Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences

About Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences

Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences: The AAAP Journal That Became Animal Bioscience

The Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences — universally shortened to AJAS — was, from 1988 until the end of 2020, the official journal of the Asian-Australasian Association of Animal Production Societies (AAAP). It carried print ISSN 1011-2367 and electronic ISSN 1976-5517, was published monthly from South Korea, and built, over thirty-three volumes, one of the largest open archives in regional animal science: research on the breeding, feeding, physiology, health and products of the farm animals on which much of Asia’s and Australasia’s food supply depends. From January 2021 the same journal continues under a new title, Animal Bioscience, with new ISSNs. This profile therefore documents a completed chapter of a living journal. It explains what AJAS published and why, how it was organised and indexed, what its editors tried to achieve, and how its title change should — and should not — be interpreted by readers, authors and librarians working with its archive.

Understanding the title change is essential to using this record correctly. AJAS and Animal Bioscience are not two competing journals, and they are not duplicates. They are successive titles of one journal, in the standard serials sense: the earlier title closed at the end of 2020 and the later title opened in January 2021, published by the same association, with the same aims, a substantially continuous editorial programme, and new ISSNs as serials rules require. Citations to work published from 1988 to 2020 belong to AJAS and its ISSNs; citations from 2021 onward belong to Animal Bioscience and its ISSNs, 2765-0189 in print and 2765-0235 online. A separate Journals World record exists for the successor title, and the relationship between the two records is a rename, reported here explicitly so that neither record is mistaken for a copy of the other.

Quick Facts

• Full title: Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences
• Abbreviation: AJAS; ISO abbreviation Asian Australas. J. Anim. Sci.
• Print ISSN: 1011-2367
• Electronic ISSN: 1976-5517
• Publisher / owner: Asian-Australasian Association of Animal Production Societies (AAAP)
• Published: 1988–2020 under this title; continued from January 2021 as Animal Bioscience
• Frequency: Monthly
• Country of publication: South Korea
• Language: English
• Access model in its later years: Open access, with articles distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution licence as stated in the journal’s own article notices
• Successor title: Animal Bioscience (ISSN 2765-0189 print; 2765-0235 online)

The Association and the Region the Journal Served

The Asian-Australasian Association of Animal Production Societies is a regional federation of animal production societies, and AJAS was its official journal — the same relationship that the successor title maintains today. That ownership shaped the journal’s content in a practical way. Its natural constituency was not a single country’s livestock industry but a region of extraordinary diversity: intensive pig and poultry production in Korea and China, dairy systems in Japan and Australasia, ruminant production across South and Southeast Asia, and smallholder mixed farming in which a single household’s buffalo, goats and chickens are simultaneously food, savings and draught power. Research questions that look narrow from a temperate, industrial standpoint — heat stress in dairy cattle, forage quality in the monsoon season, feed resources based on local by-products, disease control where veterinary infrastructure is thin — are central questions for that constituency, and AJAS gave them a peer-reviewed home with international visibility.

The journal was printed in Korea and edited from Korea, and its archive is served through Korean scholarly infrastructure, including the Korea Science platform, which preserves its aims, section structure and bibliographic record, and through the journal’s own site. Its submission system operated at the AJAS domain during the title’s life; authors today are directed to the successor title’s system instead.

Aims and Scope

The journal’s stated aim was to publish original and cutting-edge research results and reviews on animal-related aspects of the life sciences. Emphasis was placed on studies involving farm animals — cattle, buffaloes, sheep, goats, pigs, horses and poultry are the animals named — and studies directed at the improvement of human health using animal models could also be publishable. The scope encompassed all areas of animal production and the fundamental aspects of animal science: breeding and genetics, reproduction and physiology, nutrition, meat and milk science, biotechnology, behaviour, welfare, health, and livestock farming systems.

That paragraph rewards close reading. AJAS was not a veterinary clinical journal, although animal health was in scope; it was not a food science journal, although meat and milk science were in scope; and it was not a general biology journal, although fundamental and molecular work was welcome when it bore on animals and production. Its organising idea was the farmed animal as a whole system — genome, physiology, diet, environment, product and farm — studied at every level from gene expression in the rumen to the economics and waste streams of a production system.

The Ten Sections

AJAS organised its contents into ten sections, preserved in the Korea Science record of the journal and carried, in revised wording, into the successor title. Listing them with their stated coverage is the most faithful way to show what the journal actually published.

Animal Breeding and Genetics covered quantitative and molecular genetics, genomics, genetic evaluation, the evolution of domestic animals, and bioinformatics. In practice this meant breed characterisation of the region’s indigenous populations, marker and genome-wide association studies, and selection work in cattle, pigs and poultry.

