American Zoologist

About American Zoologist

American Zoologist — Journal Profile

American Zoologist was, from 1961 to 2001, the journal of the American Society of Zoologists — the United States' national society for the scientific study of animals — and one of the most distinctive zoology journals of the twentieth century. The JournalsWorld record profiled here (post 342118) is anchored to its ISSN pair, 0003-1569 (print) and 2162-4445, with Oxford University Press as publisher. The anchor is confirmed by the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint (source S4210222308), which lists exactly those two ISSNs for American Zoologist, names Oxford University Press as host organisation, and points to the journal's JSTOR home. The title ceased at the end of 2001 and was continued from 2002, under a new name reflecting its society's own renaming, as Integrative and Comparative Biology — so this record documents a complete, closed journal run of 41 volumes, not a living submission venue, and this profile treats it honestly on those terms.

American Zoologist earned its reputation through a publishing model few journals have attempted: it was built around the symposia of its society's meetings. Where a conventional journal waits for whatever manuscripts arrive, American Zoologist commissioned and published coordinated sets of papers — invited experts addressing one organismal question from anatomy, physiology, development, behaviour, ecology and evolution at once. The result was a journal whose individual issues often read as small monographs on a single theme, and whose papers, written to be read together, accumulated citations for decades. Anyone who has worked through the older literature of comparative physiology, endocrinology or evolutionary morphology has handled this journal, even if the spine they remember is the Oxford archive that now delivers it under its successor's banner.

Quick Facts

• Full title: American Zoologist
• Run: 1961–2001 (41 volumes)
• Print ISSN: 0003-1569
• Second ISSN: 2162-4445 (listed for this source by OpenAlex, covering its digital archive edition)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Owning society: American Society of Zoologists (renamed Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in 1996)
• Succeeding title: Integrative and Comparative Biology (from 2002; ISSN 1540-7063, 1557-7023)
• Field: Zoology across its branches — comparative anatomy and physiology, development, behaviour, ecology, evolution and systematics
• Model: Society journal centred on invited symposia and meeting scholarship
• Status: Ceased under this title in 2001; full archive remains available through Oxford Academic and JSTOR
• Submissions: Closed under this title; authors submit to the successor journal

History: A Society and Its Journal

The society behind the journal was formed in 1902 as the American Society of Zoologists, through the coming together of the Central Naturalists and the American Morphological Society (the latter founded in 1890). It grew into the broadest American home for zoologists, even as specialist groups budded off from it — the Ecological Society of America in 1915 and a society of geneticists in 1930. The journal itself began in 1961, and its earliest volumes show the meeting-centred DNA plainly: the third issue of Volume 1 (August 1961) is occupied by the society's officers, its summer meeting programme, the programme's synopses and page after page of meeting abstracts with an author index. Over the following decades the abstract-and-proceedings element receded and the symposium papers became the journal's core: full, refereed, individually citable articles, organised in thematic sets that mapped the research fronts of organismal biology.

Two renamings frame the end of the run. In 1996 the society, judging that "zoologist" no longer described the integrative work its members actually did, became the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB). The journal kept the American Zoologist name for five more years — through Volume 41 in 2001 — and then followed its society: from 2002 the identical journal, with continuous volume numbering, has appeared as Integrative and Comparative Biology, a bimonthly Oxford University Press title that remains SICB's flagship journal alongside the society's open access companion, Integrative Organismal Biology. The historian C. Edward Quinn's account of the society's ancestry, published in the journal itself in 1982 (Volume 22, pages 735–748), remains the standard starting point for the early history, and the fact that the journal published its own society's history is typical of its role as the community's collective record.

The society's structure shaped the journal's table of contents. SICB — and the American Society of Zoologists before it — organised its members through subject divisions, a deliberately light structure that let new specialisms form their own communities inside the one society rather than leaving to found rival bodies; Pennisi's 2014 account put membership at roughly 3,500. Divisional programmes fed the annual meeting, the meeting fed the symposia, and the symposia fed the journal, so the run of American Zoologist across 1961–2001 doubles as a forty-year record of which divisions were rising, which questions they chose to attack jointly, and how the centre of zoology moved — from the comparative anatomy and classical physiology of the early volumes, through the endocrinological and environmental physiology of the middle decades, towards the evolutionary-developmental and integrative themes that eventually renamed both society and journal. No other single American journal preserves that institutional memory in citable, refereed form, which is a further reason its archive continues to be mined long after the title closed.

