Cement Science and Concrete Technology

About Cement Science and Concrete Technology

Cement Science and Concrete Technology — Journal Profile

Cement Science and Concrete Technology — in Japanese セメント・コンクリート論文集, literally a collected-papers journal for cement and concrete — is the annual research journal of the Japan Cement Association. It carries the print ISSN 0916-3182 and the online ISSN 2187-3313 shown on this Journals World record, publishes one volume each year, and is distributed in full, free to read, through J-STAGE, Japan's national platform for scholarly journals. Its articles carry DOIs in the pattern 10.14250/cement.{volume}.{article}, a detail visible in current volumes and useful for citation checking. Volume 79 appeared in 2025, which places the journal's numbering deep into a run spanning many decades of Japanese cement research. Unlike a commercial monthly, this is an association annual: a year's refereed work from Japan's cement and concrete research community, gathered into a single large issue that serves simultaneously as journal, as conference-adjacent record and as an archive of the industry's scientific progress.

The journal's subject is the material on which modern Japan — and modern everywhere — is built. Cement chemistry, concrete properties, durability under marine, thermal and chemical attack, admixtures, supplementary cementitious materials, recycling, carbon reduction and the behaviour of structures over decades all fall inside its pages. Recent volumes on J-STAGE show the field's current centre of gravity with unusual clarity: three-dimensional printing of mortar and its frost resistance, mortars designed to absorb carbon dioxide, hydration measured by advanced diffraction and magnetic resonance methods, and the long engineering argument about how to keep making an indispensable material while cutting its very large carbon footprint. This profile explains the journal's identity and publisher, its structure on J-STAGE, its scope in depth, how to read and cite it, and what authors and librarians need to know.

Identity at a Glance

The Japan Cement Association and the Annual Model

The Japan Cement Association is the industry association for Japan's cement sector, and its journal reflects an association's distinctive strengths. The research community it serves is a mixture of university laboratories, cement company research divisions, ready-mixed concrete and construction firms, and public institutes — a community in which an author in one paper may be a producer, in another a user, and in a third a regulator-adjacent tester of the same material. An annual collected-papers volume suits that community: work is submitted, reviewed and then published together, so a single volume functions as a cross-section of the national research effort in that year, from fundamental hydration chemistry to field durability data that could only have been gathered by organisations owning real structures and long-running exposure sites. The volume numbering itself is a finding aid: because there is exactly one volume per year, a volume number and a year can be converted into one another across the run, which simplifies detective work when an older citation gives only one of the two.

Readers should distinguish this journal from its neighbours, because Japanese cement and concrete publishing has several similarly named outlets. The Japan Concrete Institute publishes its own journals, including the Journal of Advanced Concrete Technology, and a monthly members' magazine; those are different publications from different organisations, and Journals World holds separate records for them. The subject classification on this record — concrete properties and behaviour, corrosion and durability — belongs to this association journal, and citations to it should use its own ISSNs and its J-STAGE title, never a neighbouring institute's name.

Scope in Depth

Cement chemistry and hydration

The journal's first J-STAGE section heading is Cement Chemistry, and its papers show what that means in practice. Studies dissect the hydration of alite and the other clinker phases; the nanostructure of calcium silicate hydrate, the binding phase that gives concrete its strength; the chain structure of silicate species measured by nuclear magnetic resonance and trimethylsilylation; the behaviour of ettringite, including its dehydration to a meta form and the swelling risk of delayed ettringite formation after heat curing; and the acceleration or retardation of early hydration by salts, gluconates, fluoride-bearing additions and superplasticisers. Such work is not academic ornament. Every practical question in the later sections — why a concrete gained or lost strength, cracked, expanded or endured — has its explanation at this chemical and nanostructural level, and the journal's habit of publishing the chemistry alongside the engineering is one of its defining virtues.

Supplementary materials, waste use and carbon reduction

A second great strand concerns what can replace part of the cement clinker: fly ash from power generation, ground granulated blast-furnace slag, silica fume, limestone powder and other mineral additions. Papers test how raising the share of such additions changes strength, heat of hydration, fluidity, pozzolanic reaction over years — one study follows hardened paste blended with silica fume or slag across a full decade of curing — and the durability consequences. Closely allied is the use of industrial and demolition wastes: recycled concrete powder as a hydration promoter, cement systems designed around waste-derived raw materials, and the association-level question of how an industry that can absorb other industries' residues should account for that service. The carbon dimension now dominates this strand. Because clinker production releases carbon dioxide both from fuel and from the calcination of limestone itself, papers on increasing minor additional constituents in ordinary Portland cement while preserving quality, on compensating by raising reactive clinker phases, and on mortars that absorb carbon dioxide during curing speak directly to Japan's decarbonisation commitments. The 2025-volume work on carbon-absorbing mortars for three-dimensional printing, visible in this record's matched articles, shows the strand reaching into construction robotics as well.

