About Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie

Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie

Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie — Journal of Animal Psychology — was founded in 1937 as one of the first journals in the world devoted to animal behaviour, and for almost five decades it was the journal in which classical ethology was built. Edited at its founding by Konrad Lorenz, Otto Koehler and Carl Kronacher, it published Tinbergen's four-questions paper in 1963, and in 1986 it was renamed Ethology, under which it continues today.

This is a historical profile of the original title, anchored to ISSN 0044-3573. It distinguishes the historical journal from its successor throughout, because the scientific literature does the same: everything before 1986 is cited under the German title, and merging the two names would falsify thousands of citations.

Journal at a Glance

Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, in English Journal of Animal Psychology, was a German-language scientific journal founded in 1937 and published under that title until it was renamed Ethology in 1986. Its print ISSN is 0044-3573, the identifier carried by the JournalsWorld record for this title and by library catalogues for the original series. Under its first title it ran from volume 1 in 1937 through the volumes of the mid-1980s, and it is cited in the scientific literature almost always by its German title and its standard abbreviation, Z. Tierpsychol., even in English-language papers.

The journal matters far beyond its size. It was one of the first journals in the world devoted to animal behaviour, it was the house journal in which classical ethology defined itself, and it published the single most cited methodological paper in the field's history, Niko Tinbergen's 1963 article On Aims and Methods in Ethology. A profile of the historical title is therefore also a short history of ethology as a discipline, and it should be read as a historical profile: the journal no longer appears under this name, submissions go to its successor, and the practical information about that successor is given in a separate section below.

• Title: Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie (Journal of Animal Psychology)
• Print ISSN: 0044-3573
• Founded: 1937, by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Tierpsychologie (German Society for Animal Psychology)
• First editors: Konrad Lorenz, Otto Koehler and Carl Kronacher
• Renamed: 1986, to Ethology, with the subtitle International Journal of Behavioral Biology
• Successor ISSNs: 0179-1613 (print) and 1439-0310 (online), for Ethology
• Publisher of the successor: John Wiley and Sons, as recorded for Ethology

Founding in 1937

The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Tierpsychologie, the German Society for Animal Psychology, was founded in 1936, and in 1937 it founded the journal as its organ. The first editors were Konrad Lorenz, Otto Koehler and Carl Kronacher. Lorenz, an Austrian zoologist then building his reputation from observations of jackdaws and greylag geese and from his work on imprinting in young birds, became co-editor-in-chief of the new journal in the same year he took a lectureship in comparative anatomy and animal psychology at the University of Vienna. Koehler, based at Königsberg, brought experimental rigour, work on counting in animals, which he called unnamed thinking, and an early use of film to record behaviour. Kronacher brought the animal-breeding and applied side of the subject.

Lorenz published in the journal's first volume, with his 1937 paper Biologische Fragestellung in der Tierpsychologie, Biological Questions in Animal Psychology, at volume 1, pages 24 to 32. That a founding editor set out the biological framing of the subject in the first volume is characteristic of the journal's role: it was not a passive outlet for finished work, it was the place where a group of researchers argued a new discipline into existence, in German, at a moment when animal psychology in the English-speaking world was dominated by laboratory experiments on learning in a small number of species.

The contrast in method is the key to the journal's content. Where the dominant laboratory tradition studied behaviour in controlled but artificial settings, the researchers around this journal observed animals, often in semi-natural conditions, described complete behaviour patterns in detail, compared them across species, and asked what a pattern was for: its survival value and its evolutionary history. The descriptive catalogue of a species' behaviour, the ethogram, the use of models and dummies to test what stimulus releases a response, and deprivation experiments to separate learned from unlearned components all became standard tools through papers of this school, many of them published here.

War, Interruption and the Post-War Decades

The journal's early run was overtaken by the Second World War, in which its editors' careers were scattered: Lorenz served as an army physician from 1942 and was a prisoner of war in the USSR until 1948, and Koehler lost his Königsberg base as the city was destroyed. Publication of German scientific journals in those years was irregular, and any library run of the title should be checked volume by volume rather than assumed complete. After the war the journal resumed as the central European organ of the revived discipline, now increasingly called ethology rather than animal psychology, and its authors and readers became international.

