Australian Journal of Agricultural Research

About Australian Journal of Agricultural Research

Australian Journal of Agricultural Research — Journal Profile (1950–2008)

The Australian Journal of Agricultural Research (print ISSN 0004-9409; online ISSN 1444-9838) was one of the foundation journals of Australian agricultural science: a peer-reviewed CSIRO journal published from 1950 to 2008 by CSIRO Publishing, for CSIRO and the Australian Academy of Science. It carried original research on the physical, chemical and biological aspects of agricultural systems under Australasian conditions — soils, crops, pastures, livestock and the microbes and environments that connect them. In 2009 the journal continued under a new title, Crop & Pasture Science (volumes continue the sequence: the old title's volume 59 was 2008, and the new title's volume 60 was 2009), with new ISSNs. This profile therefore records a completed historical title: the journal no longer accepts submissions under this name, its archive remains available through CSIRO Publishing's platform (now presented within the Crop & Pasture Science / ConnectSci environment), and anyone wishing to publish the kind of work it carried today should submit to its successor. Getting that history right matters, because the record previously attached to this post mixed the two titles' identifiers together — an error corrected and documented below.

Quick Facts

An Important Correction to This Record

The short template text previously shown for this journal listed four ISSNs together: 0004-9409, 1444-9838, 1836-0947 and 1836-5795. Only the first two belong to the Australian Journal of Agricultural Research — CSIRO's own article pages for the journal state "Online ISSN: 1444-9838; Print ISSN: 0004-9409" on its 2007 papers. The second pair, 1836-0947 (print) and 1836-5795 (online), are the ISSNs of the successor title Crop & Pasture Science, as shown on CSIRO's current journal pages for that title. The two journals are one continuing publication lineage but two distinct cataloguing records with distinct ISSNs, and mixing the identifiers sends readers, indexers and citation tools to the wrong title. This profile keeps them separate throughout, and the mix-up is flagged in the batch report so the stored data can be corrected. JournalsWorld also holds a separate record for Crop and Pasture Science itself, so the successor is profiled in its own right elsewhere in this directory.

History: From Post-War CSIRO Science to a New Title

The journal began with volume 1, number 1 in 1950 — the CSHL archives hold a reprint of H. R. Angell's "Seedling blight" from that first issue (pages 33–42, 1950), and the journal's own early volumes show Butler's soil survey work opening volume 1 at page 3. It was a product of the young CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation), published under the general direction of an editorial board chaired in the 1950s by Dr N. S. Noble, with board members including figures such as Sir Macfarlane Burnet. The masthead of the 1956 volume describes it as "a medium for the publication of results of original investigations in the broad field of scientific research on plants, soils, and domestic animals", issued six times a year from CSIRO's Melbourne editorial office, and published for CSIRO together with the Australian Academy of Science — an ownership statement the journal's later author information repeats ("published by CSIRO PUBLISHING for CSIRO Australia and the Australian Academy of Science"). The journal grew with Australian agriculture itself: through the wool boom, the superphosphate and pasture-improvement era, the wheat-breeding decades and the molecular turn, its volumes recorded Merino sheep genetics (Morley's selection experiments in the 1950s), pasture ecology of the Riverine Plain, cereal cytogenetics, soil copper and trace-element work, and grazing-system experiments — much of it research done at CSIRO and state department laboratories and stations.

By its final years the journal was monthly in rhythm and fully online: volume 58 (2007) papers on the CSIRO platform show the modern article apparatus of DOIs in the 10.1071/AR series, received and accepted dates, and peer-review labelling. Volume 59 followed in 2008 — still under the old title, as citations to 2008 articles in volume 59 confirm. From volume 60 (2009) the journal appeared as Crop & Pasture Science. CSIRO's current journal pages state the relationship in one line — "Crop and Pasture Science was formerly known as Australian Journal of Agricultural Research" — and the successor's scope statement narrowed and sharpened the old journal's broad brief toward strategic research in crop and pasture sciences and the sustainability of farming systems. The rename is best read as a repositioning, not a closure: the same publisher, the same volume sequence, a focused title for the journal's core subject matter.

Scope as the Journal Defined It

The journal's own author information defines its scope with care, and this profile quotes its substance rather than paraphrasing loosely. It was "a scientific journal for the publication of original contributions towards the understanding of some part of the physical, chemical and/or biological aspects of an agricultural system having relevance to Australasian conditions." Agriculture was "interpreted in the widest sense" and included rangelands; "system" embraced "aerial, soil, plant, domestic animal and microbiological components and their interrelationships and integration." Papers from international sources were encouraged where they met that Australasian-relevance test. Its 1956 masthead states the same brief more shortly: plants, soils and domestic animals, across the physical, chemical and biological aspects of the field. In practice the published mix covered soil science and plant nutrition, crop and pasture agronomy and physiology, plant breeding and genetics, animal production and grazing systems, agricultural microbiology, and the climate and landscape context of Australian farming — including, in the final volume years, forward-looking work such as the 2007 special material on climate predictions for agricultural risk management in volume 58, issue 10.