Animal Reproduction and Physiology covered the physiology of reproduction, development, growth, lactation and exercise, and gamete biology — the reproductive technologies and developmental biology on which breeding programmes depend.

Ruminant Nutrition and Forage Utilization addressed rumen microbiology and function, ruminant nutrition, physiology and metabolism, and forage utilisation. For a region where roughage quality and seasonal forage scarcity limit production, this was one of the journal’s heaviest territories.

Swine Nutrition and Feed Technology covered swine nutrition and physiology and the evaluation of feeds, feed additives and feed processing technology, serving the region’s intensive pig industries.

Poultry and Laboratory Animal Nutrition covered the nutrition and physiology of poultry and other non-ruminant animals, extending the journal’s non-ruminant coverage beyond pigs.

Animal Products covered milk and meat science, muscle biology, product composition, food safety, food security and functional foods — the point at which animal science meets the consumer.

Animal Biotechnology covered molecular nutrition, transgenic animals, and the identification and manipulation of genes.

Animal Health covered immune modulation, infection and immunity, stress responses, vaccines and therapeutics, and animal models.

Animal Behavior and Welfare covered social and sexual behaviour, adaptation, and animal welfare — a section whose presence in a production journal reflects how far welfare had moved into mainstream animal science during the journal’s life.

Environment and Management covered livestock waste management, livestock and the environment, and livestock farming systems, closing the loop between production and its environmental costs.

Development, Indexing and Standing

The journal’s own retrospective accounts describe a long climb in visibility. AJAS was indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded for the first time in 1997, when, by its editors’ account, its impact factor stood at 0.094; by 2017 that figure had risen to 1.243, and total citations had grown from fewer than one hundred in the first indexed year to more than four thousand by 2007 — a forty-fold increase in twenty years, in the editors’ summary. Those are the journal’s own historical figures, quoted here as its record of itself, not as current metrics: the AJAS title ceased before the present decade, and any citation figure attached to the successor title belongs to Animal Bioscience, not to this record.

The indexing list the journal published for itself was broad, and it explains how a regional journal achieved that citation growth. AJAS described itself as indexed or abstracted in Science Citation Index Expanded, Scopus, PubMed Central, the Directory of Open Access Journals, AGRICOLA, BIOSIS, CABI, Chemical Abstracts Service, EBSCO services, Focus on Veterinary Science and Medicine, Food Science and Technology Abstracts, Current Contents in Agricultural, Biological and Environmental Sciences, ScienceCentral and the Korea Citation Index. That combination — the major citation indexes, the main agricultural and veterinary abstracting services, and full-text archiving in PubMed Central — meant a paper on, for example, rumen fermentation in Korean cattle or heat stress in Thai poultry could be found by a researcher on any continent through whichever database their library provided.

Two editorial initiatives from the journal’s own history are worth recording. The first is its award programme, created in 1990 and financially supported by Cargill Agri Purina Inc. in Korea, which recognised excellence in papers published by scientists from AAAP member countries and later broadened to recognise contribution to journal development through citations and services. The second is the strategy its editors set out in the AJAS 2020 programme: adoption of an open access policy with full-text XML service, coverage by PubMed Central and the Directory of Open Access Journals, addition of sections such as laboratory animals and animal health to reach readers beyond the livestock core, invited review papers, and active use of social channels. Read against the indexing list, that programme is a concise explanation of the journal’s trajectory — visibility first, citations following.

Why the Title Changed in 2021

The change to Animal Bioscience, effective from January 2021, was explained by the journal’s own editors in editorials in both the closing title and the successor. The old title, they wrote, was a bit too long, and its length led authors to avoid citing AJAS because of the complexity of its name. The change was intended to enhance the journal’s brand identity, secure international leadership, and allow it to cover the diverse interests of the animal industry and academia in the long run. The editors were candid that the transition carried costs: preparations took the better part of a year, involving journal style and format, the online system, and arrangements with existing databases for continued coverage, and manuscript submissions fell sharply — by almost half, in the successor’s editor-in-chief’s retrospective — with a smaller effect on citation frequency, effects they expected to be temporary. That candour is useful evidence. It confirms, from inside the journal, that the rename was a deliberate rebranding of a continuing title, planned with database continuity, and not the launch of an unrelated new journal or the closure of the old one for quality reasons.

For librarians and bibliometricians, the practical consequences are these. Holdings and citations split at the 2020–2021 boundary by title and ISSN, as serials rules intend. Scopus coverage of the AJAS title is recorded as ending in 2020 in reference summaries of the successor, which list the successor’s own Scopus coverage from 2021. Impact and citation histories likewise restart under the new title’s ISSNs. None of that diminishes the AJAS archive, which remains the citable record for its thirty-three years and remains readable through the journal’s archive and PubMed Central.

