Tumor

About Tumor

Tumor — Journal Profile

Tumor is a Chinese oncology journal, published in Chinese with English abstracts, tables and figures, under ISSN 1000-7431 and Chinese serial number CN 31-1372/R. It was founded in January 1981 and is sponsored by the Shanghai Cancer Institute and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Cancer Institute, according to the journal's instructions for international authors, a document that describes the title in unusual completeness for a journal whose primary readership is in China. The site record this profile replaces gave the same ISSN, a base in China, coverage reported from 2007 in Scopus-based summaries, and an h-index of 10; SCImago-based summaries fetched for this profile give slightly different h-index snapshots, discussed in the metrics section below, because they reflect different years.

The one-word English title is the first thing a reader outside China must handle carefully. This journal is not Tumori Journal of Italy, it is not Tumour Biology, and it is not any of the newer English-language cancer titles that use the words cancer, oncology or tumor in a longer name. It is the Shanghai journal whose articles carry DOIs in the form 10.3781/j.issn.1000-7431, a pattern visible in citations to its papers in the international literature. Checking the ISSN, the DOI prefix pattern and the Shanghai sponsorship together resolves the identity in almost every catalogue confusion.

History and Institutional Setting

A founding date of January 1981 places Tumor early in the modern re-expansion of Chinese medical publishing. Its sponsors explain its character. The Shanghai Cancer Institute and the cancer institute of Shanghai Jiao Tong University are research institutions, not commercial publishers, and a journal sponsored by cancer institutes can be expected to serve the research and clinical community around those institutes as well as a national readership of oncologists. The instructions for international authors describe the journal as open access — that description is reproduced here as the journal's own statement in that document, dated to the version fetched — and direct submissions to the journal's own site at tumorsci.org, as given in that document. Authors should use the current version of that site for any live submission, because a set of instructions preserved in a reference database may be older than the system it describes.

The journal's longevity also shows in the way it is cited. Papers in Tumor are cited in international systematic reviews and cohort studies — for example, a prospective Shanghai cohort study on soy food intake and cancer mortality published in Tumor in 2017 is cited in the European Journal of Nutrition — and individual articles from as early as the 1980s appear in historical reviews of interventional therapy for liver cancer in China. That pattern, a nationally rooted journal whose individual papers travel internationally when their data are needed, is typical of long-running Chinese specialist medical titles and is a more realistic picture of the journal's role than any single ranking number.

Scope: Cancer, From Prevention to Treatment

The journal's stated aim, in its instructions, is to publish original laboratory and clinical investigations related to cancer. It lists the fields it covers as tumor prevention, epidemiology and etiology, basic biology, pathology, clinical assessment, surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy, and the list should be read as a map of the whole oncological pathway rather than as a set of separate silos:

• Prevention, epidemiology and etiology — studies of cancer occurrence, risk factors and causes in defined populations, including the Shanghai cohort work cited internationally. For this journal, epidemiology is not an afterthought; SCImago-based summaries classify it in Epidemiology as well as in Oncology and Cancer Research.
• Basic biology — laboratory investigations of how tumors arise and behave, including molecular and cellular work, provided the connection to cancer is direct and the methods are reported in full.
• Pathology — the examination and classification of tumors, which underpins both diagnosis and the interpretation of clinical studies.
• Clinical assessment — diagnosis, staging, evaluation and follow-up of patients with cancer, including imaging and other assessment methods as reported in its clinical papers.
• Treatment, including surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy — clinical studies of the principal treatment modalities, including combined and traditional-medicine-adjacent approaches where they are studied with reported methods and outcomes, as in follow-up studies of advanced cancers after chemotherapy with traditional medicine published in the wider literature citing this field.

Article types named in the instructions are editorials, perspectives, original research, review articles, short communications and case reports, on clinical and basic topics. That range matters for authors choosing where to send work: a short communication or a well-documented case report has a stated home here, whereas in many international oncology journals such formats have largely disappeared. It also matters for readers, who should calibrate expectations by article type — a case report in Tumor is evidence about an individual course of disease and treatment, not a substitute for a controlled clinical study, and the journal's own structure makes that distinction visible.

Language and Readership

Tumor publishes in Chinese, with abstracts, tables and figures in English. That arrangement defines its real readership and its real discoverability. A clinician or researcher who reads Chinese has access to the full text; a reader who does not can still find the paper, understand its design and principal results from the English abstract, tables and figures, and cite it — as international reviewers demonstrably do. Authors outside China considering the journal should think honestly about that audience. A paper whose contribution depends on nuanced argument in the full text will reach fewer readers if they cannot write, or obtain, a competent Chinese version, while a data-rich epidemiological or clinical paper whose findings are carried in its tables may travel well. The journal expressly provides instructions for international authors, which signals that such submissions are contemplated, but contemplation is not the same as suitability for every manuscript.

