Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease

About Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease

Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease — Profile

Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease was a peer-reviewed journal devoted to a single, prescient idea: that the microbial communities living in and on the human and animal body — above all in the gut, the mouth and the urogenital tract — are ecological systems, and that health and disease can be understood, and sometimes changed, by studying those systems ecologically. Its print ISSN is 0891-060X and its online ISSN is 1651-2235, the pair printed on its articles in the form “ISSN 0891-060X print / ISSN 1651-2235 online © Taylor & Francis”. Article records show the journal publishing from 1988 to 2018, reaching volume 29 in 2018, under Taylor & Francis (Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group) in its later decades, with earlier publishing arrangements reflected in the changing DOI patterns of its back file. In its final period it published as an open-access journal. This profile describes the journal through its own articles and imprints, explains the science it carried, and is explicit about its dates and identifiers, including a third number on the stored record that turns out, on inspection, not to be a current ISSN at all.

Quick Facts

An Ecological Journal Before the Microbiome Era Had a Name

To see why this journal mattered, recall the chronology of its field. When its first volume appeared in 1988, the microbes of the healthy gut were still widely treated as background — studied by a dedicated but small community of microbial ecologists, anaerobic bacteriologists and a handful of far-sighted clinicians, while mainstream medicine concentrated on pathogens one species at a time. The journal's title announced a different programme. Ecology, not infection alone: communities, colonisation, succession, resistance to colonisation, diet as an environmental force, antibiotics as a disturbance, and the mouth, gut and vagina as habitats, each with its own flora, its own stability and its own characteristic ways of going wrong.

Three decades later, that programme had become the centre of biomedical science under a new vocabulary — microbiota, microbiome, dysbiosis — powered by DNA sequencing methods the journal's founders did not have. The journal lived through the whole transition, and its back file records it: culture-based enumeration and metabolic studies in the early volumes; molecular identification and community analysis entering in the 2000s; and, in the final volumes, historical and conceptual reviews of the microbiome–gut–brain axis sitting alongside experimental work. A directory profile should resist both exaggerations — it was not the only journal in its field, and it was not a giant — but its longevity on exactly this ground, from 1988 to 2018, is a fact of its record and a fair measure of a well-chosen title.

Scope as Shown by Its Own Contents

The surest guide to a journal's scope is what it actually published, and the contents of Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease are unusually coherent. Gut ecology is the centre of gravity. A 1996 paper in volume 9 (pages 79–89) studied the effect of lactobacilli on the ecology of the gastro-intestinal microbiota cultured in the SHIME reactor — a laboratory simulation of the human intestinal microbial ecosystem — a characteristically ecological experiment: a defined community, a controlled habitat, a dietary or microbial intervention, and community-level outcomes. Work on dietary fructo-oligosaccharides in the same volume examined how a fermentable carbohydrate modulates large-intestinal inflammatory responses, connecting prebiotic chemistry to mucosal immunology. Later gut papers range across putrefactive metabolites and gastrointestinal transit, vitamin K-producing bacteria isolated from the neonatal faecal flora (volume 18, 2006, pages 133–138), and microbial trimethylamine-N-oxide as a proposed disease marker linking gut microbial metabolism of carnitine and choline to cardiovascular questions (volume 28, 2017).

Oral microbial ecology is the second great territory, strong enough that the journal carried a named thematic strand, “Oral Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease”, in 2000, with contributions on the ecology of dental plaque and the role of nutrients in controlling the oral microflora, the microbial ecology of dental caries, the ecology of Candida-associated denture stomatitis, the microbial ecology of the dental root canal, the ecology of marginal gingivitis, and the role of the oral microflora in health. Urogenital ecology is the third: a substantial 2006 review on prevention and treatment of urogenital infections with lactobacilli traces how depletion of vaginal lactobacilli led to the idea of restoring them therapeutically, how candidate strains were selected for adhesion and pathogen inhibition in laboratory assays, and how strain identities themselves shifted as bacterial classification improved — a review that is also, incidentally, a small history of probiotic science correcting itself.

Around those territories sit recurring themes that complete the scope: probiotics and the evidence for and against particular strains and claims, including deliberately sceptical pieces; antibiotics and colonisation resistance; microbial biofilms in the body, from dental plaque to occluded biliary stents; germ-free and gnotobiotic animal work, such as the study of mesenteric dendritic cells from germ-free mice and their induction of gut-homing integrins (volume 19, 2007, pages 171–183); diet, fibre and short-chain fatty acids; and, in the last volumes, the history and culture of gut thinking — a 2018 review on autointoxication and the historical precursors of the microbiome–gut–brain axis (volume 29), and companion pieces on coprophagy in nineteenth-century psychiatry and on gut feeling in history and culture. A journal that can hold a SHIME-reactor experiment and a history of autointoxication between the same covers is not being miscellaneous; it is honouring the word ecology in its title, in the broad sense that includes the human communities doing the thinking.

