Zoological Science

About Zoological Science

Zoological Science: The Journal of the Zoological Society of Japan

Zoological Science is the journal of the Zoological Society of Japan, devoted to original articles, reviews and editorials covering the broad field of zoology. Founded in 1984 from the consolidation of two much older Japanese zoological journals, it is an English-language, subscription-based society journal, published on the BioOne platform, that serves as one of the principal international windows onto Japanese zoology and as a general forum for zoologists worldwide. This profile covers its history, scope, editorial arrangements, access model, indexing and metrics — with sources and years attached to every figure — and gives authors a realistic basis for deciding whether their work belongs here or in one of its neighbouring titles, including its open-access sister journal.

Quick Facts

History: A Journal Built from Two Older Journals

The Zoological Society of Japan's own publishing page gives the founding history directly. Zoological Science was founded in 1984 as a result of the consolidation of Zoological Magazine (1888–1983) and Annotationes Zoologicae Japonenses (1897–1983), the former official journals of the Society. The journal therefore carries a lineage that reaches back to 1888, even though the title itself dates from 1984 — which is why database records differ in the start years they quote: OpenAlex's source record, which aggregates the lineage, reports publication years from the 1950s onward for material it attaches to the source and beyond, Scopus-based summaries often quote coverage beginning in 1992, and the Society quotes 1984 for the title. None of these is the whole story on its own; the accurate statement is the Society's: the present journal began in 1984, continuing two journals of 1888 and 1897.

The Society also explains the journal's modern rationale. With the growth of molecular biology and genetics, zoology became an increasingly interdisciplinary science for studying animal diversification and evolution by integrating disciplines and techniques across biology, and Zoological Science positions itself as an international forum for that science — for zoologists addressing problems with new ideas, theoretical models and experimental systems, with, in the Society's words, a striving to set a standard for zoology through high-quality reviewing and publication. That self-description matches the journal's actual breadth today, from taxonomy and morphology to genomics, neurobiology and ecology.

Scope in Detail

BioOne, the journal's platform, describes it as devoted to the publication of original articles, reviews, essays and editorials that cover the broad and increasingly interdisciplinary field of zoology; the Society's page describes original articles, reviews and editorials across the same broad field. In subject terms, OpenAlex's topic profile for the journal gives an evidence-based picture of what actually appears: developmental biology and gene regulation; reproductive biology and its impacts on aquatic species; neurobiology and insect physiology; marine invertebrate physiology and ecology; and marine biology and ecology. Taxonomy and systematics — the description of new species and the revision of groups — remain a visible and valued part of the journal, reflecting its nineteenth-century roots, alongside behaviour, comparative physiology, cell and molecular work on animal systems, and evolutionary studies.

The journal's most-read and most-cited content on BioOne illustrates the range concretely: work on heat sensitivity in Japanese honeybees and hornets inside bee balls; on somatosensation, echolocation and underwater sniffing in mammals; on the evolution of water-acquisition mechanisms in the move from aquatic to terrestrial life; on chick development and asynchronous hatching in zebra finches; and on terrestrial bioluminescent animals of Japan sit alongside taxonomic papers describing new cockroach species from the Nansei Islands, circadian-clock work in crickets, mitochondrial-genome analysis of historic Japanese wolf specimens, scorpion phylogeography, and mating-behaviour comparisons in medaka fishes. A manuscript fits this journal when its primary contribution is zoological knowledge — about animals, their structure, function, development, behaviour, ecology or evolution — regardless of whether the methods are classical observation, experiment, or modern sequencing and imaging.

Sister Publications and the Society's Ecosystem

Two neighbouring resources matter for authors choosing where to submit. Zoological Letters, launched by the Society with BioMed Central / Springer Nature, is an open-access sister journal publishing new and important findings across the zoological sciences, from taxonomy to bioinformatics, including palaeontology; it is the natural alternative when an author needs or wants gold open access, a different article model, or the rapid handling of a letters-style journal. It is a separate journal with its own record, not an edition of Zoological Science, and the two should never be confused in citations. The Society also maintains ZooDiversity Web, a search and showcase site for papers published in Zoological Science since 1984 — more than 4,000 peer-reviewed articles covering over 13,000 animal species, searchable by general or scientific species name (searching "medaka" or Oryzias latipes, in its own example). For readers, that species-centred index is a genuinely distinctive way into the journal's backfile, and for authors it means older work in this journal remains findable by the organism it studies.

