Chinese Medicine

About Chinese Medicine

Chinese Medicine: Journal Profile

Chinese Medicine is an open access, peer-reviewed journal published by BioMed Central, part of Springer Nature, and it is the official journal of the International Society for Chinese Medicine. The society is based in Macau, and the journal is sponsored by the Macao Foundation, listed by the publisher as Fundação Macau. Its electronic ISSN is 1749-8546. That identifier, formed from the journal title and confirmed on the publisher's own journal-information panel, is the safest way to distinguish this title from the many similarly named journals in the same field. There is a Chinese Journal of Integrative Medicine, a Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine, a Chinese Journal of Natural Medicines, a Chinese Herbal Medicines, and an American Journal of Chinese Medicine, and none of them is this journal. A researcher who searches only for the words "Chinese medicine" will find a crowded field; a researcher who searches with the ISSN, the BioMed Central journal site, and the society affiliation will find this exact title quickly and reliably.

The journal was launched in 2006, and its founding editorial described it as a peer-reviewed, open access, international, interdisciplinary and scholarly journal intended to provide, in its own wording, evidence-led force for the advancement of Chinese medicine research. That founding ambition still explains the present-day scope better than any short category label can. Chinese Medicine does not publish work simply because a practice is traditional, and it does not publish work simply because a laboratory technique is modern. It publishes work in which a question rooted in Chinese medicine is investigated with evidence, with scientifically justified methods, and with ethical conduct. Claims that cannot be supported by the material, methods, results and conclusions presented are outside the character of the journal, however interesting the underlying tradition may be.

Quick Facts

One identifier question should be flagged openly for readers checking other records. The Journals World record for this journal listed a second number, 1991-0150, alongside 1749-8546. The publisher's own journal-information panel for Chinese Medicine lists only the electronic ISSN 1749-8546. Authors and librarians should therefore cite 1749-8546 as the verified ISSN for this journal and should treat any second identifier with caution until its source can be verified, because an incorrect ISSN in a reference list, a promotion file, or a library catalogue can attach a paper to the wrong serial.

Aims and Scope in Detail

The publisher's aims and scope statement defines the journal as publishing evidence-based, scientifically justified research and review papers in all aspects of Chinese medicine, including chemistry, biology, pharmacology, pharmaceutics, engineering, clinical applications and socioeconomics that are relevant and significant to Chinese medicine. That sentence is deliberately broad, and the four areas of particular welcome that follow it show where the editors see the greatest value. First, the journal particularly welcomes studies that discover new compounds from Chinese medicinal herbs. Second, it welcomes work that elucidates molecular and cellular targets and mechanisms of action for Chinese medicine. Third, it welcomes work that develops modern drug delivery and molecular pharmaceutic tools for Chinese medicine. Fourth, it welcomes evaluations of the outcomes of hypothesis-driven, rationally designed fundamental, pre-clinical and clinical research.

Read together, those four priorities describe a clear editorial logic. Herbal material is the starting point for much of Chinese medicine, so chemical discovery work matters, but discovery alone is not enough. A compound, an extract, or a formula becomes scientifically meaningful when its targets, pathways and mechanisms can be shown, when its formulation and delivery can be made consistent and testable, and when its effects are evaluated in designs that were planned to test a stated hypothesis rather than assembled afterwards around a striking result. A manuscript that covers only one link in that chain can still fit the journal, provided the link is studied rigorously and its significance for Chinese medicine is made explicit. A manuscript that covers several links, for example a chemically characterised extract whose mechanism is tested in a relevant model, often matches the interdisciplinary character of the journal especially well.

