About Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London Series A General Entomology

Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London, Series A: General Entomology

Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London, Series A: General Entomology was the general-entomology series of the Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London, the journal in which the Society published shorter, general papers on insect biology — behaviour, ecology, physiology, life histories, distribution and related subjects — as distinct from the taxonomic papers of its Series B and from the longer monographic work of its Transactions. The Society, founded in 1833 and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1885 (some digitised copies render the charter year imperfectly), published the Proceedings from its rooms at 41 Queen’s Gate, London. Series A is cited in the literature by its World List abbreviation, Proc. R. ent. Soc. Lond. (A), and its backfile is now encountered chiefly through the Wiley digitisation of the Society’s journals, where its articles carry modern DOIs. In the early 1970s the Society’s journal structure was reorganised: the Proceedings Series A line continued as the Journal of Entomology, Series A, and from 1976 its successor became Physiological Entomology, which the Society and its publisher present as continuing the Series A line founded in the 1920s.

A profile of this journal needs to do something a simple directory entry cannot: explain a three-series system that no longer exists, in a society whose journals have all since been renamed. Readers who meet a citation to Proc. R. ent. Soc. Lond. (A) in an older paper — on tsetse flies, on Lepidoptera, on insect parasitism or on a hundred other subjects — need to know what kind of paper they are being sent to, where the backfile lives now, and how this series relates to the current Royal Entomological Society journals they may already know, above all Physiological Entomology, Systematic Entomology and Ecological Entomology. That is the purpose of the account that follows.

Quick Facts

The Society and Its Three Series

The Royal Entomological Society of London is one of the world’s oldest entomological societies, founded in 1833 — the Society’s own journal front matter repeats that founding date and its incorporation by Royal Charter in 1885 at the head of its volumes — and dedicated to the study of insects. By the 1930s and 1940s its publishing was organised so that different kinds of entomological work had different homes, and the notice printed in the Proceedings themselves explains the system with admirable clarity. The Proceedings were issued in three series: Series A, General Entomology; Series B, Taxonomy; and Series C, Journal of Meetings. Series A and Series B were each issued in parts forming an annual volume of approximately 240 pages. A separate, larger publication, the Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society of London, carried longer papers and was considered by a publication committee on its own rhythm.

That structure shaped what a Series A paper looked like. The Society’s guidance to authors in the Proceedings stated that papers of more than eight printed pages would not normally be accepted for publication in the Proceedings series journals, and that papers submitted by authors who were not Fellows of the Society could be accepted if they were communicated by a Fellow. Preference was given to papers written in English. Authors were entitled to receive twenty-five copies of their papers without charge and could purchase additional copies if they asked before publication, and the copyright of the Society’s publications was vested in the Society. These are period details, but they are not antiquarian trivia: they explain the character of the Series A literature. It is a literature of concise, focused papers — a life-history observation, a behavioural experiment, a physiological note, a distributional record, a study of a parasite or a predator — each making a defined point in a few pages, rather than a literature of long reviews or monographs. A modern reader who understands the eight-page norm will not be surprised by the brevity of a Series A paper, and will read it for exactly what it was designed to be: a sharp, refereed contribution to general entomology, published relatively promptly in parts through the year.

The working life of the Society is visible in the same front matter. Volumes list the Society’s officers and council for the session — presidents who include many of the leading British entomologists of their generations — and its standing committees, among them finance and house, publication and library, generic nomenclature, and, revealingly for the period, a committee for the protection of British insects. A conservation committee inside an entomological society in the 1940s is a reminder that the Society’s general entomology was never only laboratory science; it extended to the recording, understanding and protection of the British and world insect fauna that its Fellows studied.

What “General Entomology” Meant in Series A

Behaviour, ecology and life histories

The largest part of Series A’s identity is general insect biology in the field and in observation: behaviour, ecology, life histories, seasonal patterns, migration, feeding, reproduction and interactions with other organisms. The contents of individual parts make the point concretely. A part from 1939 includes work on the utilisation of food by larvae of the buff-tip moth, on bed-bugs and cockroaches, on the parasites of a psychid moth, and notes by Sir Edward Poulton on the survival value of protective coloration in grasshoppers and on butterflies captured by birds. A part from 1944 includes work on an egg-parasite of cacao stink-bugs, on homoeosis in a psychodid fly, on copulation and the terminal segments of Diptera, on the apparent densities of African blood-sucking insects, and on the terminology of insect wing venation. A part from 1945 ranges from scarcity of butterflies in west Cornwall and migrating Colias in the central United States to ladybird beetles in India and Ceylon, notes on a greenfly predator, and hybrid and pairing studies in tsetse flies of the genus Glossina. No single modern specialty journal would gather exactly that mixture; “general entomology” was the name for the mixture itself, held together by the Society and by a readership of Fellows whose interests crossed all of it.