Editorial Standards and Conditions for Authors

The journal's author information is explicit on the points authors ask about. "The journal welcomes the submission of papers presenting original and significant research. All papers are refereed." Acceptance rested with the Managing Editor in consultation with the Editorial Advisory Committee. "There are no page charges for the Australian Journal of Agricultural Research." Reprints could be ordered with the final proofs. Those three facts — full refereeing, editorial-board oversight, no page charges — describe the classic mid-century society-and-institute journal model, funded through subscriptions and the publishing programme of a national research organisation rather than through author fees, and they distinguish the historical journal sharply from the author-pays open-access titles that now dominate parts of agricultural publishing. Its abstracting footprint, per the same author information, was the serious indexing of its era: CAB International (CAB Abstracts), Chemical Abstracts, Current Contents, BIOSIS, the Science Citation Index, and the Australian Bibliography of Agriculture — the services through which agricultural researchers worldwide actually found papers before web search.

The Archive and How to Use It Today

Although the title ceased in 2008, the archive is alive and citable. CSIRO Publishing's platform presents the journal's articles within its journal environment (article URLs carry the AR code of the old title, and citations export in the journal's name), with PDFs of the full run, including scanned-era material also visible through the Internet Archive's holdings of the print volumes. When citing, use the title as published — Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, abbreviation Aust. J. Agric. Res. — with the original year, volume and pages, and the 0004-9409 / 1444-9838 ISSN pair if an identifier is required; do not substitute the successor's title or ISSNs for pre-2009 articles. Researchers tracing a research line forward should then continue into Crop & Pasture Science from volume 60 (2009) onward, where CSIRO reports the current journal's own modern indicators on its journal pages (for context only, the successor's page reported a 1.8 Impact Factor, a 5.3 CiteScore, a 25.7% acceptance rate in 2025 and 35 days from submission to first decision — those figures describe the successor in 2025, not the historical title, and no impact factor is claimed in this profile for the Australian Journal of Agricultural Research itself).

Subject Highlights From the Run

The journal's range is best seen in individual papers that the sources for this profile document directly. From the first volume, H. R. Angell's "Seedling blight" (volume 1, number 1, pages 33–42, 1950) and B. E. Butler's opening soil paper (volume 1, page 3, 1950) set the twin poles of plant pathology and soil survey that the journal would hold for six decades. The 1956 volume 7 shows the mature pattern: F. H. W. Morley's long-running selection experiments on economic characters in Australian Merino sheep, including genotype-by-nutrition interactions, sat alongside pasture ecology of the Riverine Plain and citrus nutrition work — animal genetics, pasture science and horticulture in a single issue, refereed to one standard. The trace-element tradition appears in the "Mineral elements in temperate crop and pasture plants" series, whose third part, on copper, measured concentrations across 24 varieties of 21 annual crop and pasture species on lateritic gravelly sand in Western Australia and traced how copper moved to seed — the kind of patient, system-level nutrition work on which Australian agronomy built its fertiliser practice. In the final full volume year, the 2007 volume 58 carried both a review of cytogenetics in the age of molecular genetics (pages 498–506), explicitly linking classical chromosome work to genomics and cereal breeding, and a special issue section on climate predictions for better agricultural risk management (issue 10, pages 935–965), applying seasonal forecasting to farm decisions under El Niño and La Niña variability. A journal that could hold Merino genetics, soil copper, chromosome banding and climate services inside one refereed title was, by design, the general record of Australian agricultural research — which is precisely the role its successor narrowed to crops and pastures.

The Journal in Australian Agricultural History

Context explains the journal's weight. It was founded in 1950, in the first years of CSIRO itself and at the start of Australia's post-war agricultural expansion, when wool income funded national research and the state departments and CSIRO divisions were running the long field experiments — pasture species trials, sheep breeding flocks, soil surveys, fertiliser responses — that transformed marginal country into productive farmland. A single refereed national journal, published by the research organisation for itself and the Academy of Science, gave that work a permanent, citable home at a time when Australian results otherwise appeared in departmental bulletins of limited circulation. The journal's six-issues-a-year print rhythm, its Melbourne editorial office, and its board drawn from the leadership of Australian science (its 1950s board included Sir Macfarlane Burnet) mark it as an institution of that nation-building research system. Its later migration onto CSIRO's digital platform, with DOIs and online archives, carried the same record into the era of the successor title. For historians, the run from volume 1 to volume 59 is a continuous, refereed witness to how Australian agriculture understood itself — soils first, then pastures and livestock, then genetics and molecules, and finally climate and systems — and that continuity is why libraries preserve the full run and why citation practice must keep its identity distinct from the successor that continues its volume sequence.