Scope and the Symposium Model

American Zoologist covered the whole of zoology as its society understood it, and its scope is best described through the divisions of organismal biology it served: comparative anatomy and morphology; comparative physiology and endocrinology; developmental biology; animal behaviour; ecology and environmental physiology; evolutionary biology and systematics. Its papers characteristically crossed those boundaries within a single issue, because the symposium format put specialists on one problem side by side — a symposium on a hormone, a locomotor system, a life-history pattern or an environmental challenge would run from molecule to ecosystem in a dozen coordinated papers.

For readers, the format has lasting consequences. A symposium paper in American Zoologist is rarely a lone report; it is one panel of a designed whole, and its introduction typically frames the shared question while its companions supply the comparative pieces. Citation practice followed suit: the journal's symposium sets are still assigned as reading in graduate courses, still anchor review bibliographies, and still surface in OpenAlex's citation counts more than two decades after the title closed. Authors of historical reviews should search the journal deliberately — a keyword search confined to conventional research journals will miss the synthesis layer that this journal specialised in.

Metrics and Standing

All figures are attributed at the point of use and were recorded when this profile was checked. The OpenAlex source record for American Zoologist (S4210222308, resolved through the ISSN endpoint) counts 3,569 works and approximately 191,200 citations, with an h-index of 193 and an i10-index of 2,215. The two-year mean citedness is 0.0, as expected for a title that closed in 2001 — the window measures recent citation velocity, not the archive's worth. The lifetime figures are the meaningful ones, and they are formidable: an h-index of 193 means 193 papers in a 41-volume run have each been cited at least 193 times, a density of heavily used work matched by few society journals of its size. That record is the statistical shadow of the symposium model — synthesis papers written by invited experts, on questions framed to matter across subfields, are precisely the papers a discipline keeps citing. The stored JournalsWorld record's identification of Oxford University Press as publisher is corroborated by the OpenAlex host data and by the journal's presence in the Oxford title lists, which give its run as 1961–2001 under ISSN 0003-1569 and carry the continuation, Integrative and Comparative Biology, from 2002 under 1540-7063.

Archive and Access

The complete American Zoologist backfile is delivered today through Oxford Academic, where it is shelved inside the Integrative and Comparative Biology archive — Oxford's browse for the continuing journal opens at Volume 1, Issue 3 of August 1961, American Zoologist content under the successor's roof, with article DOIs built on the continuing journal's prefix (the Quinn history article, for example, is doi:10.1093/icb/22.4.735). JSTOR also holds the journal as a complete 1961–2001 run within its Oxford University Press collection, which is how many university libraries expose it. This arrangement occasionally puzzles readers: the archive's continuous numbering and shared DOI prefix are correct, not a cataloguing error, because publisher and society treat the two titles as one journal in sequence. When citing, however, the title on the paper itself governs — work published in 2001 or earlier is cited to American Zoologist (abbreviated Am. Zool.), and its ISSN for that era is 0003-1569.

Fees and Submissions Position

American Zoologist accepts no submissions: the title closed at the end of 2001, and the society's journals today are Integrative and Comparative Biology and Integrative Organismal Biology, both published by Oxford University Press and both reached through the society's and the publisher's current pages. No submission fee, page charge or other author charge for the historical title is asserted in this profile, and any live fee information belongs to the successor journals' own sites. Researchers who believe their work "belongs in American Zoologist" are, in modern terms, describing a symposium-style integrative paper, and the practical route is the successor journal — including its tradition of publishing symposium collections arising from the society's annual meeting and its divisional programme.

Legacy and Influence

The journal's afterlife is a case study in how a well-built society archive keeps working. When Elizabeth Pennisi surveyed the society for Science in 2014, under the headline "Once failing biology society thrives as it nurtures new disciplines", the story she told was of an organisation that had reinvented itself around integration — the same editorial idea American Zoologist had embodied in print for forty years. The society's present mission, as its publisher states it, is to further research, education and public awareness in organismal, functional and evolutionary biology; that phrasing is the American Zoologist remit carried forward, and the journal's symposium collections remain the historical record of the fields that fused into modern organismal biology: comparative endocrinology in its formative decades, the physiology of extreme environments, the early synthesis of development with evolution, and the behavioural ecology of the 1970s and 1980s. Historians and teachers use complete runs of the journal the way geologists use core samples — a dated, ordered sequence showing what a discipline believed its central problems to be, year by year.