Physiology and function

A second strand, which grew in importance across the run and eventually gave the successor journal its name, is physiology: how insects work. Papers on food utilisation, reproduction, sperm transfer, wing structure and function, and the physiological side of behaviour appear throughout Series A, and by the time the series became the Journal of Entomology, Series A its final volume was subtitled Physiology and Behaviour — a subtitle that reads, in retrospect, as an announcement of the Physiological Entomology title that followed in 1976. The current Physiological Entomology describes its own territory as how insects work and how they are adapted to their environments, from genes and molecules through anatomy and structure to behaviour and the interactions of whole organisms, including general physiology, behavioural physiology and biochemistry, neurobiology and sensory physiology, circadian rhythms and photoperiodism, and chemical ecology. That description is the modern form of a strand that Series A had carried, in shorter and less specialised form, for decades.

Economic and applied connections

Series A was a general journal, not an applied one, but insects of economic, medical and veterinary importance appear in its pages whenever the biology was general in interest: blood-sucking Diptera and tsetse flies, bed-bugs and cockroaches, cacao pests and their parasites, and parasitoids of pest insects. The Society published other, more applied material elsewhere, and Britain had specialist applied outlets in the same period, so Series A’s applied papers should be read as contributions to the biology of those insects rather than as pest-control manuals. That distinction preserves the journal’s identity: its question was always what the insect does and how, even when the insect also happened to matter to agriculture or health.

Taxonomy lived next door

Taxonomic papers — descriptions of new species, revisions and systematic work — belonged principally to Series B, the continuation of the earlier journal Stylops, and later to Systematic Entomology. Series A papers of course identify their insects, often meticulously, and may discuss distribution and classification where the biology requires it, but a reader looking for the formal taxonomic record of the Society in this period should look to Series B and the Transactions as well. Keeping the series distinct in citations matters for the same reason: Proc. R. ent. Soc. Lond. (A) and (B) are different journals with different contents in the same years, and a citation that omits the series letter is incomplete.

From Proceedings to Physiological Entomology: The Title Lineage

The lineage after the Proceedings period can be stated from library and society sources with reasonable precision, provided each step is kept separate. In the early 1970s the Society’s journals were retitled: library records show the Journal of Entomology, Series A: General Entomology running in volumes 46 to 49 in the years 1971 to 1975, with volume 50 in 1975–1976 carrying the subtitle Physiology and Behaviour; the parallel Series B became the Journal of Entomology, Series B: Taxonomy. Then, as a contemporary notice in The Coleopterists’ Bulletin recorded, the Royal Entomological Society changed the names of its journals: Ecological Entomology continued from the Transactions of the Royal Entomological Society, Physiological Entomology continued from the Journal of Entomology (Series A), described as founded in 1926, and Systematic Entomology continued from the Journal of Entomology (Series B), founded in 1932. Physiological Entomology began under its new title in 1976 — its first volume contains papers from March 1976 onward — and continues today as a Wiley journal for the Society, edited in recent listings by an international team of editors.

Two cautions belong with that lineage. First, “founded in 1926” in the contemporary notice refers to the deeper origin of the Series A line in the Society’s earlier Proceedings of the Entomological Society of London, before the “Royal” Proceedings title of the period profiled here; the volume numbering visible in Series A itself — volume 12 in 1937, volume 14 in 1939, volume 20 in 1945, volume 23 in 1948 and volume 36 in 1961 — is the practical guide to dating a Series A paper, and readers should date papers by their volume and year as printed, not by a founding claim. Second, the digitised backfile can mislead the unwary: Wiley’s archive presents some Series A volumes under the Physiological Entomology collection, and DOIs for Series A articles use the registration associated with that successor collection (articles from the 1940s, for example, carry DOIs in the 10.1111/j.1365-3032 sequence, with the article’s own year embedded in the DOI suffix). The article is still a Series A article, with its original journal title, volume and pages; the successor’s collection label is a shelving decision, not a retitling of the original paper, and citations should use the original title.