Properties of fresh and hardened concrete

The Properties of Concrete strand covers workability, fluidity with modern comb-type superplasticisers, setting, strength development, shrinkage, creep and the bond between concrete and reinforcing steel — including how that bond recovers when fire-damaged concrete is re-cured in water or moisture. These are the properties by which a mix design succeeds or fails on site, and the journal treats them with a characteristic experimental thoroughness: controlled water-to-binder ratios, stated curing temperatures and durations, replicate testing, and microstructural follow-up by diffraction, thermal analysis and electron microscopy when a macroscopic result needs a mechanism.

Durability: the long game

Durability research is where an annual journal with decades of continuity earns its keep, because deterioration is slow. The archive addresses chloride ingress and steel corrosion in marine exposure, including very long exposure programmes; sulfate attack and salt scaling, with small-specimen accelerated tests evaluated against sodium and magnesium sulfate behaviour; carbonation of hardened paste over long periods and the changes it works in pore structure and surface chemistry; freeze–thaw and frost resistance, increasingly studied for printed and layered concretes whose internal void structure differs from cast material; drying and wetting cycles that densify or loosen the hydrate structure; and surface penetrants intended to suppress water absorption and raise surface hardness. A recurring lesson is humility about acceleration: a laboratory test that ranks materials correctly in months is valuable only if its mechanism matches the field mechanism operating over fifty years, and many papers in this journal exist precisely to check that correspondence.

New construction methods

Recent volumes add a strand their predecessors could not have imagined: additive manufacturing of cementitious materials. Papers examine how layer height shapes the void structure inside a printed filament and how that structure governs frost resistance, and how the surfaces and interfaces of printed mortar differ from cast concrete. These studies apply the journal's traditional apparatus — microstructure, pore measurement, durability testing — to a construction method whose quality control problems are still being defined, which is exactly where a national association journal can set early reference results for an industry.

How the Journal Is Organised on J-STAGE

On J-STAGE the journal's volumes open to a contents list grouped by subject section — Cement Chemistry and Properties of Concrete are visible headings in the volumes sampled for this profile — with each article given its own page, abstract and PDF, marked as free access. Article records are also harvested by CiNii Research, Japan's scholarly information service, which adds structured bibliographic data: authors and affiliations, the journal name in English and Japanese, volume, issue, pages, publication date (conventionally 31 March for the annual volumes in recent years), the DOI and the publisher, Japan Cement Association. That double presence matters for discovery. A researcher searching in English will usually meet the journal through J-STAGE or CiNii English titles and abstracts; a researcher needing the full argument must then work with the Japanese full text, for which the detailed tables, figures and English abstract together provide more guidance than the language barrier first suggests. Machine translation of the current PDFs is a practical reading route for methods and results, provided numerical values and material designations are checked against the tables rather than trusted from translated prose alone.

Authorship, Review and What Publication Signifies

Authorship in the sampled volumes spans universities, cement manufacturers' research divisions and specialist institutes, frequently in collaboration — a producer's laboratory supplying materials and exposure data, a university group supplying advanced characterisation. That pattern reflects how cement research is actually resourced, and readers should note affiliations as part of assessing a paper, not as a disqualification: industry authorship is normal and necessary in this field, and the correct safeguards are transparent materials provenance, stated mix proportions and reproducible methods, all of which the journal's experimental conventions support. The detailed submission and review rules are set by the association and are not reproduced in the public J-STAGE and CiNii records consulted for this profile, so prospective authors — realistically, researchers working within or alongside Japan's cement community, writing in Japanese — should obtain the association's current contributor instructions directly. No article charge is claimed in this profile, because no verified figure could be confirmed from public sources; the absence of a published charge must not be read as a promise that publication carries no cost in any form.

