About The Crop Journal

The Crop Journal

The Crop Journal is an open-access international journal of crop science based in Beijing, China, published by KeAi and Elsevier on behalf of the Crop Science Society of China and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences. Launched in 2013, it publishes research on crop genetics, breeding, physiology, agronomy and biotechnology for cereals, legumes, oil and industrial crops. It has become China's principal English-language crop-science journal — a bimonthly title that ranks in the first quartile of its field and carries Chinese crop research, from the world's largest agricultural research system, to a global readership.

The journal was created to fill a specific gap. When its first issue appeared in 2013, its founding editor-in-chief, Jianmin Wan of the Institute of Crop Science of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, introduced it as a new scientific journal for the global crop science community, launched by the Crop Science Society of China and the Institute of Crop Science to meet the need for a major Asia-based journal covering the diverse fields of crop science. That founding purpose — an Asia-based journal of international standard — still defines the title.

Overview and identifying details

The journal's print ISSN is 2095-5421 and its online ISSN is 2214-5141. Its standard abbreviation is Crop J. It is a bimonthly, international, peer-reviewed research journal, appearing in six issues a year, and it is published open access: every peer-reviewed research article is published open access, universally and freely available via the internet. Publishing services are provided by Elsevier on behalf of KeAi Communications, and articles carry DOIs in the journal's 10.1016/j.cj series.

Sponsorship is shared between the Crop Science Society of China, the national learned society for the discipline, and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences in Beijing — in practice through its Institute of Crop Science (also rendered Institute of Crop Sciences), which bibliographic records list as the publishing institution. The journal is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded and Scopus, and Scopus-based rankings place it in Q1 in both Agronomy and Crop Science and Plant Science.

Founding and development

The first issue of The Crop Journal appeared in 2013, opening with the editorial "The Crop Journal: A new scientific journal for the global crop science community." The editorial panel was selected worldwide to bring a broad range and depth of expertise, and the founding editorial made the journal's success depend explicitly on the global community it sought to serve — scientists all over the world were its constituency from the first page, not an audience added later.

The journal's citation trajectory records how that ambition worked out. Journal-level metrics drawn from citation databases show its impact factor rising from below 1 in its early years — 0.684 recorded for 2014 — through 1.631 in 2015, 3.209 in 2017, and into the 6 range by the early 2020s, with 6.13 recorded for 2024 and 6.72 for 2025 in SciJournal's database compilation. Whatever the year-to-year figure, the direction is consistent: a journal founded in 2013 entered the top tier of agronomy and plant science titles within a decade, a rise that parallels the growing weight of Chinese crop research in world literature.

Aims and scope

The Crop Journal publishes on the broadest aspects of crop sciences. Its current aims and scope welcome original submissions offering new and fundamental insights into the origins, development and functions of crops, from the molecular to the whole-organism level, together with crop-environment interactions under biotic and abiotic conditions. It encourages work spanning a range of technologies, from structural, molecular and cellular biology, biochemistry, genetics and molecular physiology to more recent advances such as genome editing, high-resolution single-cell transcriptome analysis, genomic selection, molecular breeding and smart agriculture.

The journal also welcomes advanced work in synthetic biology, modelling, bioinformatics software, and large-scale omics analyses and databases, with minimal experimental support acceptable where the resource itself is the contribution. Its classic scope statement lists the field's full breadth: crop genetics, breeding, agronomy, crop physiology, germplasm resources, grain chemistry, grain storage and processing, crop management practices, crop biotechnology and biomathematics. The combination — fundamental insight required, methods unrestricted — is the journal's editorial signature.

Research themes

The journal organises its interests in themes that include crop genetics and breeding; crop genomics and molecular breeding; plant biotechnology, including advances and new software for genetic analysis and breeding; and crop big data, databases and genomic resources. Recent article collections add crop phenotyping — studies applying phenotyping to crop monitoring — reflecting the field's turn toward high-throughput measurement of plant traits in the field and controlled environments.

Its recent contents illustrate the range concretely. Papers have addressed the Green Revolution gene Rht-D1b in wheat, showing it orchestrates tiller angle and canopy architecture beyond its famous dwarfing effect; a rice study of the OsIAA8–OsARF12 module regulating deep rooting through auxin transport genes; and work across cereals, legumes, oil and industrial crops generally. A single journal in which wheat canopy architecture, rice root development and crop phenotyping methods sit side by side is doing exactly what a general crop-science title should do: keeping the subfields in conversation.

