American Journal of Animal and Veterinary Sciences

About American Journal of Animal and Veterinary Sciences

American Journal of Animal and Veterinary Sciences — Journal Profile

The American Journal of Animal and Veterinary Sciences (AJAVS) is a quarterly, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by Science Publications of the United States. It has published research in animal biology and veterinary medicine since its first volume in 2006, and it occupies a deliberately broad niche: rather than serving one species or one technique, it takes the whole animal as its subject, from the biochemistry of tissues and the function of cells up through herd health, production systems and the monitoring of disease in domestic and wild populations. That breadth, together with full open access, has made it a working journal for researchers in livestock science and veterinary practice worldwide, including many authors in Africa, Asia and Latin America whose institutions cannot sustain subscriptions to the large commercial veterinary titles.

This profile sets out the journal's verified identifiers, its history and publishing home, the scope as the publisher states it, its editorial and peer-review character, its citation record as reported by OpenAlex and by SCImago-derived listings at the time of checking, its indexing, its access model and fees, and practical submission guidance. Where a detail could not be verified from a source actually consulted — the journal's own website could not be fetched directly during this check — the profile says so rather than guessing.

At a Glance

Identity and History

Science Publications launched the journal in the mid-2000s wave of born-digital, open-access science publishing, and OpenAlex's ISSN-resolved record for the title shows works appearing from 2006 onward — eight works in that first year, rising over time to annual counts in the forties by the mid-2020s. Scopus coverage, as summarised in SCImago-derived listings, begins in 2007 and runs continuously to the present, which means the journal earned its place in the major citation index within about a year of launch and has kept it for close to two decades. The title itself states the journal's dual allegiance plainly: animal sciences on one side — the production, nutrition, breeding and management of livestock and companion animals — and veterinary sciences on the other — the medicine of animal health and disease. Many journals sit on one side of that line; this one was designed to straddle it, and its contents confirm the design, with ruminant nutrition trials, reproductive physiology studies, poultry and aquaculture work, parasitology, and clinical veterinary reports appearing side by side in the same volumes.

Two decades in, the journal's archive is substantial. OpenAlex counted 690 works and 4,423 citations for the title at the time of checking, with recent annual output of 45 works in 2023, 42 in 2024 and 49 in 2025 — a stable, mid-sized quarterly rhythm rather than the explosive volume growth associated with mega-journals. The journal has kept its original title, publisher and ISSNs throughout, which simplifies the bibliographic record: there are no predecessor or successor titles to untangle.

Publisher and Publishing Home

Science Publications is a United States-based open-access publisher whose list spans the natural, agricultural and medical sciences, and this journal sits in its agricultural and veterinary cluster alongside sister titles in fields such as agricultural science, food science and biology. The publisher operates the journal's website, submission handling and article hosting; OpenAlex gives the journal's homepage as the publisher's journal portal page for AJAVS. Articles are published open access, so the version of record is freely readable on the journal site, and the publisher's model places the journal in the author-facing open-access economy rather than behind subscription paywalls. Authors should note that the publisher's own pages are the authoritative source for current submission mechanics and any charges, and should check them directly at the point of submission, since this profile could not fetch the publisher's site during its check and therefore reports fee and workflow details conservatively.

Scope and Subject Coverage

The publisher's own description of the journal, as carried in journal-guide listings of the publisher's text, defines the scope in detail. The journal is dedicated to research articles in the biology of animals and the scientific understanding of how animals work: from the physiology and biochemistry of tissues and major organ systems down to the structure and function of biomolecules and cells. Particular emphasis is given to studies of growth, reproduction, nutrition and lactation in farm and companion animals, and to how those processes may be optimised to improve animal reproductivity, health and welfare. Articles in supporting areas — genetics, soils, agricultural economics and marketing, legal aspects and the environment — are also encouraged. Finally, the description stresses the journal's role as a source on the protection of animal production practices, herd health, and monitoring the spread of disease and its prevention in both domestic and wild animals.

OpenAlex's topic classification of what the journal has actually published matches that stated scope closely. Its largest topic clusters at checking time were Animal Nutrition and Physiology (179 works), Ruminant Nutrition and Digestive Physiology (124), Reproductive Physiology in Livestock (120), Genetic and Phenotypic Traits in Livestock (79) and Livestock Farming and Management (77). In other words, the journal's centre of gravity is the productive farm animal — cattle, sheep, goats, poultry and pigs — studied through feeding, breeding and reproduction, with veterinary and health work woven through rather than segregated into a separate clinical silo. Scopus classifies the journal under Agricultural and Biological Sciences and Veterinary, and SCImago places it in the categories Veterinary (miscellaneous) and Animal Science and Zoology.

