The 2017 edition (the 8th edition) of “A Guide to the Core Journals of China” is published recently, and "Science of Soil and Water Conservation" (abbreviated as SSWC) sponsored by the Chinese Society of Soil and Water Conservation was selected as a core journal in in the directory of Basic Science in Agriculture of the Guide.

The 2017 edition (the 8th edition) of “A Guide to the Core Journals of China” is published by Peking University Press, and the core journals are assessed and then determined in every three years. Totally, 1981 core journals were selected from 13 953 Chinese journals published in China in the round.

The combined quantitative evaluation and the qualitative assessment are used in this selection process. The quantitative evaluation index system adopts 16 indicators of the extracted quantity (full text and abstract), the rate of extraction (full text an abstract), the cited amount, the cited amount by others (journal, doctoral thesis, and conference), the influence factor, the influence factor by others, the influence factor in 5 years, the influence factor in 5 years by others, characteristic factor, paper influence score, citation index of a paper, mutual citation index, award-winning or indexed in important retrieval tools, ratio of fund to paper (national level and provincial level) , web downloads, and web download rate.

All 49 database and abstract publications were selected as statistical sources of evaluation indexes, and more than 9.3 billion articles were collected, 13 953 kinds of journals were involved. Nearly 8,000 subject experts participated in the assessment of the core journals.