About 中国中医基础医学杂志

中国中医基础医学杂志 (Chinese Journal of Basic Medicine in Traditional Chinese Medicine): Complete Journal Profile

中国中医基础医学杂志, rendered in English as the Chinese Journal of Basic Medicine in Traditional Chinese Medicine and cited in English-language reference lists under abbreviations including Chin. J. Basic Med. Tradit. Chin. Med. and J. Basic Chin. Med., is a Chinese-language medical journal devoted to the basic, foundational research of traditional Chinese medicine. Its ISSN is 1006-3250, the identifier embedded in its article DOIs in the form 10.19945/j.cnki.issn.1006-3250. The journal's volume numbering places its first volume in 1995: volume 1 appeared in 1995, volume 28 in 2022, volume 29 in 2023 and volume 30 in 2024, a continuous annual sequence. Its issue numbering within those volumes runs to a twelfth issue, as in volume 29, issue 12, in 2023, which establishes a monthly publication rhythm. It is published in Beijing, the centre of China's national traditional Chinese medicine research establishment, and it serves a defined and important niche: not clinical case reporting in general, not the whole of traditional Chinese medicine at once, but the basic theory, basic mechanisms and basic experimental science on which clinical traditional Chinese medicine claims to rest.

This profile is written to the site's no-fabrication standard, and that standard matters more than usual here. English-language information about this journal is thin, fragmented and often confused with several similarly named journals. Where a fact is verified from the journal's own citation record, from its DOI pattern, from its volume history or from scholarly articles citing it, this profile states it. Where a fact could not be verified from an official source in the material consulted, such as a current article processing charge, an acceptance rate, or a complete present-day editorial roster, this profile says that the detail is not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted, rather than supplying a plausible-sounding figure. A profile that admits its limits is more useful to a researcher than one that invents precision.

At a Glance

Identity: Which Journal This Is, and Which It Is Not

Traditional Chinese medicine publishing in China includes several journals with overlapping English names, and confusing them corrupts a bibliography. This journal, ISSN 1006-3250, is the Chinese-language journal of basic medicine in traditional Chinese medicine, 中国中医基础医学杂志. It is not the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, ISSN 0254-6272, the long-running journal sponsored by the China Association of Chinese Medicine and the China Academy of Chinese Medical Sciences, which is a different title with a different ISSN and a clinical and general traditional medicine remit. It is not Chinese Medicine, the open access BioMed Central journal in English. It is not the World Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The decisive identifier in every case is the ISSN and the DOI stem: an article carrying DOI 10.19945/j.cnki.issn.1006-3250 belongs to this journal, whatever abbreviated or variant English rendering the citing article uses for its name, and the variety of those renderings in real reference lists, Chin. J. Basic Med. Tradit. Chin. Med., J. Basic Chin. Med., China Journal of Basic Medicine of Traditional Chinese Medicine and others, is a translation and abbreviation variation applied to one Chinese title, not evidence of several journals.

The journal's participation in China's traditional medicine scholarly infrastructure is independently visible. It appears in the list of participating medical journals supporting the international traditional medicine clinical trial registration initiative hosted by the China Center for Evidence-Based Traditional Chinese Medicine, under its English name Chinese Journal of Basic Medicine in Traditional Chinese Medicine, alongside the other leading national traditional Chinese medicine journals. That listing confirms two things a profile needs: that the English title used here is the journal's recognised English rendering, and that the journal is an active, recognised participant in current national efforts to raise reporting standards in traditional medicine research, including prospective trial registration.

What Basic Medicine Means in This Journal

The word basic in the title translates the Chinese 基础, foundation, and it defines the scope. Traditional Chinese medicine rests on a body of theory, concepts such as yin and yang, the zang-fu organ systems understood in traditional terms, qi, blood and body fluids, meridians and collaterals, syndrome differentiation, and on a materia medica of herbal formulas whose actions were described in traditional language long before molecular biology existed. Basic research in this field is the work of testing, explaining, revising and sometimes challenging that foundation with modern methods. This journal is the venue for that work in its Chinese-language national literature.

Theory and foundational concepts

The journal publishes studies of traditional theory itself: analyses of yin and yang theory and its applications, interpretations of classical texts, work on syndrome concepts and their standardisation, and conceptual papers on the cultural and philosophical dimensions of Chinese medicine. A verified example of the genre is the 2020 analysis of yin and yang theory in traditional Chinese medicine published in this journal, volume 28, pages 9 to 12, which later theoretical work in English-language journals cites as a source. Such papers matter beyond China because English-language writing on traditional Chinese medicine theory repeatedly draws on this Chinese basic-theory literature, usually at one remove through citations of exactly this kind.