The wider subject coverage named across the journal's own descriptions includes herbal medicine, clinical nutrition, clinical diagnosis, acupuncture and other non-pharmacological modalities, pharmaceutics, biomedical sciences, epidemiology, education, informatics, sociology and psychology, where those subjects are relevant and significant to Chinese medicine. Earlier descriptions of the journal also named areas such as materia medica, theories and diagnosis, health food, Tui-na, Qi-gong and Tai Chi, disease prevention, treatment and rehabilitation, public health, regulation, management, technical translation and internationalisation. Authors should read those lists as a map of relevance rather than as a promise. A paper on acupuncture, on a diagnostic method, or on the sociology of practice belongs here only when it is investigated as Chinese medicine research, with evidence and justification, and not simply because its topic is mentioned in a list.

What the Journal Normally Does and Does Not Publish

The current aims and scope statement is unusually specific about article types, and prospective authors should take it seriously before they prepare a submission. The journal publishes research papers and review papers, both unsolicited and solicited. Opinion and commentary papers may be published, but they are by invitation only, so an unsolicited opinion piece is not a realistic submission route. The statement adds that the journal normally does not publish case studies, technical notes or meta-analyses unless the topic is of exceptional significance and urgency. The word "normally" leaves a narrow door open, but an author relying on that door must be able to explain, convincingly and early, why the work is exceptional. A routine single-case report, a minor technical variation, or a meta-analysis of a small and heterogeneous literature should be sent to a journal whose stated scope welcomes that type, rather than being reshaped in the hope that an editor here will make an exception.

This boundary is worth understanding rather than merely obeying. Chinese Medicine built its reputation by insisting that research in a traditional field meet modern evidential standards. Single cases can generate hypotheses, and the journal's founding documents recognised the value of many kinds of reports, but the present editorial position reserves the journal's pages mainly for research and reviews that can support general conclusions. Authors with a valuable case should consider whether the case can be developed into a properly designed study, reported within a case series in a venue that welcomes it, or used as the clinical motivation for laboratory or clinical research that does fit this journal.

History and Identity

Chinese Medicine began publishing in 2006, at a moment when open access publishing in biomedicine was expanding quickly and when research on traditional medicines was under growing pressure to show its methods, its materials and its evidence in full. BioMed Central provided the online open access platform, and a print version was also described in the journal's launch article as published by the International Society for Chinese Medicine itself. The society connection remains central to the journal's identity. It is not a general complementary medicine magazine and it is not a house journal for one university department, even though its editors and many of its contributors are based in leading research institutes. It is a society journal with an international readership, published by a major scientific publisher, and sponsored from Macau, a place whose history of exchange between Chinese and Western medicine gives the journal's bridging mission a concrete geographical home.

That bridging mission explains much of the journal's content. On one side stands a medical tradition with its own theories, diagnostic categories, materia medica and therapeutic practices, developed over a very long history. On the other side stand contemporary expectations for chemical characterisation, dose, controls, randomisation where appropriate, transparent statistics, ethical approval and reproducible analysis. The journal exists in the space between those two sides, and its best papers respect both. They do not translate a traditional formula into a modern product so loosely that the original preparation is unrecognisable, and they do not report a traditional use so uncritically that a reader cannot judge whether the claimed effect was actually tested.

Open Access, Copyright and Data

All articles published in Chinese Medicine are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers. Authors of articles published in the journal are the copyright holders of their articles and grant third parties the right to use, reproduce or disseminate the article according to the licence terms. The publisher's copyright page confirms that articles are published open access under a CC BY licence, the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence, which permits sharing and adaptation for any purpose, including commercial purposes, so long as the authors are credited. The journal also follows a CC0 data policy, under which the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Public Domain Dedication waiver applies to published data in the journal.

These arrangements have practical consequences that authors should plan for before submission rather than after acceptance. Because readers can reuse figures and text with attribution, authors should make sure that every image, table and adapted element in a manuscript is either their own, clearly licensed for reuse, or used with permission that covers open access republication. Material copied from a subscription source under a narrow permission may not be lawful to release under CC BY. Because data are covered by a CC0 policy, authors should expect the data underlying their conclusions to be shareable, and should discuss any genuine restriction, such as patient privacy or a material-transfer condition, with the editorial office early. An article processing charge applies to open access publication with this publisher, and the current amount, together with any waiver or discount arrangements and any institutional agreement that may cover the charge, should be checked on the publisher's official fees page at the time of submission, because charges and agreements change and third-party summaries of fees go out of date quickly.