By the 1950s and 1960s the discipline had institutional form — research institutes, international conferences beginning with the 1952 meeting at Lorenz's Max Planck institute, and a generation of students — and the journal was its leading periodical alongside Behaviour, founded in 1948, and the British journal that became Animal Behaviour. Its papers from this period are still cited because they are primary sources: original descriptions of courtship, aggression, parental behaviour, communication and orientation in particular species, made before those subjects were reorganised by later theory. In 1973 Lorenz, Karl von Frisch and Tinbergen received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for their discoveries concerning the organisation and elicitation of individual and social behaviour patterns, the citation that marks the peak of the classical school the journal had served since 1937.

The Paper That Defines the Journal: Tinbergen 1963

If one article must stand for the journal, it is Niko Tinbergen's On Aims and Methods in Ethology, published in volume 20, issue 4, in 1963, pages 410 to 433, DOI 10.1111/j.1439-0310.1963.tb01161.x. In it Tinbergen argued that a complete biological explanation of behaviour must answer four questions: causation, the immediate mechanisms that produce the behaviour; survival value, what the behaviour contributes to fitness; ontogeny, how it develops in the individual; and evolution, how it arose in the lineage. Those four questions, universally known as Tinbergen's four questions, still structure textbooks and research programmes in animal behaviour more than sixty years later.

Note the DOI suffix and the journal code it contains: 1439-0310 is the online ISSN of the successor title Ethology, because the back archive of Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie is now delivered digitally as part of Ethology's archive by Wiley. That is normal practice for a renamed journal, but it confuses citation databases, which may list a 1963 paper under the current title, the original title, or both. For historical accuracy a bibliography should cite the title as it stood when the paper appeared — Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie — while using the DOI to resolve the digital copy.

Language, Title and the 1986 Renaming

The journal began as a German-language title, and its name asserted a claim: Tierpsychologie, animal psychology, presented behaviour as a subject for psychology-like inquiry while its editors were in fact building a biological discipline. As the discipline's centre of gravity moved into English and as the word ethology displaced animal psychology as the discipline's name, both the language and the title became a limitation. In 1986 the journal was renamed Ethology, with the subtitle International Journal of Behavioral Biology, and took the new ISSN pair 0179-1613 for print and 1439-0310 for online publication. The volume sequence and the editorial lineage continued; the renaming was a change of name and language strategy, not the founding of an unrelated journal.

On JournalsWorld the successor has its own record, Ethology, post 19202, which at the time of this profile was still a brief template record carrying the successor ISSNs and an h-index of 91 drawn from citation data. That record and this one are a rename pair, not duplicate records for the same title, and they should not be merged in a way that erases the historical title: the pre-1986 literature is cited under Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, the post-1986 literature under Ethology, and a reader searching either name needs to be led to the other. This profile therefore profiles the historical journal in its own right and points forward, rather than treating the old title as a mere alias.

Content Character: What a Volume Contains

A typical post-war volume contains original research articles describing behaviour in a named species or a comparison across species, with the species, the setting and the observational or experimental method made explicit; shorter communications; and discussion that places a finding in an evolutionary frame. Taxa range across insects, fish, birds and mammals, with birds especially prominent in the classical period because so many of the founding researchers were ornithologists. The descriptive standard was high: a behaviour pattern was expected to be defined well enough for another observer to recognise it, a standard that later, more quantitative work sometimes relaxed and sometimes had to recover.

Later decades brought the field's internal changes into the journal's pages: the rise of behavioural ecology in the 1970s, with its emphasis on ultimate, evolutionary causes and on cost and benefit measured in fitness, and of sociobiology, shifted attention toward sexual selection, foraging, predation and social systems. A study of dominant research topics in the journal's successor around the turn of the century found sexual selection, predation, aggression and foraging at the top, with mechanism and development, the classical proximate questions, less prominent. Reading the title's full run from 1937 is therefore a way to watch a discipline change its mind about what an explanation of behaviour is.

Access, Archives and Citation Practice

The digital archive is delivered by Wiley as part of Ethology, whose online platform reaches back to the Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie volumes. Printed runs are held by major university and institute libraries, and the journal is recorded in the standard serials catalogues under ISSN 0044-3573. Because the title is German and contains an umlaut, searches should be run in both forms, Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie and Zeitschrift fur Tierpsychologie, and under the abbreviation Z. Tierpsychol., to avoid missing catalogue entries that were transliterated at different times by different libraries.

