Physiological and Biochemical Zoology

About Physiological and Biochemical Zoology

Physiological and Biochemical Zoology — Full Profile

Overview: Comparative Physiology With an Ecological and Evolutionary Conscience

Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, universally shortened to PBZ, was the title carried from 1999 to 2023 by a University of Chicago Press journal whose run begins in 1928. Its record here is anchored to ISSN 1522-2152 in print and ISSN 1537-5293 online, with the University of Chicago Press as publisher, exactly as the journal record states. The journal's own long-standing description says that it presented current research in environmental, adaptational and comparative physiology and biochemistry, publishing original investigations in animal physiology and biochemistry at all levels of organisation, from the molecular to the whole organism, with a focus on adaptations to the environment. That sentence, carried by the journal for decades, is the best one-line map of the title: how animals work, studied comparatively, and always with the question of what their working parts are for in the real environments where they evolved.

The distinctive insistence of PBZ, repeated in its scope statements, was context. Its specific emphasis fell on studies that investigated the ecological and evolutionary aspects of physiological and biochemical mechanisms. A measurement of enzyme activity, membrane transport or metabolic rate was therefore not, by itself, quite enough: the journal wanted to know what the measurement meant for an animal living somewhere, competing, migrating, hibernating, diving, enduring heat or cold, or coping with scarce water and food. Subdisciplines named in its scope include nutrition and digestion, salt and water balance, epithelial and membrane transport, gas exchange and transport, acid-base balance, temperature adaptation, and metabolic energetics and regulation — a list that reads like a table of contents for the whole discipline of comparative physiology, each item tied back to survival in a particular habitat.

That editorial stance made PBZ a natural home for work that crossed levels of organisation, and its successor's current guidance makes the inherited rule explicit: studies dealing exclusively with physiological mechanisms, without a clear ecological or evolutionary context, or studies that are primarily descriptive, do not fit. The same guidance asks authors of multispecies comparative studies to give due consideration to phylogeny in their statistical analyses and evolutionary interpretations, citing the classic methodological literature of the field. Readers coming to the 1999 to 2023 archive should therefore expect a literature that is unusually self-conscious about comparison itself — about when two species are enough, when they are not, and how shared ancestry can masquerade as adaptation if it is not handled properly.

Publication History: 1928, 1999 and 2024

The journal was first published in 1928 as Physiological Zoology. To appreciate that date, consider the discipline at the time: experimental physiology was dominated by laboratory mammals and by medicine, while the systematic study of how diverse animals solve common physical problems — breathing water versus air, keeping salt in the sea and out of it, staying warm or letting body temperature drift — was still taking shape as a field with its own journals. Physiological Zoology gave that field a dedicated American home at the University of Chicago Press, and for seventy years the title accumulated the foundational literature of comparative physiology, from early work on metabolic rate and temperature regulation to the modern molecular era. Library serial records confirm the simple lineage: Physiological Zoology ran under that title until 1998 and was then renamed Physiological and Biochemical Zoology.

The 1999 renaming added one word with a large meaning. Biochemistry joined physiology in the title because the field's explanations had moved decisively downward in scale: adaptation was now being traced to enzymes, transporters, hormones, gene expression and cellular signalling, and the journal wanted its name to say so. Coverage records for the renamed title run from 1999, and its publication pattern settled at six issues per year. Nothing about the journal's comparative, whole-animal heart was surrendered in the change; rather, the new title announced that a paper could begin at a molecule and still belong, provided it climbed back up to the organism and its environment. Many of the title's most-cited papers embody exactly that climb, connecting a measurable biochemical or physiological trait to performance, distribution or life history in wild animals.

In 2024 the title changed again, beginning with volume 97, to Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology, published under new ISSNs. The University of Chicago Press announced the present title as the continuation of the same journal, and its history page states the lineage plainly: first published in 1928 as Physiological Zoology, the title changed to Physiological and Biochemical Zoology in 1999, and in 2024 it changed to Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology. For cataloguing, the new title is a successor, not a duplicate: this record's ISSNs are 1522-2152 and 1537-5293, while the successor record on this site carries entirely different identifiers, and the two titles cover non-overlapping periods, 1999 to 2023 for PBZ and 2024 onward for its successor. Authors submitting today must use the successor title and its current instructions.