Metrics, Indexing and Standing

The site record from which this profile was built gives Series A an h-index of 33. For a closed historical series of short general papers, the more meaningful evidence of standing is qualitative and can be checked by any reader: the series was the general journal of a major national entomological society; its volumes were edited and overseen by the Society’s publication structures and its officers included leading entomologists of the period; its papers are still cited in modern work on insect behaviour, physiology, ecology and parasitism, where the original observation or experiment remains the primary source; and its successor, Physiological Entomology, continues the line as an established international journal. No impact factor exists for a title of this period in the modern Journal Citation Reports sense, and none is claimed here; any modern metric attached to Physiological Entomology belongs to that current title and its recent volumes, not retrospectively to Series A.

The backfile’s presence in the Wiley online library, with article-level DOIs, is the journal’s principal modern indexing route, supplemented by the great print-era bibliographies and by library holdings such as the Internet Archive’s digitised volumes, which preserve complete parts — front matter, contents, papers and Society notices together — and are invaluable for seeing the journal as its contemporary readers saw it. A researcher who needs the Society’s own context for a paper — who its officers were that session, what its author rules were, what else appeared in the same part — will often learn more from a complete digitised part than from an isolated article PDF.

How to Cite and Find Series A Articles

Cite the journal with its series letter always: Proc. R. ent. Soc. Lond. (A), followed by volume, pages and year as printed on the article. Where a DOI is given in the Wiley backfile, include it; it will normally resolve to the article in the successor collection, which is the correct digital location even though the collection name differs from the original title. Do not cite a Series A paper as Physiological Entomology: that title begins in 1976, and using it for a 1945 or 1961 paper creates a reference that cannot be found under the name given. Equally, do not drop “Series A” and cite the paper simply to the Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society, because Series B published taxonomic papers in the same years and the bare title does not say which journal is meant.

For subject searching across the whole lineage, a complete search needs all three title forms: Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London, Series A, for the period profiled here; Journal of Entomology, Series A, for 1971 to 1976; and Physiological Entomology from 1976 onward, with the understanding that the modern journal is more specialised — experimental physiology and behaviour in the broad sense described earlier — than the general journal from which it descends. A search that uses only the modern title will miss the general-entomology decades; a search that uses only the old title will miss everything the line has published in the last half century.

Guidance for Authors Today

The Proceedings Series A title is closed, so there is no submission route, fee, acceptance rate or review timeline to report for it; each of those is best described for this title as not publicly disclosed because the question no longer arises. Authors whose work descends from Series A’s territory should submit to the Royal Entomological Society’s current journals, published with Wiley, choosing by subject: Physiological Entomology for experimental work on how insects and other arthropods work, from molecules to behaviour; Systematic Entomology for systematic and taxonomic work in the Series B line; Ecological Entomology for ecological work in the Transactions line; and the Society’s other current titles — among them journals covering insect conservation and diversity, insect molecular biology, and medical and veterinary entomology — where the subject fits them better. The Society’s journals page gives the current editors and scope for each title, and that live page, not any historical profile, is the correct authority for a submission decision.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between Series A, Series B and Series C?

Series A was General Entomology — shorter general papers on insect biology. Series B was Taxonomy. Series C was the Journal of Meetings, recording the Society’s meetings. The Society’s own notice in the Proceedings states the three series in exactly those terms.

Is Proceedings Series A the same journal as Physiological Entomology?

Not the same title, but the same lineage. Physiological Entomology, from 1976, continues the Series A line through the intermediate Journal of Entomology, Series A title of 1971–1976. Cite each paper under the title printed on it.

How long were Series A papers?

Short by design. The Society’s period guidance said papers of more than eight printed pages would not normally be accepted in the Proceedings series, and Series A and B each formed an annual volume of roughly 240 pages issued in parts.

Where was the journal published from?

London. The Society published it and sold it at its rooms at 41 Queen’s Gate, London S.W.7, as printed on its volumes; the backfile is now distributed digitally through Wiley.

What ISSNs identify the journal?

Print ISSN 0375-0418, with 2056-5321 given for the digitised form in the record from which this profile was built. The successor title Physiological Entomology has its own ISSNs and should not be identified by these numbers.

Profile Summary

Proceedings of the Royal Entomological Society of London, Series A: General Entomology was the general-biology journal of one of the world’s oldest entomological societies: a concise, refereed series of papers on insect behaviour, ecology, physiology, life histories and applied biology, published from 41 Queen’s Gate as one of three Proceedings series alongside Taxonomy and the Journal of Meetings. Its front matter, its eight-page norm, its Fellowship communication rule and its committee lists preserve a complete picture of mid-twentieth-century British entomology at work. Its continuation through the Journal of Entomology, Series A into Physiological Entomology keeps the line alive today. Read with its series letter intact and its dates respected, Series A remains exactly what it was designed to be: the first place to look for the short, sharp general-entomology observations and experiments on which later, more specialised work still rests.