Background:Maladaptive coping strategies with stress taken by university students could lead to psychological problems.The Brief COPE Scale(BCS)is increasingly proven to be effective and successful in measuring coping strategy in many health-related studies.However,very few studies focused on mental health among university students,especially in China Mainland.This study aimed to explore the potential factor-structure of the scale and test whether the scale could work functionally well in medical university students under the background of China.Methods:A questionnaire survey was used to carry out a cross-sectional study in November 2016 in Jinan,Shandong province.We employed SPSS 16.0 to assess the reliability of the BCS and to explore whether the scale held a preferable discriminative power.Factor analysis was applied to explore the factor structure of the scale under the context of China and IBM SPSS Amos 24.0 was used to verify the construct validity of the scale.Results:Our sample consisted of 2,074 medical students in two universities.The results drawn from our data suggested that the Chinese version scale of BCS had good reliability,with the value of five factor structure scale of 0.83,and split-half reliability of 0.82.The confirmative factor analysis showed a sound validity of five factor structure of BCS.Conclusion:The five-factor structure of Brief Cope Scale was validated to be effective and practical in Chinese medical university students.Further studies should be carried out using different age groups and other provinces in China which may have different socio-economic or cultural backgrounds.