of the David Geffen School of Medicine at the University of California, Los Angeles; Dongmin Liu of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; Qunwei Zhang of the University of Louisville; Zhongping Feng and Hongshuo Sun of the University of Toronto; Xinjun Li of Lund University in Sweden; and Fulin Wang of Alberta's Ministry of Health in Canada. Chinese members come from institutions including Central South University, Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Nanjing University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Qingdao University, the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, Fudan University, Tianjin Medical University, Soochow University, Army Medical University and Xi'an Jiaotong University. The mix — endocrinology and nutrition alongside traditional Chinese medicine, pharmacology and public health — mirrors the journal's ten-area scope.

Peer Review and Publishing Ethics

Peer review at Metabolism and Diseases is single anonymized and described by the journal as rigorous. Submissions are first assessed by the editorial office; papers failing basic standards can be desk-rejected for being out of scope, raising ethical conflicts, showing high similarity, lacking originality, or having flaws in research design or methods. Suitable papers pass to the Editor-in-Chief, who invites reviewers or assigns a board member to do so; after at least two reviewers report, the editor feeds back reviewer and editorial comments to the authors, and the final decision on a revised manuscript is made jointly by the assigned editor and Editor-in-Chief. Submissions from editors and board members are handled confidentially by a different team member to avoid conflicts of interest. All submissions are screened automatically using iThenticate's CrossCheck for plagiarism and overlapping text — papers with high similarity are desk-rejected — and authors are encouraged to provide ORCiD identifiers. Authors must declare competing interests and funding sources under Elsevier's publishing ethics policies.

Open Access and Licensing

Metabolism and Diseases is a fully open-access journal: all articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download, including through its ScienceDirect journal homepage, where recent research articles are listed with their DOIs. The open-access model is supported by an article publishing charge payable by authors or on their behalf by their institution or funder. Reuse is governed by Creative Commons licensing: the journal's guide specifies the CC BY-NC-ND licence, which allows distribution and inclusion in collective works for non-commercial purposes, with appropriate credit and a link to the licence, provided the article is not altered; authors who must comply with a funder's policy may apply for a CC BY licence after acceptance. Ningxia Medical University, as journal owner, retains copyright of the overall compiled journal and its compiled issues, while KeAi Communications is granted non-exclusive publishing and distribution rights.

Readership and Significance

The journal addresses researchers and clinicians working on diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular and endocrine disease, nutritional science, metabolic aspects of cancer and neurology, metabolic pharmacology and preventive medicine, as well as scholars of traditional medicine and environmental health. Its significance for WorldNM's directory is twofold: it is a university-owned English-language medical title from Yinchuan — a city far less represented in international publishing than Beijing or Shanghai — and it embodies the KeAi–Elsevier model by which Chinese institutions publish internationally visible open-access journals. For WorldNM readers, Metabolism and Diseases is catalogued as a scholarly magazine published in Yinchuan, Ningxia, China, with its official home on the KeAi Publishing website and its articles hosted on ScienceDirect.