An interesting exception to the two tiers of national and provincial journals is the Journal of Preventive Medicine of Chinese People's Liberation Army, in which research articles related to public health issues in a military context, from hygiene in training camps to the temperature inside tanks, are published. Apart from those, there are also articles on civilian public health issues written by scientists in the military academy. Table 5 lists 23 journals related to tropical medicine, including journals in parasitology, HIV and tuberculosis. Table 6 lists 23 journals on non-communicable diseases, medical statistics, school health, occupational health, port/ frontier health and quarantine, evidence-based medicine and reproductive health and family planning. All but one are published in Chinese. The exception, the Journal of Reproduction and Contraception is published in English with a sister publication, Reproduction and Contraception, published in Chinese [42] . Some of these journals have been listed as Chinese core journals in 2004: three in parasitology (Table  5) , one in medical statistics, one in school health, five in Emerging Themes in Epidemiology 2008, 5:20 http://www.ete-online.com/content/5/1/20 occupational health and two in reproductive health and family planning (Table 6 ). Specialist national journals like the Chinese Journal of Parasitology and Parasitic Diseases, of the Chinese Preventive Medicine Association (CPMA) series [43] , publish papers of high academic standard in their respective specialties.