Editorial Arrangements and Submission

The Society's publishing page links the journal's editorial board, its instructions to authors (hosted on BioOne), and its submission route through Manuscript Central, and carries a message from the Editor-in-Chief. That arrangement — society ownership, an editor accountable to the society, platform delivery by BioOne — is the classic society-journal model, and it has two practical consequences. First, editorial identity is stable: the journal's standards are set by working zoologists in its community rather than by a commercial portfolio strategy. Second, authors should follow the BioOne-hosted instructions to authors as the controlling document for format, article categories and charges such as any page or colour charges, because those operational details are maintained there and in the submission system, not on the Society's summary page. Details of any such charges could not be verified from a fetched page that stated them in full for this profile, so they are recorded here as not publicly disclosed in the sources fetched, and authors should confirm them inside the submission system or with the editorial office.

Access Model

Zoological Science is a subscription journal. OpenAlex's source record flags it as not open access, it does not appear in the Directory of Open Access Journals — repeated DOAJ search-API checks for ISSN 0289-0003 run for this profile returned no record, which is the expected result for a subscription title — and BioOne presents it within its subscription collections, inviting readers to subscribe to BioOne Complete and to receive email alerts. Individual readers will most often reach it through a university or museum library's BioOne subscription. Authors should factor the access model into their choice: the journal offers the prestige and community of a long-established society title, but authors bound by funder mandates requiring immediate open access under an open licence should check what options, if any, the journal offers them, or consider the Society's open-access sister journal described above.

Indexing and Metrics

Directory summaries report the journal as indexed in Scopus and in the Science Citation Index Expanded of Web of Science, and in PubMed and Embase. Its metrics, quoted with source and year, are those of a solid mid-field society journal. Scopus-based summaries give a CiteScore of 1.5 and a SNIP of 0.42, placing it in quartile Q3 for Animal Science and Zoology in those summaries; an impact factor of 1.0 was reported for the journal by the same class of directory from Journal Citation Reports data. Older SCImago-based summaries give an SJR of 0.345 and an h-index of 64, while the JournalsWorld record this profile replaces quoted an h-index of 69 and a Q2 placing — a spread that reflects different years and different category sets rather than a single right answer, and a warning against quoting any quartile without its year and source.

OpenAlex tells a longer-history story. Its source record for ISSN 0289-0003 (source S34358731), retrieved directly for this profile, lists 7,827 works and 72,289 citations, an h-index of 83, an i10-index of 2,138 and a two-year mean citedness of about 1.54, with ISSNs 0289-0003 and 2212-3830 and the host organisation recorded as the Zoological Society of Japan. The OpenAlex h-index is higher than the Scopus-based figures because OpenAlex counts a wider and longer document set, including the journal's deep backfile; it is not a correction of the Scopus figure and the two should never be mixed in one comparison. The defensible summary is that Zoological Science is a long-lived, moderately cited general zoology journal whose influence is spread across taxonomy, physiology, development and ecology, and whose individual-paper visibility depends heavily on the organism and question — taxonomic work in particular is cited slowly but for decades, which journal-level averages do not capture.

Who Should Submit

Strong fits are original zoological studies with a clear contribution — a new species or revision done to modern standards, an experimental result on animal physiology, development or behaviour, a genomic or morphological analysis that resolves an evolutionary question, or a review that organises a field for the journal's broad readership. The journal is especially appropriate for work on East Asian fauna and for research connected to Japanese collections and field sites, without being limited to them: its authorship and subject matter are international. Authors should write taxonomy and systematics with full specimen, repository and nomenclatural discipline, and experimental work with the organism, strain, sex, life stage and husbandry details that zoological readers require to judge and replicate it. Poor fits include work whose centre of gravity is veterinary clinical practice, aquaculture production or human medicine, purely molecular work in which the animal is only a model system with no zoological question, and manuscripts whose authors require immediate gold open access — for which the sister journal exists.

