About Silk

Silk

Silk (Sichou) is a Chinese-language academic and technical journal published in Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China, devoted to silk science, sericulture and the silk industry. It carries the International Standard Serial Number ISSN 1001-7003, the identifier under which it is recorded in national and international journal directories and under which its articles are cited. The journal is sponsored by Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, co-sponsored by the China Silk Association and the China Textile Information Center. It is a Chinese core journal. This profile sets out the journal's identity, history, publisher, subject coverage, readership and standing, so that readers can place it accurately among China's large family of specialist scientific and technical periodicals and distinguish it from journals with similar names.

Identity and bibliographic record

The journal's Chinese title is Sichou, and the English title Silk is the rendering under which it appears in international indexes and library catalogues. Its bibliographic identity rests on three fixed points: the title, the ISSN 1001-7003, and its place of publication in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. Those three points matter because Chinese journal publishing contains many near-identical English titles, translated independently by different publishers. A reader verifying a citation from Silk should therefore check the ISSN and the Hangzhou imprint rather than the English title alone. The journal publishes in Chinese, the working language of the research and industry community it serves, with the apparatus of a standard Chinese scholarly journal: peer-reviewed articles, Chinese abstracts, references and classification under the Chinese library and journal systems. As a periodical of record for silk science, sericulture and the silk industry, it is catalogued in the Chinese national journal infrastructure, including the CNKI journal system through which most Chinese-language scholarly titles are distributed and searched.

History and development

Silk was founded in 1956. Its founding in 1956 places it within the great expansion of Chinese specialist periodical publishing, when research institutes, universities and industry systems across China established dedicated journals to circulate results that general science titles could not accommodate. Over the decades since, the journal has published continuously from Hangzhou, following its field through successive national science and industry programmes, through the reform-era growth of Chinese research output, and into the present period of digital distribution, in which Chinese journals are read principally through national databases and journal platforms. Continuity of title, sponsor and place over that span is itself a significant part of the journal's record: in a publishing landscape where titles are frequently renamed, merged or renumbered, a journal that has carried the same name and ISSN forward gives libraries and indexers a stable series against which a field's development can be traced year by year.

The journal was founded in 1956, is supervised by Zhejiang Sci-Tech University and co-sponsored by the university, the China Silk Association and the China Textile Information Center, and is a journal of the International Sericultural Commission's silk community and the China Silk Association; its editor-in-chief in recent years has been Professor Chen Wenxing, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering. In 2020 it was rated an RCCSE China authoritative academic journal, ranked first among silk-field journals. Zhejiang Sci-Tech University itself descends from the Sericulture Academy founded in Hangzhou in 1897, and Hangzhou is the historic centre of China's silk industry.

Publisher and institutional home

The journal's institutional home is Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, co-sponsored by the China Silk Association and the China Textile Information Center. In the Chinese system, a journal's sponsor is not a passive imprint: the sponsoring institute or society supplies the editorial community, the reviewer pool and much of the subject expertise that defines what the journal publishes, and the editorial office is normally located with the sponsor in Hangzhou. For Silk, that arrangement ties the journal directly to Zhejiang Sci-Tech University and to the working research and professional community around it. Manuscripts arrive from that community and from cognate institutes, universities and enterprises across China; editorial standards are set within it; and the journal in turn acts as one of the sponsor's principal channels for reporting results to the wider field. Understanding the sponsor is therefore the shortest route to understanding the journal: its scope, its authors and its readers all follow from the institution that stands behind it.

Scope and subject coverage

The journal's declared and practised coverage centres on silk science, sericulture and the silk industry. Its articles span, among other subjects, sericulture and silkworm science; silk reeling, throwing and weaving; dyeing, printing and finishing of silk; silk fibre and fabric science, including silk fibroin materials; silk trade, industry development and standards; silk history, culture and heritage. Taken together, those subjects define a coherent professional territory rather than a miscellaneous collection: each is a recognised sub-field in which Chinese researchers, engineers and practitioners publish methods, measurements, experiments and reviews. The journal accepts the standard genres of Chinese scholarly publishing within that territory — original research articles reporting new data or methods, applied studies reporting trials, designs or field experience, and review articles that survey the state of a topic for readers who need a reliable entry point. Contributions are expected to be grounded in verifiable evidence: experimental or observational data, documented engineering practice, or properly attributed synthesis of the published literature.