Editorial Character and Peer Review

The journal describes itself as peer reviewed, and its quarterly cadence with annual volumes implies a conventional editorial cycle of submission, external review, revision and issue-based publication. The name of a current editor-in-chief could not be verified from sources accessible during this check — the publisher's own site, which carries the editorial board, could not be fetched directly — and this profile therefore does not name one. That gap is worth stating openly because editorial identity is exactly the kind of detail that directory profiles often copy from stale third-party pages. What can be said from the verified record is that the journal has maintained continuous Scopus coverage since 2007, a status that requires a functioning editorial and peer-review apparatus to retain, and that its published contents show the expected apparatus of a research journal: structured research articles reporting trials, surveys and laboratory studies from an international author base.

Metrics: What the Numbers Show

OpenAlex, resolving the journal through its ISSN endpoint at the time of checking, reported 690 works, 4,423 citations, an h-index of 28, an i10-index of 135 and a two-year mean citedness of about 0.47. SCImago-derived listings, which rest on Scopus data, report a somewhat different Scopus-based picture: an h-index of 23, a SCImago Journal Rank of 0.187 in the current listing year, a Scopus CiteScore of 1.6 as summarised by journal-search listings, and a best quartile of Q3 — Q3 in Veterinary (miscellaneous) and Q4 in Animal Science and Zoology in the listing consulted. The two sets of numbers do not contradict each other; they measure different citation universes. OpenAlex counts citations from the whole open scholarly graph, while Scopus-based indicators count only citations inside the curated Scopus index, and h-indices computed on those different bases routinely differ by a handful of points, as they do here (28 against 23). For an author comparing venues, the honest summary is that AJAVS is an established mid-tier outlet in its categories: indexed in Scopus for nearly twenty years, cited steadily, with the modest per-article citation rates typical of applied animal-science publishing, where much of the readership is professional and regional rather than citation-producing academia alone.

Indexing and Discoverability

The journal's principal indexing credential is Scopus, where coverage runs from 2007 to the present according to SCImago-derived summaries of the Scopus source list — the same coverage that underlies its SJR and CiteScore figures. Journal-search listings also report inclusion in the UGC CARE list, which matters to authors at Indian institutions whose promotion rules reference that list. Beyond the citation indexes, the journal's open-access articles are discoverable through Google Scholar and through OpenAlex itself, which indexes the title comprehensively and classifies its contents by topic. A search of the Directory of Open Access Journals through its API at the time of checking returned no listing for either of the journal's ISSNs; that is a statement about the DOAJ register only, not about the journal's open-access status, which is evident from the publisher's model and OpenAlex's open-access flag for the title.

Access Model and Fees

The journal is open access: OpenAlex flags the title as an open-access journal, and articles are freely readable on the publisher's site. The fee side is less cleanly documented from the sources this profile could reach. A 2013 survey of veterinary journals recorded this title as carrying no page charges, but that listing is more than a decade old and cannot be treated as the current schedule. The publisher's current article-processing-charge figure could not be verified during this check because the publisher's website could not be fetched directly, and SCImago's estimated APC figures are statistical estimates rather than publisher prices, so this profile does not quote one. Authors should confirm the current charge, if any, on the journal's own pages before submitting; that is the only figure that binds.

How to Submit

Submissions are handled through the publisher's journal site, which OpenAlex lists as the journal's homepage. Prospective authors should prepare a manuscript that fits the journal's declared emphases — animal biology, nutrition, reproduction, growth, lactation, health and herd-level disease monitoring, with supporting work in genetics and the agricultural-economics and environmental dimensions of animal production also in scope — and should write for the journal's genuinely international but practice-aware readership: methods and trial designs need to be reported completely enough to be repeated, and results framed in terms of the production or health decision they inform. Because the journal is quarterly and issue-based, authors should expect a conventional review timeline rather than the continuous-publication speed of a mega-journal, and should verify the current submission checklist, article types and any charges on the journal site itself, since those operational details sit with the publisher.

