Harnessing the wealth of Chinese scientific literature: schistosomiasis research and control in China

In this thematic series of Emerging Themes in Epidemiology, Fung provides a general overview of Chinese biomedical journals, and a focus on specialized journals in epidemiology, preventive medicine and public health [1]. Moreover, Fung examines two of the six core mainland Chinese biomedical bibliographic databases – WanFang Data and iLib – and emphasises that the Chinese interface of Google Scholar provides a convenient entry point to search for Chinese articles. His analysis complements a recent investigation by Xia et al. who studied the accessibility, content and form of five major Chinese biomedical databases, namely (i) Biomedical Literature Database (CBM), (ii) Chinese Medical Current Content (CMCC), (iii) China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) Medicine and Hygiene Section, (iv) VIP Information (VIP), and (v) the above-mentioned WanFang Data [2]. Finally, Fung discusses the prospects and challenges of English language journals published in China, including issues of language publication bias and quality, and concludes that "Chinese journals are a mine of epidemiological information that is yet to be explored by the outside world" [1].The purpose of our article is to illustrate that the Chinese literature is indeed a treasure house of biomedical knowledge. One of the most prominent examples is the discovery of the antimalarial properties of artemisinin (the active ingredient derived from the herb Artemisia annua) in the early 1970s by Chinese scientists [3,4]. Comprehensive investigations of the chemistry and synthesis of artemisinin and its derivatives, assessment of the antimalarial efficacy in different animal models, toxicity and mechanism of action studies, and clinical trials involving over 2000 patients infected with Plasmodium were carried out in the 1970s and published in specialized Chinese journals. In 1982, the key findings were summarized and published in English in a special issue of the Journal of Traditional Chinese Medicine [5-8]. Howe