Crops covered

The journal's remit covers the crops on which food, feed and industrial agriculture depend. Its inventory description specifies cereals, legumes, oil crops and industrial crops; its scope embraces the major staples — rice, wheat and maize among them — together with the legume, oilseed, fibre and other cultivated species studied by the institutes of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences and by crop scientists worldwide. Work on a crop is judged by the fundamental insight it offers, so a study in a model or minor crop belongs when its conclusions transfer, while a purely local variety report without wider insight does not meet the journal's stated bar.

That insistence on mechanism over description appears in the guide for authors: research papers must provide minimal mechanistic insights instead of simple description of experimental data, and studies of genes already characterised in other or model species must show sufficient novel discovery in the target species. Novelty is described as crucial in deciding whether a manuscript proceeds to full review.

Article types and editorial process

Research papers and short communications are submitted through the journal's manuscript submission portal. Research papers report original studies, typically with up to seven figures or tables and no more than about 7,000 words in the main text with up to 70 references. Short communications carry significant discoveries, temporarily incomplete works or novel but limited data, with one to two figures or tables and up to about 3,000 words. Other types — review articles, Spotlight, Highlight and Perspective pieces, and editorials — are generally commissioned by invitation only, a model that lets editors shape the journal's review and commentary content deliberately.

Speed is a published feature of the process. The journal's ScienceDirect page reports summary turnaround figures — on the order of ten days to first decision, around 47 days to decision after review, about 130 days to acceptance and only a few days from acceptance to online publication at the time those figures were displayed. Figures change, and authors should check the current page, but the commitment they signal is structural: an open-access bimonthly competing for strong crop papers must decide and publish quickly.

Open access and publishing arrangements

Every peer-reviewed research article in The Crop Journal is published open access, freely accessible via the internet, under the KeAi–Elsevier model used by many leading China-based journals: a Chinese society and academy own and direct the title, KeAi provides the publishing house, and Elsevier provides the ScienceDirect platform and global distribution. Manuscripts must not be under simultaneous consideration or published elsewhere, though prior appearance on preprint servers, as a poster abstract or oral presentation, or as a degree thesis is not treated as formal publication — a policy aligned with modern crop-science practice, where preprints are common.

For readers, open access removes the subscription barrier between Chinese crop research and the farmers'-field problems it addresses in other countries; a breeder or agronomist anywhere can read the journal without institutional access. For authors, the journal offers Q1 visibility in SCI-Expanded and Scopus, rapid handling, and an audience spanning molecular biologists and field agronomists alike.

Institutional home: CAAS and the Crop Science Society of China

The Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences is China's national agricultural research organisation, and its Institute of Crop Science in Beijing is a centre for research on the genetics, breeding and cultivation of major crops, including national programmes on crop germplasm and molecular breeding. The Crop Science Society of China is the discipline's national society. A journal jointly backed by the academy institute and the society speaks for the organised crop-science community of China in a way no single-university title could.

That backing also explains the journal's breadth. CAAS institutes work on virtually every major crop grown in China, and the society's membership spans breeding, physiology, agronomy and biotechnology. The Crop Journal was designed as their shared international platform — the English-language face of a research system whose Chinese-language journals, however strong, could not reach the whole world.

Place in crop science publishing

Internationally, crop science has long been served by society journals from Europe and North America. The Crop Journal added a major Asia-based entrant, headquartered where a large share of the world's crop research is now performed. Its Q1 standing in agronomy and plant science, its rising citation record and its open-access model have made it a routine first-choice venue for strong Chinese crop papers that a generation ago would have gone abroad by default, and an increasingly common choice for authors elsewhere.

Within the family of China-based English journals in this inventory, it complements the specialist titles around it: where Rice Science serves one crop in depth and horticultural and plant-biology journals serve their own communities, The Crop Journal is the generalist flagship for field crops as a whole. Its founding editorial promised a journal for the global crop science community; its first decade, measured in submissions, citations and quartile rankings, is the record of that promise being kept.

Readership and authors

The journal's readership includes crop geneticists and breeders, molecular biologists and biotechnologists, crop physiologists and agronomists, germplasm specialists, grain chemists, and researchers in phenotyping, bioinformatics and smart agriculture — in academies, universities, seed companies and international centres. Authors considering the journal should bring work with fundamental, transferable insight into how crops originate, develop and function, supported by the molecular, physiological or field evidence the question requires.

Published from Beijing by KeAi and Elsevier for the Crop Science Society of China and the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, The Crop Journal stands as the principal English-language journal of Chinese crop science — and, by its founding design and its citation record, as one of the international journals of crop science as a whole.