ACTA THERIOLOGICA

Overview: Acta Theriologica, the predecessor of Mammal Research

Acta Theriologica was the international journal of mammalogy published by the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences (Instytut Biologii Ssaków PAN) in Białowieża, Poland. It is a historical title: the journal was first published in January 1955 under this name and retained it through 59 regular volumes plus seven special issues, before being renamed Mammal Research with the sixtieth volume in 2015. The rename was presented by the editor-in-chief at the time as a deliberate step to raise the journal's international profile and visibility, while preserving the mission, editorial standards and subject coverage that had defined the title for sixty years. Because the title is no longer active, this profile describes the journal's documented history, scope and legacy as Acta Theriologica and its continuation as Mammal Research under Springer.

The journal's International Standard Serial Number under its former title was 0001-7051, confirmed by multiple union catalogues and by the printed mastheads of its volumes (recorded as "PL ISSN 0001–7051" on issue front matter), with a separate ISSN (1509-4537) recorded at the ISSN Portal for the Acta Theriologica. Supplement series. Under its current title Mammal Research, the journal carries print ISSN 2199-2401 and electronic ISSN 2199-241X, and is published quarterly by Springer Science+Business Media in partnership with the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

For researchers encountering citations to Acta Theriologica in the literature — and the title is cited thousands of times in mammalogy — the essential fact is that pre-2015 volumes (volumes 1–59, 1955–2014) are the archive of one of Europe's longest-running zoological journals, while post-2015 volumes appear under Mammal Research. Scopus and Web of Science treat the two titles as a continuing publication series, so citation histories span the name change, and the journal's cumulative record represents seven decades of mammal research.

Founding and early history: August Dehnel and the post-war Polish school of mammalogy

The history of Acta Theriologica is inseparable from its founder, Professor August Dehnel (1903–1962), the Polish zoologist best known for the "Dehnel phenomenon" — the seasonal change in the size of the braincase and brain weight in shrews (Sorex), which he documented in the early 1950s. According to the sixtieth-anniversary transition editorial published by Springer, the first issue appeared in January 1955, issued by the Institute of Zoology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. In the same year, the Mammal Research Institute in Białowieża became an independent entity within the Department of Biological Sciences of the Polish Academy of Sciences, and in 1958 it took over the publication of the journal.

Dehnel managed the journal from its beginning until his sudden death in 1962. From the outset, the journal aspired to be international rather than a domestic Polish periodical: articles were published in one of four languages — English, German, French and Russian. Since the 1970s, almost every article has been published in English, reflecting the broader shift of the life sciences toward English-language communication. Over the sixty years of its existence as Acta Theriologica, the journal communicated more than 2,500 articles — original papers, short notes and book reviews — submitted by researchers from six continents. The journal's home in Białowieża, adjacent to the Białowieża Primeval Forest, the last remnant of the primeval lowland forest of temperate Europe, gave it a natural laboratory for studies of forest mammals, and many of its landmark papers concern species studied in that forest.

Early volumes were published through Polish Scientific Publishers (Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe), as bibliographic records of bound volumes from the 1980s show. The archival digital copies preserved by the Polish digital library system (rcin.org.pl) include full-text PDFs of mid-century volumes with DOI prefixes under 10.4098/AT.arch, an older Polish institutional archiving scheme distinct from the current Springer DOI structure (10.1007/s13364).

Editorial succession across six decades

Despite its long history, Acta Theriologica changed managing editors surprisingly rarely, as the transition editorial notes. Professor August Dehnel served from the founding in 1955 until his death in 1962. He was succeeded by Professor Zdzisław Pucek, who continued the mission until 2005 — an exceptionally long editorship of more than four decades — supported first by Dr. Marek Gębczyński and then by Dr. Bogumiła Jędrzejewska as assistant editors. Professor Jan Wójcik led the journal for the following eight years. In 2013, Professor Karol Zub took over as editor-in-chief and shepherded the transition to Mammal Research in 2015; he remains editor-in-chief of the continuing title, affiliated with the Mammal Research Institute in Białowieża and the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw (contact listed on the Springer editorial board page as karolzub@ibs.bialowieza.pl). The editorial board draws on an international team of subject editors covering different mammal groups and disciplines, a structure that was already in place under the old title and continues under Springer.

This stability in leadership is worth noting because it correlates with the journal's consistent identity: from the Dehnel era to the present, the journal has centered on field-based, organismal and population-level mammalian biology, even as it broadened to include physiology, genetics and molecular approaches. Editors of the title were not merely administrators; the anniversary editorial stresses that all of Dehnel's successors were themselves eminent scientists, and that their scientific standing shaped the journal's character.