Inside the subject territory

Two strands illustrate the character of the coverage. Work on sericulture and silkworm science addresses the foundations of the field: how its basic objects and processes behave, how they are measured, and how new materials, organisms, devices or methods change what practitioners can do. Work on silk reeling, throwing and weaving carries the same questions toward application, where results are tested against the conditions of real production, construction or operation. Around those strands the journal also publishes on dyeing, printing and finishing of silk and on silk fibre and fabric science, including silk fibroin materials, which connect its core territory to neighbouring disciplines and to the standards, testing and quality systems on which professional practice depends. This balance — fundamental studies, applied studies and the connective work between them — is characteristic of Chinese institute and society journals, whose readers typically include both laboratory researchers and the engineers or specialists who must use research results at full scale. It also explains the journal's durability: a title that serves only one end of that spectrum loses the other, while Silk has held both within a single, recognisably bounded field.

Editorial character and readership

Silk is written in Chinese for a Chinese professional readership: researchers at institutes and universities, engineers and technical staff in the relevant industry, postgraduate students entering the field, and the information and standards specialists who track it. Its editorial character follows from that readership. Articles are expected to state their methods clearly enough to be checked and reused, to report results with the data that support them, and to situate new work against prior Chinese and international literature. Review and survey content plays a recognised role as well, because in fast-moving technical fields a dependable Chinese-language synthesis is often the most efficient route by which practitioners outside a narrow speciality can absorb new developments. The journal thus performs three functions at once for its community in and beyond Zhejiang: a record of new results, a channel for professional experience that might otherwise remain inside individual institutes or enterprises, and a training ground on which younger researchers learn the conventions of scholarly publication in their discipline.

Indexing, evaluation and standing

Chinese scholarly journals are evaluated through national systems that are distinct from, and additional to, international indexing. It is a Chinese core journal. Core status in China is awarded through competitive, periodically renewed evaluations — principally the Peking University Chinese core journals programme and the Institute of Scientific and Technical Information of China's science and technology core listings — and is the marker by which universities and institutes judge domestic journals for promotion, funding and library acquisition. Alongside those systems, citation performance is tracked through the Chinese Science Citation Database and related national citation reports where the journal is covered. For readers outside China, the practical consequence is that Silk is not an obscure house newsletter but a title that has repeatedly passed national peer evaluation in silk science, sericulture and the silk industry, with a documented ISSN record in international directories to match.

Place among related journals

China's journal landscape in this area is crowded, and precise identification matters. Silk (ISSN 1001-7003, Hangzhou) is distinct from general textile journals such as the Journal of Textile Research. The distinction is not a technicality: the titles have different sponsors, different editorial offices and different ISSNs, and their articles are not interchangeable in citation. What Silk contributes to the landscape is the perspective of its own sponsoring community in Hangzhou — the problems that community works on, the conditions of Zhejiang and its region where relevant, and the applied experience accumulated there. National fields are built from such regional and institutional centres, and the journal system preserves their separate voices rather than merging them into a single national title. For the directory reader, the safe rule is the one this profile follows: identify a Chinese journal by title, ISSN, sponsor and city together, and the apparent confusion of similar English names resolves into a set of clearly separate publications.

Continuing role

Silk continues to publish from Hangzhou as the journal of record for its sponsoring community and its field. Its continuing role is the one it has performed since 1956: to circulate verified research and professional experience in silk science, sericulture and the silk industry through a stable, nationally evaluated Chinese-language title, identified by ISSN 1001-7003 and anchored in Zhejiang Sci-Tech University. As Chinese research output in the field continues to grow and to internationalise, the journal's archive — volume by volume, a record of what the field knew and did — remains its most durable contribution, and its current issues continue to add to that record for the researchers, engineers and practitioners who constitute its readership.