Bibliographic Notes for Librarians and Indexers

Catalogue this title as a ceased serial: Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, ISSN 0004-9409 (print) and 1444-9838 (online), CSIRO Publishing, 1950–2008, volumes 1–59, succeeded by Crop & Pasture Science (ISSN 1836-0947 / 1836-5795) from volume 60 (2009). Do not merge the two records: the ISSN change at the title change is deliberate, citation databases key pre-2009 and post-2008 content to different title records, and interfiling them corrupts holdings statements and citation exports in both directions. The error found in this directory's own stored data — all four ISSNs listed against the historical title — is the standard failure mode and should be checked wherever these titles are catalogued together. Article-level DOIs for the journal sit in CSIRO's 10.1071/AR series, and the journal's citation abbreviation is Aust. J. Agric. Res.; references carrying those markers with years up to 2008 belong here, while 10.1071/CP-series and post-2008 references belong to the successor.

Who This Record Serves

This profile serves three groups. Historians and bibliographers of Australian science get a clean, corrected record of one of the country's foundation research journals, with its dates, ownership and title succession stated from the publisher's own material. Working agricultural scientists get a map from the older literature — much of the long-run pasture, soil and livestock data still cited today sits in these volumes — to the archive and onward to the successor journal. And authors get a clear direction: you cannot submit to the Australian Journal of Agricultural Research, because it no longer exists under that name; its living continuation is Crop & Pasture Science, whose scope (strategic crop and pasture research, from molecular level to whole farming systems) and author instructions are published on CSIRO's ConnectSci journal pages. Submissions sent anywhere else in this journal's name should be treated with suspicion.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the correct ISSNs of the Australian Journal of Agricultural Research? Print 0004-9409; online 1444-9838 (CSIRO's own article pages). The pair 1836-0947 / 1836-5795 sometimes listed with this title belongs to its successor, Crop & Pasture Science.

When did the journal run? From volume 1 in 1950 to volume 59 in 2008.

What happened to it? It continued as Crop & Pasture Science from volume 60 (2009), published by the same publisher, CSIRO Publishing — CSIRO's journal pages state the former-name relationship explicitly.

Who published it? CSIRO Publishing, for CSIRO and the Australian Academy of Science, matching the publisher stored for this record.

Was it peer-reviewed, and did it charge authors? Yes, all papers were refereed; and no — its author information states there were no page charges.

Can I submit a paper to it today? No. The title ceased in 2008; submit instead to Crop & Pasture Science or another current CSIRO journal as scope dictates.

Reading the Journal's Final Decade

The journal's last decade shows a title in full working order rather than decline. The 2007 volume alone — the best documented in the sources behind this profile — carried a forward-looking cytogenetics review connecting chromosome science to genomics-era cereal breeding, a multi-author treatment of constraints and opportunities in applying seasonal climate forecasts in agriculture, and a coordinated special section on climate prediction for agricultural risk management, alongside the journal's staple diet of soil, crop, pasture and livestock research, all of it refereed and published with received and accepted dates and DOIs on CSIRO's platform. That a journal could end its run publishing climate-services science — a field that barely existed at its founding — while still serving the agronomy community it began with, underlines the point made throughout this profile: the 2009 retitling was an editorial repositioning of a healthy journal toward its crop-and-pasture core, executed by the same publisher with an unbroken volume sequence, and the historical title deserves to be recorded as the substantial, completed publication it is.

Sources and Verification

Primary sources are CSIRO's own. CSIRO Publishing article pages for the journal's 2007 papers (volume 58) state the print ISSN 0004-9409 and online ISSN 1444-9838 and the publisher. The journal's own author information (preserved CSIRO author page) gives the scope wording, the refereeing policy, the absence of page charges, the indexing list, and the "for CSIRO Australia and the Australian Academy of Science" ownership line. The 1956 print masthead (Internet Archive volume) gives the founding-era editorial board, the six-times-a-year issue pattern and the plants/soils/domestic-animals brief. The CSHL Archives record documents volume 1, number 1 (1950). Title succession is established by CSIRO's current Crop & Pasture Science pages ("formerly known as Australian Journal of Agricultural Research"; successor ISSNs 1836-0947 / 1836-5795; volume 60 in 2009) together with citations showing the old title still in use at volume 59 (2008). Successor metrics quoted are labelled as the successor's own publisher-reported figures and are not attributed to the historical title.