Mechanism and experimental studies

The larger modern share of a journal of this type is experimental: studies that take a traditional formula, a single herb, an acupuncture intervention or a traditional syndrome model and examine its action in animal models, cell systems or patients using contemporary measures. The citation record shows the pattern clearly. Articles in this journal report, for example, work on cell pyroptosis in non-alcoholic steatohepatitis interpreted through the traditional theory of treating the liver from the lung, experimental studies of kidney deficiency models and gonadal function in arthritis models dating back to the journal's first volume in 1995, and clinical and mechanistic studies across oncology supportive care, metabolic disease and neurological conditions in which a traditional intervention is the object of study. Network pharmacology, molecular docking and signalling pathway analysis, the standard modern toolkit for explaining multi-component herbal formulas, are characteristic methods in this literature, and reviews in English-language journals cite this journal's papers as primary evidence within it.

Reviews and syntheses

Review and commentary articles form the third strand. A 2023 review in this journal on traditional Chinese medicine treatment of pancreatic cancer, volume 29, issue 12, is a typical example, cited in later work on syndrome distribution in pancreatic cancer. Such reviews serve the Chinese clinical and research community by consolidating a fast-moving experimental literature in its own language, and they serve outside researchers as a map: a topic with a recent review in this journal is a topic where the Chinese basic research community is active, and the review's reference list is a route into primary studies that English databases index incompletely.

Publication Pattern: Volumes, Issues and Identifiers

The journal's bibliographic skeleton can be reconstructed entirely from its own citation footprint, and this profile relies on that footprint rather than on unsourced directory claims. Volume 1, issue 1, appeared in 1995, carrying, among other work, an experimental study on the mechanism of gonadal dysfunction in a kidney-deficiency arthritis model. Volume 22 appeared in 2016, volume 28 in 2020 and 2022 citations, volume 29 in 2023 and volume 30 in 2024, with issue numbers reaching 12 in a volume year: the journal is monthly and has maintained an unbroken annual volume sequence for three decades. Each article carries a DOI under the prefix 10.19945 with the journal's ISSN embedded, in the standard Chinese CNKI-pattern form, followed by year, issue and article number, for example the 2024 article in volume 30, issue 5, on modified Yupingfeng powder for viral infectious diseases, DOI 10.19945/j.cnki.issn.1006-3250.2024.05.024. For a librarian or a systematic reviewer, that DOI pattern is the most reliable retrieval key for this journal in Chinese databases, more reliable than any English title variant.

The JournalsWorld stored record for this post is sparse: it gives the ISSN 1006-3250, describes the focus as traditional Chinese medicine studies, medical research and treatments and history of medicine studies, and gives an h-index of 1 from its OpenAlex-derived summary. That h-index should be read as a statement about OpenAlex's coverage of a Chinese-language journal, not about the journal's standing in its own literature. Citation databases built mainly on English-language sources undercount Chinese journals severely, and a journal that is routinely cited in the Chinese traditional medicine literature, and cited as primary evidence in English-language systematic and narrative reviews, is not a journal of negligible influence merely because an English-centred index records few of its citations. This profile therefore reports the stored figure with its source and declines to rank the journal by it.

Scope as Shown on the JournalsWorld Record, Read Carefully

The subject labels on the stored record, traditional Chinese medicine studies, traditional Chinese medicine analysis, acupuncture treatment research, history of medicine and history of science and medicine among them, are broadly consistent with the journal's contents as evidenced by its citations, with one correction of emphasis. The journal is not primarily a clinical acupuncture journal or a general medical journal. Acupuncture and clinical topics appear when they are studied at the basic level, as mechanism, model or theory, or when a clinical study tests a foundational claim. A researcher who needs routine clinical case series should look to China's clinical traditional Chinese medicine journals; a researcher who needs to know why a formula is claimed to work, what a syndrome model predicts, or how a classical concept is being reinterpreted experimentally, is in this journal's territory. The history of medicine label is genuine but secondary: historical and cultural studies of Chinese medicine appear, as the journal's own record of an article on the cultural roots of Chinese medicine in its early volumes shows, because the history of the theory is part of the foundation the journal exists to examine.

Authors, Review and Practical Submission Realities

This is a Chinese-language journal for a Chinese research community, and the practical realities follow from that. Manuscripts are in Chinese. The author community is the staff and students of China's traditional Chinese medicine universities, academies and hospital research departments, the institutions that produce the experimental basic research described above, frequently supported by institutional and national research funding for basic theory work. Submission, review and publication operate through the journal's Chinese editorial channels and the Chinese academic journal platforms through which its articles and DOIs are distributed. Detailed operational facts that an author would want, the current submission system address, manuscript formatting rules, review timetable, page charges or other fees, and the current editorial roster, could not be verified from an official English-language source in the material consulted for this profile, and they are therefore recorded here as not publicly disclosed in those sources, to be confirmed on the journal's current Chinese editorial pages before any submission is prepared. Inventing them would break the rule that governs this whole profile series, and an author who acts on an invented fee or timetable is worse off than an author told honestly to check the primary source.