Scope in Detail: Systems, Environments and Levels

Temperature, water and energy organise much of the PBZ archive, because they organise much of animal life. Papers on thermal biology examined critical thermal limits, acclimation, fever, torpor and hibernation; the widely cited comparison of hibernation and daily torpor in mammals and birds is representative of the journal's taste for work that clarifies a whole category of strategy rather than reporting a single species in isolation. Metabolic studies addressed basal and field metabolic rates, the cost of locomotion, flight, diving and reproduction, and the way metabolic machinery scales with body size. Osmoregulation and salt and water balance brought in desert rodents, marine birds, amphibians moving between fresh and salt water, and insects managing water loss at tiny scales. Gas exchange and acid-base work ranged from insect tracheae to fish gills to the lungs of exercising mammals, always with the environment — altitude, burrow air, hypoxic water — treated as part of the physiology rather than as background.

A second large territory is the physiology of life history and performance. How animals allocate energy to growth, reproduction, immune defence, migration and moult; how hormones coordinate those allocations; how locomotor performance, bite force, digestive capacity or endurance limit what an animal can do — these questions sit naturally in PBZ because they are physiological in mechanism and evolutionary in meaning. Nutritional physiology and digestion form part of this territory, including work on gut morphology, digestive enzymes, diet switching and the assimilation of isotopes into tissues, a topic whose methodological papers in this journal, on factors influencing assimilation rates and the fractionation of nitrogen and carbon stable isotopes in avian blood and feathers, became standard references far beyond zoology, in ecology and archaeology as well.

A third territory, growing through the PBZ years, is the molecular and genetic basis of physiological variation: gene expression under heat, cold, hypoxia and salinity stress; the evolution of protein function; endocrine signalling; and, increasingly, conservation physiology, where stress hormones, immune measures and energetic markers are used to judge how populations are coping with disturbance, climate change and habitat alteration. The journal's editorial leadership in the 2010s explicitly encouraged that growth, announcing expanded interest in comparative biomechanics and functional morphology where they tie to physiology, in behavioural endocrinology, in conservation physiology and in the molecular genetics of ecologically relevant traits. A manuscript that was purely a catalogue of measurements, however competent, still risked rejection as descriptive; the argument connecting mechanism to ecology or evolution was not decoration, it was the admission ticket.

Methods, Comparison and the Garland Tradition

No account of PBZ is honest without its methodological conscience. Comparative biology has a built-in trap: species are not independent data points, because close relatives resemble each other through inheritance as well as through adaptation. The journal became a principal venue for confronting that trap, publishing influential methodological guidance on phylogenetically informed analysis, including the much-cited warning against naive two-species comparative studies and what can and cannot be inferred from them about adaptation. Its successor's author guidance still directs multispecies studies to that literature and requires due consideration of phylogeny in analysis and interpretation. For a reader appraising the archive, this means later PBZ papers generally state their comparative design more carefully than the broader literature of their day, and that reusing their data in a modern meta-analysis usually requires the same phylogenetic care the original authors were asked to exercise.

Experimental design in the journal spans laboratory and field in a way few physiology titles match. A single issue might contain respirometry on exercising lizards, field metabolic rates measured with doubly labelled water, hormone assays from free-living birds, and a modelling paper on heat exchange. The journal welcomed that mixture because its questions demanded it: a mechanism isolated in the laboratory earns its evolutionary meaning only when it is shown to matter outdoors, and a pattern observed outdoors earns its explanation only when the mechanism is demonstrated. Technical comments, brief communications, comments on published papers, reviews and invited perspectives, formats the successor still lists among its article types, supported the conversation around the research papers, letting methods be criticised and reinterpreted in the open rather than in private correspondence.

That culture also explains the journal's unusually long citation life. Bibliometric summaries record a cited half-life well into double figures, around fourteen years in recent Journal Citation Report style summaries, which is exceptional among life-science journals and entirely consistent with a literature of methods, mechanisms and natural history that researchers keep needing. A metabolic equation, an isotope discrimination factor or a torpor classification published in PBZ does not expire when a drug is superseded; it is used every time a new study is designed. Readers should therefore not judge the archive by recency: some of its most useful papers are old, heavily reused and still the correct citation for the technique or value they report.

Indexing, Standing and Metrics — Stated With Their Years

PBZ was indexed in the major life-science services appropriate to its field, including Scopus and the Web of Science science citation indexes, and its articles are retrievable through PubMed where their topics are biomedical as well as through zoological and ecological databases. Scopus-based SCImago coverage for the title runs from 1999, matching the renaming, and SCImago-derived summaries place its best quartile at Q1 in Animal Science and Zoology, with lower quartiles, around Q3, recorded in Biochemistry and Physiology categories in the same summaries. Those mixed quartiles are a fair portrait of the journal: dominant in its home territory of animal physiology and zoology, more specialised when measured against the enormous general biochemistry literature, and authors should read the category, not just the letter, before drawing conclusions.