Publishing History and Identifiers

The journal's back file carries its publishing history in its identifiers, and reading them correctly prevents catalogue errors. Articles from the Taylor & Francis period carry DOIs beginning 10.1080, in two patterns that match the two ISSNs: earlier Taylor & Francis DOIs built on the print number, such as 10.1080/08910600601048894 for the 2006 neonatal vitamin K paper, and later DOIs built on the online number, such as 10.1080/16512235.2017.1327309 for the 2017 trimethylamine-N-oxide review and 10.1080/16512235.2018.1548249 in volume 29 (2018). The Taylor & Francis journal code, given in the articles' own “journal homepage” lines, is zmeh20, and the standard Taylor & Francis terms page for the title is the journal-information page for that code. Article PDFs of the period state the imprint directly — for example “© 2006 Taylor & Francis” with “ISSN 0891-060X print / ISSN 1651-2235 online” — and 2017–2018 articles state “© The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group”, with publication online through Taylor & Francis, which is the documentary basis for describing the final period as open-access, author-copyright publication.

Earlier material looks different, and the difference explains the puzzle on the stored record. Articles from the mid-1990s, before the Taylor & Francis DOI pattern, carry Wiley-era SICI DOIs of the form 10.1002/(SICI)1234-987X(199603)9:2<79::AID-MEH415>3.3.CO;2-V — the example is the 1996 SHIME-reactor paper in volume 9, issue 2, pages 79–89. Inside that string, 1234-987X occupies the place where a SICI records the serial's identifier. The stored Journals World record lists three numbers for this post — rendered as 0891060X, 1234987X and 16512235 — and the middle one is exactly that SICI component. This profile therefore reports the situation precisely: the journal's current and imprint ISSNs are 0891-060X (print) and 1651-2235 (online); 1234-987X is a historical identifier visible in the journal's 1990s DOI strings, and it should not be presented as a third current ISSN or used on its own to match this title to a different serial without an ISSN Portal check. Separately, the Open Access Directory's list of journals that converted from subscription to open access records Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease as published by Co-Action Publishing in that context — a reminder that the title passed through more than one publishing arrangement during its thirty years, as many society-era journals did, before and alongside its Taylor & Francis period.

One further caution belongs in this section, because the web invites the confusion. This journal is not Microbial Ecology, the Springer journal of environmental microbial ecology (a different title, with different ISSNs), and it is not the later Microbiota in Health and Disease, the official journal of a European study group on Helicobacter and microbiota, whose aims page uses a similar phrase. Similar titles are common in a fast-growing field; the ISSN pair 0891-060X / 1651-2235 and the Taylor & Francis code zmeh20 are the reliable fingerprints of the journal profiled here.

Scale, Citation Footprint and Standing

Measured against the giants of microbiology, this was a specialist journal of modest volume and long duration. A bibliometric summary of its indexed peer-reviewed articles counts 833 such articles across the 1988–2018 series, with nine in the final year, 2018 — figures this profile reports as a secondary summary of the back file, useful for scale rather than as an official publisher statistic. Its individual papers, however, travelled. The probiotic and vaginal-ecology reviews, the oral-ecology thematic papers and the whole-gut reviews are cited in later microbiome literature, in clinical and dental journals, and in historical writing on the gut–brain idea, where the journal's own 2018 historical pieces have themselves become sources. That pattern — a small journal whose review content is cited well beyond its size — is typical of a title that served a defined community at the moment its subject was becoming central.

No Journal Impact Factor or quartile is asserted in this profile. The sources consulted document the journal's ISSNs, run, contents and publisher imprints in detail, but they do not provide a verified, current Clarivate impact factor or a SCImago quartile that this profile could responsibly print with a year attached, and the journal's run ending in 2018 makes any undated metric claim actively misleading. Where a metric is genuinely required, a reader should take it, with its year, from the ranking service itself, and should expect coverage to end with the journal. Honest absence is preferable to a borrowed number, for this title above all, because so much secondary web content about it is automatically generated and recycles figures between similarly named journals.