Aims and scope: what Acta Theriologica published

Under its former title, Acta Theriologica published research across the full breadth of mammalogy. From the beginning, all the main groups of mammals were represented in its pages, although special attention was given to insectivores, rodents, ungulates and carnivores — groups that dominated the research of the Białowieża school. Under the continuing title, the Springer aims-and-scope statement describes Mammal Research as "an international journal of mammalogy, covering all aspects of mammalian biology," with the editors especially encouraging submissions on mammal ecology, behaviour, conservation, physiology, genetics and evolution. The journal publishes original research reports, short communications, method papers, reviews and forum papers.

Representative themes in the Acta Theriologica archive include:

• Ungulate ecology and population dynamics, particularly in Białowieża Primeval Forest — long-term studies of red deer, roe deer, wild boar and European bison, including the factors shaping population densities and increases of ungulates across the 19th and 20th centuries.
• Predator–prey relationships and carnivore biology — including early studies of food-niche overlap in winter predator communities of the Białowieża forest, examining how specialists (wolf, lynx, polecat, stoat, tawny owl) and generalists (fox, marten, raccoon dog) partitioned resources.
• Small-mammal population ecology, such as robust capture–recapture designs applied to field examples like Microtus pennsylvanicus, and studies of bank vole (Myodes glareolus) ecology, including a dedicated supplement volume on the ecology of the bank vole edited by Kazimierz Petrusewicz.
• Morphological and anatomical studies — from skull variability of weasels (Mustela nivalis) in Poland to cranial and dental abnormalities of the endangered red wolf (Canis rufus), bone-marrow fat as an indicator of condition in roe deer, and the classic work on shrew braincase seasonality.
• Genetics and systematics — including allozyme evolution and molecular-clock studies in Lagomorpha, karyotype and species-diversity work on Neotropical cricetids such as Delomys, genetic structuring of the northern myotis (Myotis septentrionalis) at multiple spatial scales, and the systematic status of the Italian wolf Canis lupus.
• Biogeography and faunistics, including surveys such as the mammals of Algeria and of the Palaearctic deserts, and distribution work on the Eurasian lynx recolonizing north-west Poland.

The U.S. Geological Survey's Publications Warehouse indexes a number of Acta Theriologica articles, including works on capture methodology and conservation genetics, which illustrates the title's visibility in North American wildlife research. The journal also hosted debates of methodological significance — for instance, an exchange on the correct analysis of archeozoological data on the aurochs — showing its role as a forum for the discipline rather than merely a repository of results.

Białowieża: the forest that shaped the journal

Understanding Acta Theriologica requires understanding its institutional home. The Mammal Research Institute sits in Białowieża, a village on the Polish side of the Białowieża Primeval Forest, the last and largest remaining part of the primeval lowland forest that once stretched across the European Plain. This proximity made the journal the natural outlet for long-term research on the forest's fauna: the European bison, whose microscopic thyroid structure was examined in the "Bisoniana" series of papers; the wolf and lynx, whose spatial organization and social relations were documented in the forest; the beaver, the elk, the wildcat. A recurring methodological strength of the journal's papers was the use of very long observational series — decades of ungulate counts, multi-year predator diet studies, repeated live-trapping grids — made possible by the institute's permanent presence at the forest edge.

The journal's international character grew out of this local strength: researchers from six continents sent manuscripts to Białowieża, and the journal reciprocated by publishing faunistic and systematic work from the Palaearctic deserts to Algeria to Brazil. Yet the forest remained its signature: papers anchored in Białowieża form the backbone of the archive and continue to be cited in textbooks on wildlife ecology and conservation biology.

The supplement series and special issues

Alongside its regular volumes, Acta Theriologica produced seven special issues over its sixty years, plus the Acta Theriologica. Supplement series (ISSN 1509-4537 per the ISSN Portal record). A notable example is the supplement devoted to the ecology of the bank vole, edited by Kazimierz Petrusewicz, which consolidated research on one of Europe's most studied small mammals. Supplements and special issues allowed the journal to publish monographic treatments — such as A. L. Ruprecht's-style regional monographs and edited collections on particular taxa — that would not fit the regular article format. The anniversary volume itself (volume 60, 2015, published as Mammal Research) opened with the transition editorial reviewing sixty years of the title, effectively serving as both a valediction for the old name and a program statement for the new one.

Publication model, frequency and access

As Acta Theriologica, the journal was published by the Mammal Research Institute of the Polish Academy of Sciences; publication was transferred to Springer in January 2011, and the title has appeared with Springer since then, first as Acta Theriologica (2011–2014) and then as Mammal Research (2015–present). The current frequency is quarterly. The continuing title operates under an open-access license (CC BY 4.0) as recorded in bibliographic databases, with article processing supported through Springer Nature's standard publishing infrastructure including online-first publication and electronic submission through Editorial Manager.