Indexing and Discoverability

The publisher's journal-information panel lists Chinese Medicine as abstracted and indexed in a wide range of services. The list includes Baidu, CAB Abstracts, CLOCKSS, CNKI, CNPIEC, Chemical Abstracts Service, the Chinese Academy of Medical Science, DOAJ, Dimensions, EMBASE, EMCare, Gale, GoOA of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Google Scholar, the Japanese Science and Technology Agency, Naver, the OA Journal Index of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, OCLC WorldCat Discovery Service, Ovid Discovery, Portico, ProQuest, PubMedCentral, Reaxys, SCImago, Scopus, the Science Citation Index Expanded, Semantic Scholar, TD Net Discovery Service, Wanfang and eLibrary.ru. The journal's own home page summarises the position by noting that it is indexed by DOAJ, PubMed, Scopus and SCIE, among others.

For an author, this breadth matters in two distinct ways. The first is simple discoverability: a paper can be found by a clinician searching PubMed, by a pharmacologist searching a chemistry service, by a scholar searching a Chinese-language database, and by a librarian working through a discovery layer, all without a subscription to the journal itself. The second is institutional recognition. Many universities and funders assess a journal by asking whether it appears in Scopus, in the Science Citation Index Expanded, in PubMed, or in DOAJ, and Chinese Medicine can answer yes to each of those questions on the basis of the publisher's own listing. Authors should still confirm the position at the moment they submit, using the master lists of the service that matters to their institution, because indexing lists are maintained by the services themselves and a publisher page is a summary, not a substitute for the source list.

Metrics and How to Read Them

Chinese Medicine is an established journal in its category, and its citation indicators place it well above the level of a marginal or newly launched title. Readers comparing journals will encounter Journal Impact Factor figures from Journal Citation Reports, SJR and h-index figures derived from Scopus data through SCImago, and CiteScore figures from Scopus, and those figures will differ from one another because each is calculated from a different database, a different citation window and a different set of document types. None of them should be quoted without its year and its source. A figure that was accurate for one reporting year can be misleading two years later, and a single strong year, for example one driven by a small number of heavily cited review articles, does not guarantee that an individual new paper will be cited at the same rate.

The responsible way to assess fit is to combine the indicators with evidence that a reader can check directly. Read the papers the journal published in the last two or three years on topics close to your own. Judge whether those papers were chemically and clinically well characterised, whether their methods are described in enough detail to be repeated, and whether the journal's readership is the readership your work needs. Check whether researchers you cite publish there, and whether researchers you hope will cite you read there. A journal whose recent content genuinely matches your question will do more for a paper than a headline metric from a neighbouring field, and in a field as method-sensitive as Chinese medicine research, editorial standards for materials and methods are often the most meaningful quality signal of all.

Preparing a Strong Submission

Material identity is the first test a manuscript for this journal must pass. A study of a herbal medicine should identify the material precisely: the species and plant part, the source, the preparation method, the extraction conditions where relevant, and the chemical characterisation that allows another laboratory to obtain or reproduce a comparable material. A formula study should give the composition and proportions, the preparation, and the reasoning that connects the tested preparation to the preparation used in practice. Vague descriptions such as a herb name with no authentication, or an extract with no fingerprint or marker compounds, make the results impossible to interpret and impossible to repeat, and they are a common reason why otherwise interesting traditional medicine research fails at review.