Editorial Process and Instructions for Authors

The instructions for international authors fetched for this profile set out authorship expectations in detail, and they are worth reporting because they state the journal's standards in its own terms. Submission is made online through the journal's site named in those instructions, with a cover letter identifying the person responsible for editorial correspondence, with address, telephone and fax numbers, mobile phone and e-mail. All authors should have made substantial contributions to the conception and design of the study, or to the acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data; to drafting the article or revising it critically for important intellectual content; and to final approval of the version to be submitted. Details of any previous submission should be included. Those three authorship conditions follow the familiar international pattern for medical journals, and an author who cannot meet them — a purely honorary author, for example — should not be listed.

Beyond authorship, current technical requirements — manuscript length, reference formatting in detail, figure preparation, ethics approvals, trial registration and reporting checklists — should be taken only from the current instructions on the journal's own site. They are written here as not publicly disclosed in the sources fetched beyond the authorship and submission material reported above, rather than reconstructed from the practices of other Chinese medical journals, however similar those practices may look. In particular, human and animal research ethics requirements must be confirmed in the current instructions and satisfied in the study itself; a profile cannot confer compliance.

Indexing and Abstracting

The journal's instructions list a wide set of services in which it says it is indexed: CSTPCD, CSCD, A Guide to the Core Journal of China, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts (CSA), EMBASE / Scopus (Elsevier), Chemical Abstracts, Index Copernicus, VINITI, JST, and China CNKI, among others. That list is reported here as the journal's own statement in that document. Two cautions apply. First, indexing lists in author instructions can lag reality in both directions — a service may have changed its coverage after the document was written, and a new service may have been added since. Second, Chinese national systems such as CSCD, CSTPCD and CNKI and international systems such as Scopus serve different evaluation purposes; being in one is not evidence about another. Authors whose appointment, promotion or degree depends on a specific database should verify that database's current source list for ISSN 1000-7431 directly.

SCImago-based secondary summaries report Scopus coverage beginning in 2007, with one summary giving 2007–2024 and an older one giving 2007–2020, reflecting their snapshot dates. A DOAJ search-API query by ISSN 1000-7431, performed for this profile, returned no results; no DOAJ claim is made on that basis, because an interim zero in that API is not treated here as proof of listing or of non-listing.

Metrics, With Attribution

The superseded site record gave an h-index of 10. SCImago-based secondary summaries fetched for this profile gave an h-index of 9 in one snapshot, with a SCImago Journal Rank (SJR) of 0.103, an overall rank of 29506, an impact score of 0.08 and Q4 classification in Cancer Research, Epidemiology and Oncology, and an h-index of 8 with an SJR of 0.104 in an older snapshot. As with many journals whose papers are mainly in a language other than English, these figures understate use in a specific way that readers should understand: citations in Chinese-language journals and databases that Scopus does not cover do not enter the Scopus-based calculations, so the journal's influence inside Chinese oncology is systematically larger than its international citation metrics suggest. That does not turn a Q4 international ranking into a Q1 one, and this profile does not pretend otherwise; it means the ranking answers a narrower question — visibility in the Scopus citation network — than the question most of the journal's authors and readers are actually asking.

For a researcher deciding where to publish, the honest reading is therefore two-sided. If the goal is maximal international citation visibility within Scopus and Web of Science networks, Tumor's reported metrics are modest and its Chinese-language full text is a further limit. If the goal is to reach Chinese oncologists, cancer researchers and the institutes around its sponsors, to place a clinical or epidemiological study where that community will read it in full, or to publish a format such as a case report or short communication that the journal expressly welcomes, the metrics are only part of the decision and not the decisive part.

OpenAlex was attempted first for bibliometric verification, but its ISSN endpoint returned HTTP 429. Use of OpenAlex was stopped at that point, no OpenAlex figures are cited, and any OpenAlex-derived count for this journal is written as could not be verified for this profile.

Publication Model and Charges

The journal's instructions for international authors describe Tumor as an open access monthly journal. No article processing charge, submission fee or page charge for Tumor was verified from a source fetched for this profile; any such charge is therefore not publicly disclosed in the sources consulted here. Authors, especially international authors, should confirm the current position on charges, and on any translation or language requirements and associated costs, directly with the editorial office before submitting, and should not rely on third-party APC listings for this title, none of which were verified here.

Distinguishing Tumor From Similar Titles

Three distinctions should be made in every catalogue, reference list and literature search. First, Tumor (ISSN 1000-7431, Shanghai) is different from Tumori Journal, the Italian oncology journal with a different ISSN, publisher and history. Second, it is different from Tumour Biology, a different journal again, associated with an international society for oncodevelopmental biology and medicine. Third, it is different from the many newer journals whose titles contain the word tumor or tumour as part of a longer phrase. In database searches, the ISSN and the DOI pattern 10.3781/j.issn.1000-7431 are the reliable discriminators; the single word Tumor on its own will retrieve a large and mostly irrelevant set of results about tumors as a biological subject, as any search on the term quickly shows.