Cite pre-1986 papers under the original title, with volume, issue, pages and DOI where the archive supplies one, and do not modernise the title to Ethology in a reference list: doing so makes a 1950s paper look as if it appeared in a journal of a name that did not exist until 1986, and it breaks the matching that reference services perform against the original record. Conversely, when a database gives a pre-1986 paper under the Ethology name, that is a platform artefact of the archive delivery, not evidence about the paper's original publication, and it can be corrected in a bibliography without any doubt about the paper's identity, which the DOI settles.

Why the Historical Title Still Matters

Three groups still need this record. Historians and philosophers of science use the journal as a primary source for the emergence of ethology, and recent scholarly work on the discipline's history treats its founding, its methods and its founding figures at length. Behaviour researchers need it because the classical descriptions and Tinbergen's framework remain live references, not museum pieces. And librarians and bibliometricians need the title history stated plainly, because a rename in 1986 splits one journal's citation record into two names, and any evaluation that counts only one name understates the journal's influence by roughly half a century of work.

For completeness: the current journal, Ethology, is a monthly peer-reviewed journal published by John Wiley and Sons, associated with the Ethologische Gesellschaft, and at the time of the most recent general reference consulted its editor-in-chief was Wolfgang Goymann of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Intelligence. In 2021 it adopted a sampling-bias framework for behavioural research and made deposit of original data in a public repository mandatory, policies that belong to the successor's modern history. Anyone wishing to submit work should go to the successor, not to this historical title, and should use the successor's current author instructions.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie founded, and by whom?

In 1937, by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Tierpsychologie, the German Society for Animal Psychology founded the previous year. Its first editors were Konrad Lorenz, Otto Koehler and Carl Kronacher.

Is the journal still published under this title?

No. In 1986 it was renamed Ethology, with the subtitle International Journal of Behavioral Biology, and it continues under that name with Wiley. The pre-1986 volumes are delivered digitally as part of the Ethology archive.

What is its ISSN?

Print ISSN 0044-3573 for Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie. The successor title Ethology has print ISSN 0179-1613 and online ISSN 1439-0310, which is why the DOI of a 1963 paper in this journal contains the successor's online ISSN.

What is the journal's most famous paper?

Niko Tinbergen's On Aims and Methods in Ethology, volume 20, issue 4, 1963, pages 410-433, which set out the four questions — causation, survival value, ontogeny and evolution — that still structure the study of animal behaviour.

Is Ethology on JournalsWorld the same record as this one?

No. Ethology, post 19202, is the renamed successor and has its own record. The two form a rename pair covering one continuous journal: before 1986 under the German title, from 1986 under Ethology. Neither record is a duplicate of the other.

In what language did it publish?

It began as a German-language journal, reflecting its German and Austrian founding circle. The 1986 renaming to an English title, Ethology, marked the discipline's shift to English as its main publication language.

Editors, Contributors and the Journal's Circle

The founding editorial trio set the journal's range. Lorenz contributed the observational natural history of birds and the concept of imprinting, the process by which a young bird, at a critical stage after hatching, learns to follow a parent or a substitute object, with consequences for its later social and sexual behaviour. Koehler contributed experiment, quantification and film, and a research programme on whether animals could count and recognise numbers without language. Kronacher, a veterinarian and animal-breeding specialist, connected the journal to applied animal science. Around them gathered the contributors who made the post-war volumes: ornithologists, ichthyologists and entomologists in the German-speaking universities and Max Planck institutes, and, increasingly, Dutch, British, Scandinavian and American behaviour researchers publishing in a German journal because that was where their audience was.

That circle also explains the journal's standards of evidence. A contributor was expected to know the animal: its natural history, its sensory capacities and its normal repertoire, before claiming that an experiment had revealed something about it. Criticism in the journal's tradition often took the form of showing that a laboratory result was an artefact of an unnatural setting or of an animal kept in conditions that distorted its behaviour. Later behavioural ecology changed the questions, but it kept that insistence on natural history, and the modern successor journal's requirement that authors deposit their original data continues, in a new form, the old insistence that a claim about behaviour must be checkable against the record of what the animal actually did.

A Note on Names and Diacritics

Catalogue searches for this journal and its editors are complicated by diacritics and by transliteration. The title appears with the umlaut, as Tierpsychologie with a prefixed für carrying an umlaut, and in stripped form as fur in older catalogue records. Editor Otto Koehler is also written Köhler. A search that uses only one form will miss records filed under the other, which is why this profile has given both forms of the key names. The same care applies to the journal's successor, whose authors are filed under German names with and without diacritics in the Wiley archive.