Medical Journal of Peking Union Medical College Hospital

About Medical Journal of Peking Union Medical College Hospital

Medical Journal of Peking Union Medical College Hospital — Journal Profile

The Medical Journal of Peking Union Medical College Hospital — in Chinese 《协和医学杂志》, transliterated Xiehe Yixue Zazhi — is the scholarly journal of Peking Union Medical College Hospital (PUMCH) in Beijing, China, one of the most prestigious teaching hospitals in the country. Its recorded identifier is ISSN 1674-9081, the number on this Journals World record, printed in the journal's own citations, recorded in its listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) under its Chinese title, and displayed on the masthead of its official site. The journal publishes in Chinese, with English-language titles, abstracts and a full English version of its website, and it is published by the journal's own editorial office — DOAJ names the publisher as the Editorial Office of Medical Journal of Peking Union Medical College Hospital. Its articles carry DOIs in the prefix 10.12290/xhyxzz, built from the journal's pinyin short name, and its archive reaches back to its founding volume in 2010: the journal was in its sixteenth volume in 2025 and its seventeenth in 2026, a sequence that fixes its first volume to 2010.

The hospital behind the journal

A hospital journal is only ever as interesting as its hospital, and this hospital is exceptional. Peking Union Medical College Hospital, founded in the early twentieth century with support from the Rockefeller Foundation's China Medical Board, has stood for a century at the apex of Chinese academic medicine — the hospital whose name, in its Chinese form Xiehe (协和), is a byword in China for clinical excellence, and whose clinicians write a disproportionate share of the country's diagnostic and therapeutic guidance. The journal's own pages keep that institutional memory deliberately: its archive includes a running strand of medical-history scholarship on the hospital itself — studies of its formulary of 1927, of clinical teaching at the hospital in 1925, of the parasitologists and medical educators of Peking Union Medical College, and of landmark cases from its social-service department's records, including China's first insulinoma case. A journal that publishes its own institution's history alongside its clinical science is making a statement about what it is: the written memory, as well as the research outlet, of a famous hospital.

Scope and content

DOAJ compresses the journal's subject into a single catalogue phrase — clinical medicine — and the journal's own current content shows what that means in practice. The third issue of its 2026 volume, displayed on its official site at the time of checking, is organised around a special topic in lung cancer: precision treatment of the malignancy with the highest global mortality, ground-glass nodules on screening CT, molecular residual disease testing by circulating tumour DNA, multiple primary lung cancers, multidisciplinary-team diagnosis, fluorescence-guided surgery, lipidomics with machine learning, and sleep phenotypes and pulmonary-nodule risk. Around that themed core, the wider current listing ranges across the whole of hospital medicine — Parkinson's disease management, obesity and exercise interventions, pancreatic disease, sepsis, autoimmune disease, diabetic kidney disease, gene therapy, hospice and palliative care conflicts, large-language-model applications in health communication, and the hospital's characteristic historical pieces. Original research, reviews, special-topic collections, case-based work and medical history all appear, in the pattern of a general hospital journal whose real subject is the full breadth of an academic medical centre's work.

Two structural features deserve note. The first is the special-topics format: issues built around a single clinical theme, edited as a coherent set, which lets the journal publish something closer to a state-of-the-art symposium than a miscellany. The second is the journal's role in Chinese evidence-based medicine and standards work: its pages carry methodological and guideline-oriented scholarship — for example an evidence-based review of how health-related standards are managed and developed across countries and organisations — of the kind that feeds national clinical pathways. For a Chinese hospital journal, that combination of themed clinical depth and standards scholarship is the route by which a single institution's journal speaks to a national audience.

Publishing pattern and identifiers

The journal appears in numbered issues through the year — its site showed Volume 17, Number 3 in 2026, following Volume 16 in 2025 — in the rhythm of a periodical that has published continuously since 2010. Its citation identity has two layers, both visible in its own archive. Older articles were cited with DOIs in the form 10.3969/j.issn.1674-9081.year.issue.number, the classic Chinese journal DOI pattern that embeds the ISSN itself; current articles carry DOIs in the form 10.12290/xhyxzz.year-number, registered through the journal's present platform, and the journal is also carried on the SciOpen platform, where its English-titled article pages present its content to international readers. The ISSN itself, 1674-9081, appears in the article codes printed on its papers (for example, article code 1674-9081(2023)01-0225-04 in a 2023 medical-history article), tying every printed page back to the registered title.

Metrics and indexing — what is verified, and what is not

This profile quotes only figures that could be tied to a fetched source in October 2026, and for this journal the honest picture is mixed.