The second test is design. The aims and scope statement asks for hypothesis-driven, rationally designed research, and reviewers will look for that structure. State the hypothesis or research question early. Choose controls that isolate the effect claimed, including vehicle controls, positive controls where a standard treatment exists, and blinding or randomisation where the design allows them. Report sample sizes, inclusion and exclusion criteria, ethical approvals and consent for human or animal work, and statistical methods in enough detail for a reader to judge whether the conclusions follow. For clinical research, register the trial where registration is expected, follow the relevant reporting guidance for the study type, and report adverse events honestly, including when none were observed.

The third test is interpretation. A mechanism shown in a cell line is not yet a clinical effect, an animal result is not yet a recommendation for patients, and a traditional use is a reason to investigate a claim, not proof of it. The journal's insistence on evidence-based and scientifically justified work applies to the discussion as much as to the methods. Authors who state their limitations plainly, distinguish their findings from their speculation, and explain exactly what further work a claim would need tend to serve both the journal and the tradition they study better than authors who overstate a result. Review articles face the same discipline: a strong review for this journal is organised around a question, describes how literature was found and selected, and weighs conflicting evidence, rather than collecting positive findings into an advertisement for a herb or a therapy.

Who Should Consider This Journal

Chinese Medicine is a strong candidate for researchers working on the chemistry and pharmacology of Chinese medicinal herbs, on molecular targets and mechanisms of Chinese medicine interventions, on formulation and drug delivery for Chinese medicine products, and on fundamental, pre-clinical or clinical evaluations designed to test a clear hypothesis. It also suits interdisciplinary teams, for example a group combining pharmacognosy, analytical chemistry, pharmacology and clinical expertise, because the journal explicitly welcomes interdisciplinary methods and technologies. Researchers in acupuncture, clinical nutrition, diagnosis, epidemiology, education, informatics or the social sciences should consider it when their question is squarely about Chinese medicine and their methods can bear evidential weight.

It is a weaker fit for work whose connection to Chinese medicine is incidental, for uninvited opinion, for routine case reports, and for studies whose materials or methods cannot be described reproducibly. Authors in those positions are not being told their work has no value; they are being told that this particular journal has chosen a defined role, and that a manuscript succeeds fastest when it is sent first to the journal whose stated scope it already matches. Checking the most recent issues before submitting, and honestly comparing a draft against them, is the simplest and most reliable fit test available to any author.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Chinese Medicine open access?

Yes. The publisher states that all articles are made freely and permanently accessible online immediately upon publication, without subscription charges or registration barriers, and that articles are published under a CC BY licence with authors retaining copyright.

Is Chinese Medicine the same as the Chinese Journal of Integrative Medicine?

No. They are different journals with different publishers and different ISSNs. Chinese Medicine is the BioMed Central journal with electronic ISSN 1749-8546 and is the official journal of the International Society for Chinese Medicine. Always confirm a title with its ISSN before citing it or submitting to it.

Does the journal charge to publish?

An article processing charge applies to open access publication with the publisher. The amount in force, and any waiver, discount or institutional agreement that may cover it, should be checked on the publisher's official fees page at the time of submission, because fees change and secondary listings may be out of date.

Can I submit a case report or a meta-analysis?

The current aims and scope statement says the journal normally does not publish case studies, technical notes or meta-analyses unless the topic is of exceptional significance and urgency. Authors of such work should expect to justify that exception clearly, or choose a journal whose scope welcomes the type.

Where is the journal indexed?

The publisher lists a wide range of services, including DOAJ, PubMed and PubMedCentral, Scopus, SCImago and the Science Citation Index Expanded, together with chemical, Chinese-language and general discovery services. Authors should confirm current coverage in the source list of the service their institution requires.

Verification Note

This profile is based on the journal's own publisher pages, including its aims and scope, its journal-information and indexing panel, its copyright page and its launch editorial, together with the society affiliation stated there. Facts that could not be verified from those sources have been left general rather than stated as specifics, and readers preparing a submission should confirm fees, editorial membership and indexing on the official journal site on the day they submit, because those details are the ones most likely to change between the writing of any profile and the reading of it.