About Journal of the North American Benthological Society

Journal of the North American Benthological Society

The Journal of the North American Benthological Society, cited throughout its life by the acronym J-NABS, was a peer-reviewed scientific journal devoted to benthic communities and their role in aquatic ecosystems. It was published in the United States for the North American Benthological Society, with the University of Chicago Press as publisher, a relationship recorded on this Journals World record. The print ISSN is 0887-3593 and the electronic ISSN is 1937-237X. This profile describes a historical title, and it is important to state that plainly at the outset: the journal was first published in 1982 as Freshwater Invertebrate Biology, its title was changed to Journal of the North American Benthological Society in 1986, and its title was changed again, to Freshwater Science, in 2012. The record on this page therefore covers the 1986 to 2011 period of a continuing journal whose present-day form, Freshwater Science, carries different ISSNs and is profiled as a publication in its own right. Keeping the three titles distinct, while recognising that they form one continuous publication history, is the correct way to cite, search and evaluate this literature.

Origins: from Freshwater Invertebrate Biology to a society journal

The journal's history is unusually well documented because the society published it and later wrote about it in its own pages. In 1981 Jerry L. Kaster founded a new journal, Freshwater Invertebrate Biology. At that time the North American Benthological Society, known by the initials NABS, was considering how to start a journal devoted to the research interests of its members. Kaster offered his journal to the society. The proposal was championed by NABS President Vincent H. Resh and by David M. Rosenberg, chair of the society's Executive Committee, who invited Rosemary J. Mackay to become editor, while Irwin Polls was asked to develop a budget for the new journal. The proposal to acquire Freshwater Invertebrate Biology was passed at the 1984 NABS business meeting in Raleigh, North Carolina, and incoming President Richard Merritt and Executive Committee chair Jack Webster oversaw the society vote that formally approved the acquisition. In 1985, at the business meeting in Corvallis, Oregon, the society agreed, after what the journal's own historical account describes as a contentious debate, to name its journal the Journal of the North American Benthological Society. The first issues under that title appeared in 1986. Mackay, the journal's first editor under society ownership, later described the society's first fifty years in her 2005 book Beneath the Surface: A history of the North American Benthological Society 1953 to 2003, which remains a primary source for the journal's early development.

That founding story explains two features of J-NABS that lasted throughout its life. First, it was a society journal in the full sense: owned by a scientific community, edited by its members, and intended to serve the research that community actually did, rather than a commercial title created to fill a market gap. Second, its scope was set by benthology, the study of organisms living in or on the bottom of water bodies and of the ecological processes connected with them, at a moment when stream and lake benthic research was becoming central to environmental assessment. The journal grew with that field, and its backfile is one of the main documentary records of how freshwater benthic ecology developed in North America and internationally during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Scope under the J-NABS title

The journal's own statement of scope, reproduced in its standards for authors, said that the Journal of the North American Benthological Society published articles that would promote further understanding of benthic communities and their role in aquatic ecosystems. In keeping with the interests of most society members, emphasis was on freshwater inland habitats. However, papers on aspects of estuarine and marine science that addressed ecological processes and properties shared with freshwater systems were encouraged, and submissions from non-members were welcomed. The editors welcomed a wide range of topics, including the physical and chemical properties of lentic and lotic habitats, meaning still waters such as lakes and ponds and flowing waters such as streams and rivers; ecosystem processes; community structure and function; the ecology and systematics of organisms, from bacteria to benthic-feeding vertebrates; bioassessment, conservation and restoration; environmental management and pollution; and new or novel methods for basic or applied research. Theoretical discussions and critical appraisals of rapidly developing research fields were also considered, and reviews, meta-analyses, perspectives and book reviews were welcome alongside original research articles.

Several features of that scope deserve emphasis for anyone using the archive today. The journal was never only about insects, although aquatic insect ecology, including the life histories of mayflies, stoneflies and caddisflies, was a major strength and benthic macroinvertebrates were its most characteristic subject. Algae and periphyton, microbial processes, nutrient cycling, organic matter dynamics, fish that feed on benthic prey, and the physical template of streams and lakes all fell inside its remit when the work illuminated benthic communities or ecosystem function. The journal was also a methods journal in practice: papers setting out sampling designs, taxonomic data quality procedures and biological assessment protocols were published, debated and heavily cited there, because the growing use of macroinvertebrates in regulatory bioassessment created an urgent need for shared, tested methods. A well-known example is the journal's work on data quality, performance and uncertainty in taxonomic identification for biological assessments, a topic that sounds technical but determines whether monitoring programmes run by agencies can be trusted.