• DOAJ: the journal is listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals under its Chinese title Xiehe Yixue Zazhi, print ISSN 1674-9081, language Chinese, publisher country China, with the Editorial Office of the journal named as publisher.
• OpenAlex: the source resolved through the OpenAlex ISSN endpoint for 1674-9081 (source S2764757474) is a partial record: it indexes 261 works with coverage ending in 2017 and a summary h-index of 2 on that partial set. That record plainly does not describe the journal's full output — the journal's own site shows a complete, current run through 2026 — and the OpenAlex figures are reported here only so that readers who meet them elsewhere understand what they are: an incomplete capture of the journal's earlier years, not a measure of the journal.
• Other metrics: no SJR, CiteScore or Journal Impact Factor figure for this journal could be verified from an official source fetched during this research, so none is quoted. The h-index of 12 carried in older directory data for this record could not be traced to a primary source and is not relied on here. Readers who need a verified metric for evaluation purposes should consult the journal's editorial office or the Chinese scientific-literature databases in which the journal is primarily indexed.

That caution is itself information about the journal's ecosystem: it is a Chinese-language hospital journal whose citation life is lived mainly inside China's own academic databases and evaluation system, and international metric services capture it thinly and late. Judged in its own setting — the journal of the country's most famous hospital, in its seventeenth volume, running themed issues on the central problems of Chinese hospital medicine — its standing is institutional and national rather than metric-driven.

Open access and charges

The journal is open access: its full text is readable on its official site, and it maintains open access, peer review, editorial and ethics policy pages in English as well as Chinese. Its DOAJ record states that it levies an article processing charge, with a maximum of 8,000 CNY, and no other charges; the DOAJ entry points to the author instructions on the journal's own site for the operative detail, and authors should confirm the current charge there before submitting. The journal's site also carries a pointed practical warning from its editorial office: authors have been approached by impostors posing as journal editors, sending fake acceptance notices and soliciting fees through personal messaging accounts. The office states that it contacts authors only by email or telephone, gives its notification mailbox (mjpumch@126.com) and its editorial telephone number (010-69154261), and asks authors to verify any doubtful approach with the office directly. Anyone submitting to this journal should work only through the official site and those stated channels.

How to submit

Submissions are made through the journal's official website, xhyxzz.pumch.cn, which provides instructions for authors and reporting guidelines in its English version as well as the full Chinese guidance. The journal publishes in Chinese, so a manuscript should be prepared in Chinese to the journal's stated format, with the English title and abstract elements its articles uniformly carry. Authors should use the site's stated editorial contacts — and no other channel — for queries, and should treat the journal's reporting guidelines and ethics policies, both posted on the site, as binding parts of the submission: for clinical research from a hospital of this standing, the ethics and reporting paperwork is examined as carefully as the science. Prospective authors outside China should note that this is a Chinese-language venue: it suits work written for China's clinical community, including the Chinese-language publication of hospital-based research, guideline and standards work, and the medical-history scholarship the journal distinctively welcomes.

Similar journals

The closest comparators are China's other great hospital and medical-college journals: the Chinese Medical Journal, the English-language flagship of the Chinese Medical Association; Acta Academiae Medicinae Sinicae, the journal of the Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences and Peking Union Medical College — the college side of this journal's own institutional family, and a separate Journals World record; Jichu Yixue yu Linchuang (Basic and Clinical Medicine), another title from the same academy-and-college stable; and the university hospital journals of China's other leading medical centres, which form with this title the top tier of Chinese institutional medical publishing.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ISSN of the Medical Journal of Peking Union Medical College Hospital? ISSN 1674-9081, as shown on the journal's own site and in its DOAJ record.

What is the journal's Chinese title? 《协和医学杂志》, transliterated Xiehe Yixue Zazhi — the title under which DOAJ lists it.

Who publishes it? The journal's editorial office at Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Beijing, China, per DOAJ.

When was it founded? Its first volume appeared in 2010; it reached Volume 16 in 2025 and Volume 17 in 2026.

In what language does it publish? Chinese, with English titles, abstracts and an English version of its website, per DOAJ and the journal's site.

Is it open access, and does it charge? It is open access and DOAJ-listed; DOAJ records an article processing charge with a maximum of 8,000 CNY and no other charges — confirm the current amount in the author instructions on the journal's site.

What DOI prefix do its articles carry? Current articles use the prefix 10.12290/xhyxzz; older articles used the ISSN-based form 10.3969/j.issn.1674-9081.