Who Read It, and How to Use the Back File Now

Its readership was the community its contents imply: microbial ecologists and anaerobic bacteriologists; gastroenterologists and nutrition scientists interested in the gut flora; dentists, oral microbiologists and periodontists; gynaecologists and urologists working on vaginal and urinary ecology; probiotic and functional-food researchers; and, increasingly in the final decade, historians and social scientists of medicine following the microbiome idea. For those readers today, the back file has three durable uses. It is a primary source for the pre-sequencing and early-sequencing science of gut, oral and vaginal ecology, including methods — reactor models, culture collections, adhesion assays — that newer papers cite but no longer describe. It is a source of careful, sometimes sceptical reviews from inside the probiotic field, useful precisely because their authors distinguished strains, assays and claims at a time of considerable commercial enthusiasm. And it is a document of a conceptual change: how “the normal flora” became “the microbiota”, and then an axis said to connect gut, brain and behaviour, can be watched happening across its volumes from 1988 to 2018.

Practical access follows the identifiers. Search Taylor & Francis Online by the journal code zmeh20, by the online ISSN 1651-2235, or by the article DOI in the 10.1080 patterns described above; search library catalogues by either ISSN, and expect the print ISSN 0891-060X on older holdings. Cite with volume and pages for the print-era material (volume 18, 2006, pages 133–138, for example) and with the article number where the journal used one in its final open-access period (volume 28, article 1327309, in 2017). If a database record for the title shows volumes after 29 or years after 2018, treat it as a probable conflation with a similarly titled journal and check it against the ISSN pair before citing.

Article Types and Editorial Character

The journal published original articles reporting experiments and observational studies; review articles, often substantial and sometimes commissioned around a theme; short and specialised contributions within thematic strands such as the 2000 oral-ecology series; and, in the final volumes, historical and perspective pieces that fall within the journal's ecological remit broadly understood. Guest editorship appears in the record — the oral-ecology strand reads as a curated thematic collection — and an editorial in 2008 publicly thanked the journal's reviewers, a small but real sign of a conventional refereeing operation in that period. What the record does not support is any present-tense claim: there is no current submission portal to describe, no current editor-in-chief to name responsibly from the sources consulted, and no article charge to quote, because the journal's evidenced run is complete. Anyone who needs to submit microbiome-ecology work today should choose a currently publishing journal in the field and verify its status on its publisher's site, rather than relying on any page that presents this title as open for submissions.

Strengths and Limitations

Its strengths were focus, timing and intellectual honesty. It held one idea — the ecology of the body's microbes — steadily for thirty years, through the period when that idea moved from the margin to the centre of medicine, and its pages include both the experimental work and the scepticism the subject needed, from strain-level probiotic detail to warnings about over-claiming. Its thematic collections, above all in oral ecology, gave subfields a shared reference point.

Its limitations are equally plain. It was small, its final-year output was in single figures for indexed research articles, and its web footprint is now easily confused with later, similarly named microbiota journals and with automatically generated metrics pages. Its publishing history, spread across arrangements reflected in SICI-era, Co-Action-era and Taylor & Francis-era traces, makes its catalogue record more error-prone than average — as the extra identifier on the stored record illustrates. And, decisively for any author, it is a closed file: valuable to read and cite, no longer a place to publish.

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the ISSNs of Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease? Print ISSN 0891-060X and online ISSN 1651-2235, as printed on its Taylor & Francis articles. The number 1234-987X on the stored record is the serial component inside its 1990s SICI DOIs, not a third current ISSN.

When did it publish? Its articles evidence a run from 1988 to 2018: volume 9 in 1996, volume 18 in 2006, volume 28 in 2017 and volume 29 in 2018.

Who published it? In its later period, Taylor & Francis (Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group), journal code zmeh20; earlier traces include Wiley-style SICI DOIs and a Co-Action Publishing listing in the context of its conversion to open access.

What did it publish? Peer-reviewed original and review work on the microbial ecology of the gut, mouth and urogenital tract — microbiota, probiotics and prebiotics, colonisation, biofilms, diet and host–microbe interaction — including, in its final volumes, historical work on the microbiome–gut–brain idea.

Is it the same as Microbial Ecology, or as Microbiota in Health and Disease? No. Both are different journals with different publishers and ISSNs; check the ISSN pair 0891-060X / 1651-2235 to be sure a record belongs to this title.

Can I submit to it now? No submission route is evidenced for a journal whose run ends in 2018. Treat any site offering submission to this title as unverified and check the publisher's own site first.

Conclusion

Microbial Ecology in Health and Disease was the journal of a good idea held for a long time: that the microbes of the gut, mouth and urogenital tract form ecologies, and that medicine does better when it studies them that way. From 1988 to 2018, through changing publishers and a revolution in method, it published the experiments, the thematic collections and the sceptical reviews of the community that built what is now called microbiome science. Its fingerprints are exact — ISSN 0891-060X and 1651-2235, Taylor & Francis code zmeh20, volumes 1 to 29 — and kept exact, they let its substantial back file go on being found, read and cited for what it is.