How to Use the AJAS Archive Today

Researchers encounter AJAS in three main ways. First, through citations: a reference to Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences with a year between 1988 and 2020, a volume from that run, and the ISSNs above is a reference to this record’s journal, and the article will normally be retrievable through the journal archive, Korea Science, PubMed Central or a DOI resolver. Second, through systematic searching: because AJAS was the region’s general animal science journal for three decades, reviews of breeding, nutrition, forage, heat stress, animal products and livestock-environment questions in Asian and Australasian production systems are incomplete if they omit it. Third, through its successor: an author wishing to submit work of the kind AJAS published should submit to Animal Bioscience, whose aims and ten-section structure — breeding and genetics; reproduction and physiology; ruminant nutrition and forage utilization; swine nutrition and feed technology; poultry nutrition; animal biotechnology; animal health; animal products; animal behavior and welfare; environment and management — continue the AJAS programme in slightly revised wording, including newer emphases such as epigenetics, functional genomics, assisted reproductive technology, gut microbiology and meat analogues.

No submission route, fee schedule or current editorial board is given in this profile for AJAS itself, deliberately: the title no longer accepts submissions, its editorial facts now belong to the successor’s record, and inventing continuity details for a closed title would mislead authors. The current editor-in-chief names, charges and instructions are those published for Animal Bioscience on its official site.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of the Asian-Australasian Journal of Animal Sciences?
Print ISSN 1011-2367 and electronic ISSN 1976-5517.

Who published AJAS?
The Asian-Australasian Association of Animal Production Societies (AAAP), from South Korea. It was the association’s official journal.

Is AJAS still published under that title?
No. The title ran from 1988 to 2020 and was changed to Animal Bioscience effective January 2021, with new ISSNs 2765-0189 and 2765-0235. The journal itself continues under the new title.

Was AJAS open access and indexed?
In its later years it operated an open access policy with full-text archiving, and it listed indexing in Science Citation Index Expanded, Scopus, PubMed Central and the Directory of Open Access Journals among many agricultural and veterinary services, as detailed in the indexing section above.

Is AJAS the same journal as Animal Bioscience?
It is the same journal under its former title — a rename, not a duplicate and not a separate competing journal. The two Journals World records document the two title periods, and the pair is reported in this batch’s notes as a rename relationship with distinct ISSN sets.

Where do I submit a paper of the kind AJAS published?
To Animal Bioscience, through its official site. AJAS itself no longer accepts submissions.

Sources and Verification Notes

This profile is anchored to the Journals World record for post 333654 (title, slug, publisher and ISSNs as stored, which match the external record). The aims, scope and ten-section structure are taken from the journal’s record on the Korea Science platform. Indexing, open access and citation-history details are taken from the journal’s own published descriptions and its editors’ retrospective accounts, and are attributed as such in the text. The title change, its date, its reasons and its submission effects are taken from editorials published in the journal and its successor, including an account in a journal-editing periodical. The successor’s aims and section wording are taken from the official Animal Bioscience site. The successor post on Journals World (Animal Bioscience, post 14857) was fetched directly by ID and checked during preparation: it carries the successor’s ISSNs, not the AJAS ISSNs, and is a thin record — confirming a rename pair with distinct identifiers rather than a duplicate of this post. No impact factor is stated as a current fact for AJAS, because the title is closed and historical figures are identified by year wherever they appear.

Reading AJAS as a Record of Regional Animal Science

Finally, the archive deserves to be read historically, because few journals document the transformation of Asian livestock production as completely. In its early volumes, the dominant problems are foundational: characterising indigenous breeds, measuring the nutritive value of local feeds and forages, and establishing reproductive and growth baselines for animals kept under tropical and subtropical conditions rather than the temperate conditions assumed by European and North American textbooks. Through the middle period, molecular tools enter section by section — genetic markers in breeding papers, rumen microbiology in nutrition papers, immunology in health papers — while the systems questions remain stubbornly regional: monsoon forage gaps, rice-straw and crop by-product feeding, heat and humidity stress, and smallholder constraints. In the final decade under the AJAS title, the editors’ own programme documents a journal deliberately internationalising: open access full text, PubMed Central archiving, invited reviews, new sections reaching toward laboratory animals and animal health, and citation counts its founders could not have anticipated when the first volume appeared in 1988. A researcher who understands that arc will search the archive more intelligently, expecting terminology, methods and even species emphasis to shift across the volumes, and will treat a 1992 feeding trial and a 2019 genomics paper as products of the same journal at different stages of a field’s development. That is the real content of this record: not a defunct title, but thirty-three volumes of a region learning, in public and under peer review, how its animals feed its people.