How do I contact the editorial office safely? Only through the official site and the channels the office itself states: notification email mjpumch@126.com and telephone 010-69154261. The office warns that impostors have posed as its editors to solicit fees.

Sources consulted for this profile, October 2026: the journal's official website (English version) and its current-issue pages; articles from the journal carried on SciOpen; the DOAJ record for ISSN 1674-9081; the OpenAlex source resolved through its ISSN endpoint, whose partial coverage is described as such in the text.

The medical-history strand

The history papers deserve a closer look, because few hospital journals anywhere sustain anything like them. In the journal's pages, historians and clinicians from the hospital reconstruct its first decades piece by piece: an outline of the hospital formulary as pressed in 1927, examining what the young hospital actually prescribed; a silhouette of clinical teaching at the hospital in 1925, built from its own archives; a study of the parasitologists and medical educators of Peking Union Medical College as shown on old postcards — a paper whose reference list runs through the Rockefeller Archive Center's China Medical Board records and the hospital's annual reports of the 1930s; a return to the medical record of China's first insulinoma case, through the follow-up work of the hospital's social service department; and a biographical study of Paul C. Hodges and the early development of radiology in China. These are not decorative pieces. They are archival scholarship, published year after year (the examples above run from 2019 to 2024), and they mark the journal as the place where one of Asia's great hospitals writes its own history with scholarly apparatus. For medical historians, that strand alone makes the journal worth following; for the hospital, it is institutional memory kept in the most durable form a hospital has — its journal.

The breadth of a general hospital journal

Set the themed lung-cancer issue beside the journal's general listing and the second feature of the journal appears: range. The current-issue stream on its homepage at the time of checking moved from Parkinson's disease and exercise intervention in obesity to acute pancreatitis, systemic lupus erythematosus, diabetic kidney disease, polycystic ovary syndrome, traumatic brain injury, sepsis and its cardiac complications, adeno-associated-virus gene therapy for rare and genetic diseases, idiopathic multicentric Castleman disease, hospice and palliative care, nursing care for an ageing population, and the use of large language models to generate evidence-based health communication. That is the case-mix of a great general hospital rendered as a table of contents. It also explains the journal's author base: departments across the hospital, and collaborators across China, publish here because the journal's readership is precisely the cross-specialty audience a hospital paper needs — the colleagues in the next department whose practice the work should change.

Citing and finding the journal

Two practical points trip up international readers. The first is the name: cite the journal by its English title, Medical Journal of Peking Union Medical College Hospital, or find it in catalogues under its Chinese title, Xiehe Yixue Zazhi — DOAJ, for example, files it under the Chinese title, and a search under the English title alone can miss the record. The second is the DOI history: articles from the journal's earlier years carry DOIs built on the ISSN form, 10.3969/j.issn.1674-9081 followed by year, issue and article numbers, while current articles carry the 10.12290/xhyxzz prefix. Both forms resolve to the same journal, and a reference list that mixes them is showing the journal's platform history, not an error. The journal's content is presented in full on its own site, with an English version for navigation, and its articles are also carried on the SciOpen platform in English-titled form.

Who should publish here

The journal's natural authors are clinicians and researchers writing in Chinese for China's hospital community: PUMCH departments reporting the hospital's own clinical experience; multi-centre Chinese groups publishing themed, guideline-adjacent and standards work; and scholars of medical history, above all of the Peking Union institution itself. Its fit questions are equally clear in reverse. Work written only in English, aimed at an international metric audience, belongs elsewhere; work whose value lies in reaching Chinese practising clinicians — in the language they read, from the hospital whose name carries the most weight in Chinese medicine — has few better addresses.

Editorial policies on the record

The journal's English site organises its governance in the open: separate posted policies for editorial practice, for ethics, for open access and for peer review, together with instructions for authors and reporting guidelines. That structure is worth an author's attention before submission rather than after. The reporting guidelines exist because the journal expects clinical research to be reported to recognised standards; the ethics policy because a hospital journal lives on patient material — case reports, images, histories — whose use must be defensible; and the peer-review policy because a journal published by a single institution must show, structurally, that its decisions are review-driven rather than internal. Authors who treat those posted documents as part of the manuscript's specification, and who route every communication through the official site and the editorial office's stated contacts, will have the smoothest passage the journal offers.

Is the journal the same as Acta Academiae Medicinae Sinicae? No. That is a separate journal from the college and academy side of the same institutional family, with its own ISSN and its own record in this directory; the two titles are neighbours, not duplicates.

Where can I read it? In full on the journal's official website, which offers a complete English-language version for navigation alongside the Chinese text of its articles.