Who Should Read and Submit

Oncologists, cancer epidemiologists, pathologists and laboratory cancer researchers working in or on China are the journal's natural readers, and the archive is a substantial record of Chinese cancer research since 1981, including population studies from Shanghai that are difficult to replicate elsewhere because of the size and continuity of the underlying cohorts and registries. International readers with a specific question — the epidemiology of a cancer in a Chinese population, a treatment experience reported from a Shanghai institute, a historical line of Chinese work on a tumor type — will often find that the English abstract and tables give them what they need, and that ignoring the journal because its full text is in Chinese would leave a genuine gap in a systematic search. Reviewers conducting systematic searches on cancer epidemiology or treatment should therefore include it, with translation support where full-text assessment is required, rather than filtering it out by language at the search stage.

Reading and Using Papers From Tumor in a Systematic Search

Researchers outside China often meet this journal first inside a systematic review, and they need a practical method for handling it. The English abstract, tables and figures usually allow a reviewer to establish the study design, the population, the intervention or exposure, the comparison and the principal outcomes, which is enough for screening and often enough for inclusion decisions at title-and-abstract stage. Full-text assessment is different. Risk-of-bias judgements about randomisation, allocation, blinding, completeness of follow-up and partial reporting depend on methodological sentences that may appear only in the Chinese full text, so a review team that includes papers from Tumor should arrange competent translation of the methods and results sections of the papers it finally includes, rather than scoring bias from an abstract. Where translation is not possible, the honest course is to record the paper as awaiting classification or to report the limitation, not to guess.

The same care applies to data extraction. Numbers carried in tables travel across languages reliably, and Tumor's practice of giving tables in English is a real help, but definitions — of a response, a recurrence, a complication or a cause of death — may be stated in the text around the table. Reviewers should also watch for duplicate publication across languages, a known hazard in all bilingual publishing environments: a cohort reported in Tumor may also be reported, in whole or in part, in an English-language journal by the same group. Checking author groups, institutions, recruitment periods and sample sizes before extracting data prevents double counting, and it is a check that the journal's clear institutional sponsorship makes easier, because the originating institute is usually identifiable.

For clinicians rather than reviewers, the journal's value is different again. Its clinical and case material records how cancer is actually diagnosed and treated in a major Chinese centre's orbit, including combinations of surgery, chemotherapy, radiotherapy and traditional Chinese medicine that are widely used in practice and rarely described in Western journals. Reading that material does not oblige a clinician elsewhere to adopt it; it does prevent the common error of assuming that practice elsewhere mirrors one's own, and it gives researchers designing international studies a realistic picture of the treatment background against which their intervention would be tested in China.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the ISSN of Tumor?
1000-7431, with Chinese serial number CN 31-1372/R.

Who sponsors and publishes Tumor?
The journal's instructions state that it is sponsored by the Shanghai Cancer Institute and the Shanghai Jiao Tong University Cancer Institute. SCImago-based summaries name Shanghai Jiao Tong University as publisher. The numeric publisher string in the superseded site record was garbled and is corrected here on that basis.

When was Tumor founded and how often does it appear?
Founded in January 1981 and described in its instructions as a monthly journal.

What does Tumor publish?
Editorials, perspectives, original research, reviews, short communications and case reports on cancer prevention, epidemiology and etiology, basic biology, pathology, clinical assessment, surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

What are its metrics?
The superseded record gave an h-index of 10. SCImago-based summaries report h-index snapshots of 8–9, SJR around 0.103–0.104 and Q4 in Cancer Research, Epidemiology and Oncology, varying by year. OpenAlex figures could not be verified after an HTTP 429 response.

Is it open access and does it charge?
Its instructions describe it as an open access monthly journal. No charge was verified from the sources consulted, so charges are written here as not publicly disclosed in those sources.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is anchored to the live site record for Tumor (title, slug, ISSN 1000-7431, China, coverage and h-index as stored) and to sources fetched for this profile: the journal's instructions for international authors (ISSN and CN number, open access monthly description, Shanghai sponsors, January 1981 founding, indexing list as stated there, subject fields, article types, online submission and authorship conditions), citations to Tumor papers in international journals confirming its DOI pattern and the international use of its Shanghai epidemiological work, and SCImago-based secondary summaries for publisher, categories, coverage, SJR and h-index snapshots. A DOAJ search-API query by ISSN returned no results and no DOAJ claim is made on that basis. An OpenAlex ISSN query returned HTTP 429 and was not retried.