What can be said responsibly about standards is this. The journal participates in the national traditional medicine journal grouping that supports prospective clinical trial registration and reporting standards, which signals an editorial environment in which ethics, registration and reporting requirements for clinical research are taken seriously. Its articles follow the standard Chinese medical journal article architecture, with structured abstracts and DOI registration, visible across its citation record. And its longevity, thirty volumes without a break in sequence, is itself evidence of a functioning, selective editorial operation sustained by a national research system, not of an ephemeral or pay-to-publish outlet, a distinction outside readers sometimes fail to make when they meet a non-English journal with a small English web footprint.

How Researchers Outside China Should Use This Journal

For a systematic reviewer, the journal is a reminder that a search confined to English-language databases is incomplete for traditional Chinese medicine basic research. The primary experimental literature on many formulas, models and mechanisms is Chinese, and this journal is one of its recognised venues. A defensible review search in this field states explicitly whether Chinese databases were searched, and if they were not, states that as a limitation, rather than presenting an English-only sample as the literature. For a reader following a single citation, the DOI is the reliable path: resolve the 10.19945 DOI, use the Chinese title and the volume, issue and page data from the citing reference, and expect the full text to be in Chinese, with translation needed for detailed appraisal. For a bibliographer, record the journal under its Chinese title with ISSN 1006-3250 and the English title given here, and treat all abbreviated English renderings in citing articles as variants of that one record.

Relationship to Other Journals in the Field

Placed among its neighbours, the journal's position is clear. General traditional Chinese medicine journals in China publish the field whole: clinic, theory, herbs and acupuncture together. Clinical journals publish treatment experience and trials. Materia medica journals publish drug and formula research in the pharmacological sense. This journal's distinct contribution is the foundation layer: theory, syndrome science, models, mechanisms and the experimental testing of traditional claims. Its citation by English-language journals across pharmacology, integrative medicine and traditional medicine reviews shows that this foundation layer is used internationally even though it is published nationally and in Chinese. That combination, nationally published, internationally cited at one remove, is common for strong Chinese specialist journals and should be described accurately rather than mistaken for obscurity.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the journal's ISSN? 1006-3250. It is embedded in every article DOI, which begins 10.19945/j.cnki.issn.1006-3250.

What does the Chinese title mean? 中国中医基础医学杂志 is the Chinese Journal of Basic Medicine in Traditional Chinese Medicine: the journal of the basic, foundational research of Chinese medicine.

When did it start? Its first volume appeared in 1995. Volume numbering is continuous: volume 29 is 2023 and volume 30 is 2024.

How often is it published? Monthly. Issue numbering within a volume year runs to issue 12.

In what language? Chinese. English-language information about the journal is limited, and this profile distinguishes verified facts from details that are not publicly disclosed in English sources.

Is it the same as the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine? No. That is a different journal, ISSN 0254-6272. The ISSN and DOI stem distinguish the two in every case.

Who is its publisher or sponsor? That detail could not be verified from an official English-language source consulted for this profile and is recorded as not publicly disclosed in those sources, rather than guessed. The journal is published in Beijing and participates in the national traditional medicine journal grouping supporting trial registration standards.

What fees does it charge authors? No fee figure is asserted. No verified official figure was found in the sources consulted, and authors should confirm current terms on the journal's Chinese editorial pages.

Why does its stored h-index look so low? Because the stored figure comes from an English-centred citation index with limited coverage of Chinese-language journals. Its citation presence in Chinese and international traditional medicine literature, documented in this profile, is the better evidence of its role.

Conclusion

中国中医基础医学杂志, the Chinese Journal of Basic Medicine in Traditional Chinese Medicine, ISSN 1006-3250, monthly since its first volume in 1995, is China's specialist venue for the foundational science of its traditional medicine: the theory, the syndrome models, the mechanisms of formulas and interventions, and the experimental testing of classical claims with modern methods. Its articles carry DOIs under 10.19945, its volume sequence is unbroken across thirty volumes, it participates in national efforts to raise traditional medicine reporting standards, and its papers are cited as primary evidence well beyond China. Its English-language footprint is small and sometimes garbled by variant title renderings, which this profile has separated from the verified record. Judged on that record, in its own literature and language, it is an established national specialist journal with a clear and continuing remit.