The benthological community and why the journal mattered

Benthic macroinvertebrates occupy a special place in freshwater science. They are diverse, relatively sedentary, present throughout the year, and differentially sensitive to pollution and habitat change, which makes them practical indicators of ecological condition. Research published in J-NABS helped establish the conceptual tools the field still uses: functional feeding groups and trait-based analysis of insect communities, the river continuum and patch dynamics frameworks as applied to streams, nutrient spiralling, and the linkage of terrestrial riparian zones with aquatic food webs. A representative and much cited article, on functional trait niches of North American lotic insects, published in volume 25 in 2006, examined hundreds of taxa across the mayfly, stonefly and caddisfly orders, identified trait combinations or syndromes, and assessed how freely traits evolve, in order to guide trait selection for a more predictive community ecology. Work of that kind illustrates the journal's blend of natural history, taxonomy and ecological theory: the trait data existed only because generations of benthologists had documented the organisms, and the journal was where that documentation and its synthesis met.

The journal also documented its own discipline. A 2010 article on the role of a discipline-specific journal in scientific discovery reviewed the history of J-NABS and examined trends in life-history research on benthic macroinvertebrates since the first J-NABS issue appeared in 1986, assessing milestones in that literature. Such self-examination was possible because the journal and the society were closely connected, and it gives historians of science an unusually direct record of how a research community understood its own progress. Readers should note the practical consequence: when a concept, index or protocol is described in textbooks as standard practice in freshwater bioassessment, the primary debate about it very often took place in J-NABS, and citing the modern textbook alone misses the original evidence.

From J-NABS to Freshwater Science

By the late 2000s the society recognised that its name, and its journal's name, no longer described the breadth of its membership. Many members worked on lakes, wetlands, groundwater and estuaries, on whole-ecosystem processes, or on organisms well beyond the benthos, and few outside the field knew what the word benthological meant. At the society's annual meeting in Santa Fe in June 2010 a re-evaluation of the society and journal names was initiated, and 426 members ranked candidate terms in a survey that October. Aquatic and freshwater scored highest among habitat terms, and ecology and science among discipline terms, well ahead of benthic and benthological. The society became the Society for Freshwater Science, and from 2012 the journal continued as Freshwater Science, published by the University of Chicago Press in partnership with the society. Freshwater Science appears four times a year, carries print ISSN 2161-9549 and electronic ISSN 2161-9565, and its stated scope, covering all types of inland aquatic ecosystems and ecosystems at the interface between aquatic and terrestrial habitats, is the direct descendant of the J-NABS scope, widened in wording to match the broader community. Volume numbering continued across the change, so Freshwater Science volume 31 appeared in 2012 immediately after the J-NABS volumes.

For this Journals World record, the consequence is precise. Post 354655 documents the J-NABS title period, with ISSNs 0887-3593 and 1937-237X. It is not a duplicate of any Freshwater Science record: the titles, ISSNs and publication periods differ, and the relationship is one of succession, the same relationship that libraries record with earlier and later title entries linked in their catalogues. Researchers should cite articles by the title in force when the article appeared, should search both title forms when reviewing the literature across the 2012 boundary, and should not be surprised that databases vary in whether they present the archive as one journal or as linked titles. The University of Chicago Press presents the archive as a continuous list of issues reaching back through the J-NABS and Freshwater Invertebrate Biology periods, and BioOne carried the journal for part of its history, noting the journal as a BioOne member from 2004 with Freshwater Science available in BioOne Complete through the 2014 volume before current content moved fully to the Chicago platform.

Publication pattern, access and citation

Under the J-NABS title the journal appeared quarterly, in step with the four issues a year pattern that its successor retains. Its articles carry digital object identifiers in which the print ISSN forms part of the identifier string, as in the 2006 traits article cited above, whose identifier embeds 0887-3593; that pattern is a quick authenticity check when a citation is in doubt. The standard abbreviation for the journal is J N Am Benthol Soc, and citations in the ecological literature use volume and page numbers in the conventional way, for example volume 29, pages 344 to 358, for a widely cited 2010 review of freshwater biodiversity conservation. Access to the backfile is primarily through institutional subscriptions to the University of Chicago Press journals platform and through library holdings; individual article pages on the Chicago site and on BioOne show abstracts even where full text requires access. No open access mandate applied to the journal during the J-NABS period, and this profile therefore makes no claim that the backfile is freely available in full text.