Numerical indicators must be quoted with their source and year or not at all. SCImago-derived listings record, for recent years of the title, a journal rank measure around 0.585 to 0.60, an h-index in the low to mid nineties, roughly 93 to 96 depending on the year and database consulted, and two-year citation averages corresponding to an impact factor near 1.8 in 2024-style summaries. The successor title now accumulates its own metrics under its own ISSNs, and early figures attached to Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology, including any carried in its separate record, belong to that record and should not be merged into PBZ's history. What the numbers jointly support, without exaggeration, is the standing of a respected specialist journal: not a general-science title, but a first-choice venue within comparative, ecological and evolutionary physiology, whose papers are read for decades.

This profile deliberately avoids presenting any single metric as the journal's quality. For an individual paper, the better tests are the ones the journal itself applied: is the species comparison sound, is phylogeny handled, does the mechanism connect to ecology or evolution, and have later studies built on the result? For the journal as a whole, longevity is itself evidence: a title that a major university press kept, renamed twice with care, and carried into a new century had to be serving a community that no neighbouring journal served in quite the same way. That community, of comparative physiologists who think like ecologists and evolutionists, is the constant beneath all three names.

For Authors and Readers Today

Authors cannot submit to Physiological and Biochemical Zoology today, because the title closed with its 2023 volume; the living journal is Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology, whose current author guidance, published by the University of Chicago Press, describes double-blind peer review, the article types it accepts, ranging from research papers and brief communications to reviews, invited perspectives, education and outreach pieces and book reviews, and its interest in focused issues and special collections. That guidance also preserves PBZ's core rules in modern form: ecological or evolutionary context is required, purely descriptive work does not fit, and multispecies comparisons must respect phylogeny. An author with a manuscript in PBZ's tradition should therefore prepare it for the successor, study its recent issues rather than PBZ's, and confirm current charges, formatting and submission arrangements on the publisher's site, since those practical details are not publicly disclosed in a form this historical profile can responsibly reproduce.

Readers, by contrast, will use the PBZ title constantly, because the archive is where the evidence lives. Cite papers under Physiological and Biochemical Zoology for the 1999 to 2023 period, with the standard abbreviation Physiol Biochem Zool, and resist the temptation to update the citation to the modern title: citation accuracy protects both the historical record and the bibliometric credit of the journal that actually published the paper. When searching, combine the ISSNs 1522-2152 and 1537-5293 with author and topic terms, and remember that earlier work in the same run, before 1999, will be found under Physiological Zoology with its own identifiers, a predecessor relationship of exactly the same kind as the 2024 successor.

Institutions and librarians should note the clean three-part structure of the run — Physiological Zoology to 1998, Physiological and Biochemical Zoology from 1999 to 2023, Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology from 2024 — when checking holdings, because gaps in access are often title-change artefacts rather than missing subscriptions. The University of Chicago Press platform hosts the archive across the changes, and holdings statements that stop at a renaming year should be verified before a reader is told that an article cannot be obtained. That simple check, applied to all three titles in this family, is the practical lesson of this profile: the journal never stopped, it only changed its name, twice, as its science widened.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Physiological and Biochemical Zoology still published?

No, not under that name. The title ran from 1999 to 2023 and was renamed Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology from 2024, beginning with volume 97. The journal itself, published by the University of Chicago Press since 1928, continues.

Is Ecological and Evolutionary Physiology a duplicate of this journal?

No. It is the successor title in a documented rename chain, with different ISSNs, 2993-7965 and 2993-7973 in its own record, against 1522-2152 and 1537-5293 here, and with coverage beginning in 2024 where this title's coverage ends. Successor and predecessor records should be kept separate and cross-referenced.

What subjects did PBZ cover?

Animal physiology and biochemistry in ecological and evolutionary context: thermal biology, metabolic energetics, osmoregulation, gas exchange, acid-base balance, nutrition and digestion, endocrinology, locomotor performance, life-history physiology and, increasingly, conservation physiology and the molecular genetics of ecologically relevant traits.

What kind of paper was PBZ likely to reject?

Work that was purely descriptive, or a physiological mechanism studied with no clear ecological or evolutionary context, however technically sound. Multispecies comparisons that ignored phylogeny were also vulnerable, a rule its successor still states explicitly.

How should I cite a 2010 article from this journal?

Under the title as published, Physiological and Biochemical Zoology, abbreviated Physiol Biochem Zool, with the year, volume and pages from the article itself. Do not substitute the post-2024 title.