There is also a bibliometric legacy. Because the OpenAlex record for the title carries the archive's citations in one place, the journal's influence can be measured rather than merely asserted: roughly 191,200 citations against 3,569 works is an average above fifty citations per paper across a run that ended more than two decades ago, and the i10-index of 2,215 means well over half the journal's papers have each been cited at least ten times. Very few closed journals of any era sustain numbers of that order, and they were earned disproportionately by the symposium synthesis papers — the pieces departments still photocopy, post and assign. For evaluators encountering the journal on an older researcher's publication list, the correct reading is that American Zoologist was a demanding, society-governed venue of the first rank in its field and period, not an obscure archive title.

Searching and Citing the Backfile

Three practical rules make the archive easy to use. First, search by both identities: database records variously file the content under American Zoologist with ISSN 0003-1569, under the continuing journal's archive at Oxford Academic, or under the successor title with its 2002-onwards ISSNs; a complete sweep uses the title as printed on the paper plus the ISSN pair on this record. Second, cite by the printed title and year: a 1982 paper is an American Zoologist paper (volume 22 in the Quinn example, DOI 10.1093/icb/22.4.735) even when the PDF was delivered from the Integrative and Comparative Biology shelf of Oxford Academic — the "icb" element inside the DOI is a platform artefact of the shared archive, not the journal's name at publication. Third, exploit the symposium structure: when one paper from an issue proves relevant, the surrounding papers in that issue were commissioned as its companions and are the fastest route into the same problem from neighbouring subdisciplines — a finding path that keyword search alone seldom reconstructs. Library users should note that JSTOR's run and Oxford's run are the same content through two doors, so availability through either is sufficient.

Similar Journals

The closest neighbours are the successor title itself, Integrative and Comparative Biology, which continues this journal's model and numbering; the Journal of Experimental Biology, the comparative physiology flagship; Comparative Biochemistry and Physiology in its several parts; Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, another society-rooted comparative title with its own renaming history; and the Journal of Experimental Zoology. American Zoologist's distinction within that company was breadth with design: other journals published excellent comparative papers one at a time, while this journal published them in coordinated constellations — which is why its backfile remains, issue by issue, a map of what organismal biology thought its big questions were between 1961 and 2001.

Frequently Asked Questions

What was American Zoologist?

The journal of the American Society of Zoologists from 1961 to 2001, published by Oxford University Press and built around invited symposia spanning comparative anatomy, physiology, development, behaviour, ecology and evolution.

What are its ISSNs?

Print ISSN 0003-1569, with 2162-4445 also listed for this source by OpenAlex. Its successor, Integrative and Comparative Biology, carries 1540-7063 and 1557-7023.

Why can't I find recent issues?

Because the title ceased at the end of 2001 (Volume 41). From 2002 the same journal has appeared as Integrative and Comparative Biology, with continuous volume numbering, after the owning society renamed itself the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology in 1996.

Where can I read the archive?

Through Oxford Academic, where the backfile sits inside the Integrative and Comparative Biology archive (reaching back to Volume 1, 1961), and through JSTOR's complete 1961–2001 run in its Oxford University Press collection.

How cited is the journal?

OpenAlex counts 3,569 works and roughly 191,200 citations for the title, with an h-index of 193, at the time this profile was checked — an exceptionally heavily cited archive for a closed society journal.

Who owned and governed the journal?

The American Society of Zoologists, the national society formed in 1902 from the Central Naturalists and the American Morphological Society. In 1996 the society renamed itself the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, and the journal followed the same integrative direction under its new title from 2002. Oxford University Press was the publisher throughout the period covered by the sources used for this profile, and remains publisher of the successor journals.

What kind of papers did it publish?

Principally symposium papers: coordinated, invited sets of full research and synthesis articles organised around a single organismal theme, supplemented by the society's meeting scholarship. Its earliest volumes also carried society business and meeting abstracts in quantity — Volume 1, Issue 3 (August 1961) is largely programme and abstracts — but the refereed symposium article became the journal's signature content and the source of most of its citations.

Is the journal the same as Integrative and Comparative Biology?

It is the same journal in an earlier name form. The volume sequence, society ownership, publisher and symposium model run continuously across the 2002 title change, and the publisher shelves the 1961–2001 content inside the successor's archive. Bibliographically the two titles keep separate ISSNs and are cited separately, by the title printed on each paper.

Can I submit a paper to American Zoologist?

No — the title closed in 2001. The living venues are its successor, Integrative and Comparative Biology, and the society's open access journal, Integrative Organismal Biology, both via Oxford University Press.

Profile prepared from Oxford University Press title records and the Oxford Academic archive, the JSTOR publisher collection listing, the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology's published history, and the OpenAlex source record resolved through the ISSN endpoint. Figures are attributed at the point of use and were verified at checking time.