Note: access and licensing terms described here apply to the continuing Mammal Research title; the historical Acta Theriologica archive is available through SpringerLink and through the Polish digital library rcin.org.pl, which hosts full-text PDFs of older volumes, some digitized from the original print editions.

Peer review and editorial process

The anniversary editorial describes manuscript processing under the old title as the work of an international team of subject editors who handled submissions and improved paper quality through constructive criticism — with authors regularly acknowledging editorial effort in correspondence. Under Springer, the continuing title follows the publisher's standard peer-review workflow: initial editorial screening, assignment to subject editors, external peer review, and revision cycles before acceptance. The journal publishes original research reports, short communications, method papers, reviews and forum papers, a structure that provides room both for rapid dissemination of findings and for synthetic contributions to the discipline. Specifics of the current review model (blinding, reviewer numbers, turnaround statistics) were not verified on the live journal page during this research and are not stated here.

Indexing, archiving and citation standing

The journal is abstracted and indexed in Biological Abstracts, BIOSIS Previews, Current Contents/Agriculture, Biology & Environmental Sciences, EBSCO databases, Essential Science Indicators, GEOBASE, ProQuest databases, the Science Citation Index Expanded, Scopus, and The Zoological Record. These indexing assignments apply across the title's history under both names. According to the Journal Citation Reports, the continuing title has a 2024 impact factor of 1.6 (attributed figure from encyclopedic and directory sources; verify against the current Clarivate record). Scopus source records show the title's coverage spanning the name change, and bibliographic metrics aggregators treat the Acta Theriologica/ Mammal Research sequence as a single serial.

For citation purposes, researchers should cite articles by the title under which the volume was published: volumes 1–59 (1955–2014) as Acta Theriologica (ISSN 0001-7051), volume 60 onward (2015–present) as Mammal Research (ISSN 2199-2401 print / 2199-241X electronic). The NLM/ISO 4 abbreviation for the continuing title is Mammal Res. Older volumes are preserved in library union catalogues (e.g., COBISS records document holdings from 1955 onward in Ljubljana libraries), in the Polish digital library, and in SpringerLink's backfile.

Distinguishing Acta Theriologica from similarly named titles

The Latin stem "Acta Theriologica" should not be confused with Acta Theriologica Sinica (兽类学报, ISSN 1000-1050), the Chinese mammalogy journal published by Science Press in Beijing, which is a separate, currently active title founded in 1981. Nor should it be confused with Theriogenology (the Elsevier journal of animal reproduction) or with Mammalian Biology (the journal of the German Society for Mammalian Biology, now published as Mammalian Biology by Springer). When searching databases for Acta Theriologica, use the ISSN 0001-7051 to disambiguate, and remember that post-2014 records appear under Mammal Research.

Fields not publicly disclosed

Per the no-fabrication rule, the following could not be verified from the sources consulted: the current acceptance rate and median review turnaround of the continuing title; the current article-processing-charge schedule under Springer (directory figures vary and were not confirmed on the live journal page during this research); the full current roster of associate editors beyond the editor-in-chief; and any formal statement of COPE membership or ethics policy text beyond standard Springer publishing policies. Historical financial details of the institute's publication program were likewise not documented in the sources consulted. Readers seeking to submit should consult the live Springer journal page for current author guidance.

Reading the journal strategically

Acta Theriologica matters most today as an archive: six decades of continuous mammalogy that track the discipline's evolution from descriptive natural history to quantitative population ecology and molecular genetics. Anyone researching European mammals — especially forest ungulates, large carnivores and small mammals of the Palaearctic — will find foundational papers in volumes 1–59. Because the journal's ISSN changed with its title, citation searches should be run under both Acta Theriologica (0001-7051) and Mammal Research (2199-2401) to capture the full record. The rcin.org.pl digital library provides open full-text access to many older volumes, making the archive unusually accessible for a mid-century European journal.

Legacy and why the title still matters

The decision to retire the Acta Theriologica name after sixty years was framed by its editor as a forward-looking choice: the research community the journal served had globalized, and the new title Mammal Research names the field directly in the language the community now uses. Yet the old title retains real significance. Bibliometric studies of mammalogy routinely draw on the 1955–2014 corpus, and the journal's six-decade run provides one of the longest unbroken records of population-ecology data in Europe. For historians of science, the archive documents how a small institute in a forest village built an international journal during the Cold War, publishing across political divides in four languages. For working mammalogists, the archive remains a living reference: the bison, wolf, lynx, bisoniana and bank-vole literatures that began in these pages are still extended today. The title may be historical, but its science continues to be read, cited and built upon.