Sci-Tech Journals Serving Scientific and Technological Innovation in the Context of the “Planning–Communication–Empowerment” Path

Currently, the “Planning–Dissemination–Empowerment” approach has become a widely adopted practice paradigm for scientific journals to serve industrial scientific and technological innovation. Nevertheless, how to achieve the effective transformation from knowledge production to scientific and technological innovation remains a core issue urgently to be addressed in the academic publishing sector. Taking Yangtze River as the research sample, this paper constructs and conducts an in-depth analysis of a systematic practical path of “Planning–Dissemination–Empowerment” targeting the improvement of research achievement transformation efficiency. Under this path, the planning segment accurately identifies core issues aligned with national strategies and frontline engineering demands through demand anchoring, ensuring the pertinence and application value of academic content; the dissemination segment relies on a diversified digital matrix to realize precise delivery and efficient diffusion of research findings, accelerating the transmission of academic outputs; the empowerment segment intervenes from three dimensions of talent cultivation, decision support, and technology implementation, promoting the conversion of academic achievements into practical innovation capabilities. Practice demonstrates that this path has not only produced more than 1500 high-impact papers but also directly facilitated multiple scientific and technological innovations. Talent empowerment has fostered a cohort of young scientific and technological backbones; decision empowerment has directly underpinned national emergency decision-making via 3 policy advisory reports adopted by central authorities; technology empowerment has driven breakthroughs in key technologies such as barrier lake emergency disposal, with relevant achievements winning the First Prize of Hubei Provincial Science and Technology Progress Award. In addition, the optimal reservoir operation technology was applied in the 2024 basin-wide flood control, reducing flooded arable land by 170,000 hectares and preventing the evacuation of tens of thousands of residents, thus achieving the integration of academic influence and tangible social benefits. Rather than a mere restatement of industry consensus, the path proposed in this paper reveals the underlying mechanism through which scientific journals are deeply embedded in the innovation chain and catalyze the shift from “consensus” to “practical outcomes” via systematic design. Combined with discussions of multi-industry cases, this path provides an operable theoretical framework and practical paradigm for scientific journals to play more substantial and verifiable roles in the national innovation system.