Metrics for the J-NABS title period should be handled with the same care as its titles. Citation indicators published for Freshwater Science, including an impact factor of 2.35 quoted by the University of Chicago Press in its 2024 call for a new editor-in-chief, belong to the successor title and to recent years; they must not be reported as J-NABS metrics. Historical citation standing is better conveyed qualitatively: the journal was the flagship publication of its society, was indexed in the major ecological and aquatic sciences services of its period, and its articles continue to be cited decades after publication, as the reference lists of current freshwater research show. Any reader who needs a year-specific figure for evaluation purposes should take it from the citation database or Journal Citation Reports edition for that year and title, rather than from a directory profile.

Who should use this record and this archive

This record is most useful to freshwater ecologists tracing the primary literature of benthic ecology between 1986 and 2011; to environmental scientists and agency staff who need the original methods and assessment studies behind current bioassessment practice; to taxonomists and trait ecologists working with North American aquatic insect data; and to librarians and bibliometricians maintaining title histories. If your question concerns current submission, read the Freshwater Science author standards instead, because new manuscripts have not been accepted under the J-NABS title since the 2012 change. If your question concerns a specific article published between 1986 and 2011, this record identifies the journal correctly, and the article itself should be retrieved through the University of Chicago Press archive or a holding library using its volume, issue and page details or its digital object identifier.

Verification notes

The identity of this record was anchored to the Journals World record fetched directly for post 354655, which gives the title Journal of the North American Benthological Society, the publisher University of Chicago Press, and the ISSNs 0887-3593 and 1937-237X. The title history, first published in 1982 as Freshwater Invertebrate Biology, changed to the J-NABS title in 1986 and to Freshwater Science in 2012, is stated on the University of Chicago Press journal site itself. The founding narrative follows the historical account published in the journal in 2010. The scope wording follows the journal's own published standards. The 2010 renaming survey details come from the society's published survey results. The successor's frequency, ISSNs and scope are from the University of Chicago Press Freshwater Science pages and its BioOne listing. No metric has been invented for the J-NABS period, and where a figure belongs to the successor title it is labelled as such in the text.

Reading the J-NABS archive well

A researcher opening the J-NABS archive for the first time should understand how its contents are organised, because the journal's structure rewards deliberate searching. Each annual volume contains four issues, and the December issue of a volume often carries syntheses and special material alongside regular articles. Taxonomic papers may appear modest beside large ecosystem studies, yet they are frequently the most durable part of the record: a careful revision of a midge, mayfly or crustacean group, or a well documented life-history study, supplies the identifications and trait values on which later monitoring and modelling depend, and such papers continue to be consulted long after the hypotheses debated in the same issue have been settled. The archive also contains an important applied strand on biological assessment, in which authors tested how sampling effort, subsampling, taxonomic resolution and laboratory quality control affect the indices that agencies compute from macroinvertebrate samples. The audit and data quality studies in that strand, including the first audit of samples from a European monitoring programme published in the journal's final J-NABS years, show the journal acting as a forum where North American and international assessment practice were compared directly. A reader evaluating a modern monitoring protocol will often find that its contested choices, how many organisms to count, how finely to identify them, and how to report uncertainty, were argued through in these pages with data rather than by assertion.

Three cautions apply when citing this literature. First, organism names change: taxonomic revisions since 2011 mean that a species name used in a J-NABS paper may now be a synonym, and careful authors note the name as published alongside the currently accepted name. Second, place and method matter as much as results: many J-NABS studies come from particular stream types, ecoregions or experimental reaches, and transferring a numeric threshold or trait relationship to a different region without checking the original setting repeats an error the journal's own assessment literature warned against. Third, the journal published vigorous exchanges, including critical appraisals and perspectives, so a single paper may represent one side of a live debate; reading the responses and later syntheses in the same archive gives a fairer picture than citing the opening paper alone. Used with those cautions, the twenty-six volumes published under the J-NABS title remain a working library for freshwater science, not a closed historical curiosity, and they form the necessary background for the research that Freshwater Science publishes today.

In short, this record preserves the middle and longest chapter of one journal's life: founded as a specialist invertebrate title, matured as the Journal of the North American Benthological Society between 1986 and 2011, and continued from 2012 as Freshwater Science. Treating those chapters accurately, with their own titles, dates and ISSNs, is what makes the whole archive citable and searchable today.