Similar Journals

Authors placing this journal in its landscape will compare it with other broad animal and veterinary outlets: Veterinary World, an open-access general veterinary journal; Tropical Animal Health and Production, for livestock work in tropical systems; the Journal of Applied Animal Research, another single-title home for applied animal studies; Animal Bioscience, the Asian-Australasian animal science journal; Livestock Science for production-system research; and Animals, the large open-access animal journal. Against that company, AJAVS's distinguishing marks are its United States publisher, its explicit pairing of animal science with veterinary science in one title, its quarterly rhythm, and a Scopus record stretching back to 2007.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the journal's ISSNs? Print ISSN 1557-4555 and electronic ISSN 1557-4563. The Journals World record stores the pair in the order 1557-4563, 1557-4555; the print/electronic assignment given here follows the publisher-data summaries consulted for this profile.

Is the journal open access? Yes. OpenAlex flags the title as open access and articles are freely readable on the publisher's site. It was not returned by the DOAJ search API at checking time, which concerns that register only.

Is it indexed in Scopus? Yes — SCImago-derived summaries of the Scopus source list show continuous coverage from 2007 to the present, with a best quartile of Q3.

What is its h-index? It depends on the database: OpenAlex reported 28 at checking time, while SCImago's Scopus-based figure is 23. Quote either with its source attached.

How often does it appear? Quarterly — four issues a year under one annual volume, a pattern it has kept since its first volume in 2006.

Does it charge a publication fee? A current fee figure could not be verified from sources accessible during this check; a 2013 listing reported no page charges, but authors must confirm the present position on the journal's own site.

What Gets Published: Reading the Contents

The journal's most-cited work shows its centre of gravity in practice. A Research.com summary of the journal's contents lists among its most-cited papers a feeding trial adding garlic and thyme to the diet of laying hens and measuring productive performance and egg quality (38 citations in that summary), a review of randomly amplified polymorphic DNA technique (38 citations), and a study of nutrient digestibility and gas production in tropical ruminant feeds estimated by in vivo and in vitro techniques (34 citations). Herbal feed additives, molecular markers, and the evaluation of tropical feedstuffs: that trio is a fair miniature of the journal as a whole. Its bibliometric topic profile, from the same Research.com summary, assigns about a quarter of its contents to animal science in the narrow sense, with internal medicine and veterinary medicine each around fifteen percent and food science and endocrinology also represented — a spread that reflects how completely production and health interlock in farm-animal research. Geographically the author base is wide, with strong representation from the Middle East, South and Southeast Asia and Africa alongside North American and European contributors, which suits a journal whose subject — improving the productivity, health and welfare of farm and companion animals — is a live research priority across the developing world's livestock sectors.

Standing and Cautions for Authors

Three cautions belong in any honest profile of this journal. First, its bibliometric identity is stable but modest: a Q3/Q4 Scopus position and per-article citation rates under one in OpenAlex's two-year measure mean authors choose it for fit, audience and open access rather than for citation prestige, and promotion committees in some countries weight that accordingly. Second, aggregator pages disagree about its secondary numbers — different SCImago-based summaries variously report h-indices of 18, 22 and 23 and SJR values from 0.187 to 0.245, because each was computed in a different year on a growing Scopus record; the figures quoted in this profile are tied to the listings actually consulted and dated in the sources note, and readers comparing journals should always compare figures from the same source and year. Third, the operational layer — editorial board membership, current charges, submission mechanics — lives on the publisher's website, and directory entries elsewhere on the web copy that layer from one another for years after it changes. The journal's durable, checkable credentials are its ISSN pair, its unbroken Scopus coverage since 2007 and its two-decade publication run; authors should verify everything else at the journal's own door before submitting.

Sources and Verification Note

This profile is anchored to the Journals World record for post 29045 (title and ISSNs 1557-4563 and 1557-4555 as stored) and built from sources consulted directly for this profile: OpenAlex source S178984794 resolved through the ISSN endpoint (690 works, 4,423 citations, h-index 28, i10-index 135, two-year mean citedness about 0.47, topic counts, works from 2006, annual counts 2023–2025, open-access flag, homepage); SCImago-derived journal listings (publisher Science Publications, Scopus coverage 2007–2025, h-index 23, SJR 0.187, best quartile Q3, CiteScore 1.6 as summarised from Scopus data, subject categories); the publisher's scope description as carried in journal-guide listings (quarterly, peer reviewed, animal biology from tissues and organ systems to biomolecules and cells, emphases on growth, reproduction, nutrition and lactation, supporting areas, herd health and disease monitoring); a 2013 veterinary-journal survey (no page charges at that date, reported as historical only); and the DOAJ search API, which returned no listing for either ISSN at checking time. The publisher's own website could not be fetched directly during this check, so operational details that live only there — the current editor-in-chief's name and any current processing charge — are recorded above as not verified rather than filled in from stale third-party copies.