Metrics, Standing and Honest Limits

This is a national-language, association-published annual whose influence runs through Japanese standards, mix-design practice and the domestic research community. International citation aggregators attach modest figures to its ISSNs — the Journals World record shows an h-index of 10 from its aggregation source — but such figures systematically undercount a journal whose primary readership cites in Japanese, builds to Japanese Industrial Standards and measures success by durability in service. No impact factor or quartile is claimed here. The better evidence of standing is structural: a run reaching volume 79; complete, free availability on the national J-STAGE platform with DOIs; indexing in CiNii; and a contents list in which national research priorities — carbon reduction, waste absorption, resilience of infrastructure, new construction methods — are visibly being worked on year by year by the country's combined academic and industrial laboratories.

Citation Practice

Cite the journal in English as Cement Science and Concrete Technology, with year, volume, issue 1, page range and DOI in the 10.14250/cement pattern; where a database or a Japanese bibliography uses the Japanese title, treat the two titles as the same journal and do not create a second reference. Because there is one issue per year, a citation lacking an issue number is still usually resolvable from volume and pages — but include the DOI whenever it exists, since it resolves directly to the J-STAGE article page. When citing results, record the materials precisely as the paper states them — cement type, additions and their proportions, water-to-binder ratio, curing — because in this field a result detached from its mix design is not a transferable fact.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the journal open access?

Articles on J-STAGE are marked JOURNAL FREE ACCESS and are openly readable there. Free to read should not be confused with a particular reuse licence; check the article page before reusing text or figures beyond normal scholarly quotation.

Who publishes it?

The Japan Cement Association, as confirmed in CiNii Research article records for the journal. It is not a Japan Concrete Institute publication; that institute's journals are separate titles with separate records.

In what language are articles published?

Primarily Japanese, with English titles and abstracts provided on J-STAGE and CiNii, which makes the literature discoverable and partly assessable to international readers.

How often does it appear?

Annually — one volume and one issue per year, with recent annual volumes conventionally dated at the end of March on CiNii records.

Verification Note

This profile is anchored to the Journals World record for post 367258, showing ISSNs 0916-3182 and 2187-3313, and verified against the journal's own J-STAGE browse pages (volumes 64–79 sampled; subject sections, free-access marking and annual single-issue pattern all directly visible) and CiNii Research article records, which name the Japan Cement Association as publisher and supply volume, page, date and DOI details for individual articles. Current-volume topics — carbon-absorbing mortars for printing, layer-height effects on printed mortar frost resistance, early-age hydration measurement — are taken from the 2025 volume's own article listings as matched on this record and on J-STAGE. No fee, review timetable or impact metric is asserted, because none could be verified from those official sources.

Why This Journal Matters Beyond Japan

International readers sometimes overlook national-language association journals, and in this field that is a costly oversight. Japan's exposure conditions — marine environments, seismic design, dense urban infrastructure, hot and humid summers, and a large stock of ageing concrete placed during the high-growth decades — generate durability and maintenance evidence that transfers, with appropriate care, to many other countries. Japan's cement industry is also an early and systematic user of industrial by-products and wastes as raw materials and fuels, so the journal's long record on blended cements and residue absorption documents a transition that other national industries are now attempting under carbon pressure. Finally, the journal's pairing of deep chemistry with engineering testing models a standard of evidence that purely structural or purely chemical outlets each lack on their own. A researcher in any country who is designing a blended cement, questioning an accelerated durability test, or trying to understand why a hydrate assemblage behaved unexpectedly will find this annual worth searching — in CiNii by author and subject, and on J-STAGE by volume — even if reading the full text requires translation support. The barrier is linguistic, not scientific, and the DOIs and English abstracts are deliberately provided so that the work can be found, assessed and requested across that barrier.

A Practical Route Into a Volume

New readers should begin with the most recent volume's contents on J-STAGE, identify the section closest to their problem, and read one recent review-like or method-setting article before chasing individual results, because cement terminology, test methods and standard designations are used in a compact, assumed-knowledge style. Keep a glossary at hand for the cement chemist's shorthand — the single-letter oxide abbreviations and the named clinker phases — since a single misunderstood designation can invert the meaning of a mix design. Then work backwards through the same section in earlier volumes: the annual rhythm makes the development of a topic unusually legible, with each year's papers answering, refining or quietly abandoning the previous year's approach. That longitudinal reading, across chemistry, properties and durability together, is the deepest use this journal offers and the reason its back run should be preserved as a set rather than mined only for isolated articles.