The Breadth of Zoology, as This Journal Practises It

General zoology journals survive by serving a discipline that has fragmented into specialties, and Zoological Science's contents show how it holds that breadth together. One strand is organismal and descriptive in the best sense: taxonomy, comparative anatomy and morphology, and faunistics, where the contribution is precise knowledge of animal diversity itself. A second strand is experimental: physiology, endocrinology, neurobiology and developmental biology, where animals are studied as working systems and where the journal's cricket, medaka, honeybee and echinoderm papers sit. A third strand is evolutionary and ecological: phylogenetics and phylogeography, behaviour, life-history and population studies, increasingly built on mitochondrial and genomic data, as in the mitochondrial-genome analysis of historic wolf specimens in its most-cited lists. A fourth, growing strand is integrative: studies that combine a museum specimen, a genome, a field observation and a physiological measurement to answer a question no single method could settle.

That breadth creates a specific kind of value for readers and a specific demand on authors. The value is serendipity with discipline: a developmental biologist browsing an issue will meet a taxonomic revision of a group they use as a model, and a taxonomist will meet the genomic methods that are redrawing their group. The demand is intelligibility across subfields. Authors cannot assume readers share their specialty's shorthand; the organism must be introduced, its biology and the reason it matters explained, and technical terms defined at first use. Papers that fail in general journals often fail on exactly this point — they are specialty papers wearing a general journal's clothes. Papers that succeed state a zoological question in the first page that any zoologist can recognise as interesting, then deliver the specialist evidence rigorously.

The Backfile and Why Older Papers Still Matter Here

Zoology is a cumulative science in a way that fast-moving experimental fields are not. A species description from 1910, a distribution record from 1960 or a physiological measurement from 1990 may still be primary evidence today, because the animal, the locality or the baseline cannot be recreated. This journal's backfile is therefore an asset with unusual longevity: through its predecessors it reaches toward the nineteenth century, its own run begins in 1984, and ZooDiversity Web indexes the modern run by species — over 4,000 articles and over 13,000 species, by the Society's count — so that a researcher starting from an organism can find everything the journal has published on it. Authors contribute to that cumulative record best by treating their own paper as a permanent entry in it: deposit specimens in a named repository, give exact localities and collection data where ethics and conservation permit, use current and correctly spelled scientific names with authorities where the discipline expects them, and cite the older literature in this and its predecessor journals accurately rather than only the last five years of English-language work. Reviewers for a society journal with this history notice, and value, that kind of scholarship.

How the Journal Is Used by Its Readers

Readers reach this journal in three main ways, and each shapes what a successful article looks like. Working zoologists follow its issues on BioOne as part of staying current across a broad field — for them, a clear question, a well-illustrated organism and an honest discussion matter more than fashionable framing. Specialists reach individual articles through database searches in Scopus, Web of Science or PubMed, usually starting from a species, a gene, a structure or a behaviour — for them, precise titles, complete abstracts and correct scientific names are what make an article findable at all. And researchers starting from an organism use the Society's ZooDiversity Web to pull together everything the journal has published on that animal since 1984 — for them, an article is one entry in a species dossier that may be consulted for decades. An author who writes for all three readers — broad significance up front, exact terminology throughout, and specimen and locality data recorded permanently — gives a paper the longest possible working life in this journal's ecosystem.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who publishes Zoological Science? The Zoological Society of Japan. A numeric code appearing in some database records as its "publisher" is an internal identifier, not a publisher's name.

When was it founded? In 1984, by consolidating Zoological Magazine (1888–1983) and Annotationes Zoologicae Japonenses (1897–1983), the Society's former journals.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 0289-0003. OpenAlex's record also lists 2212-3830 as an ISSN for the source; the JournalsWorld record previously listed only the print ISSN.

How often does it appear? Six regular issues per annual volume, one every two months, according to the Society's current publishing page. Older descriptions of the journal describe a different frequency, so rely on the Society's current statement.

Is it open access? No. It is a subscription journal delivered through BioOne. The Society's open-access journal is its sister title, Zoological Letters.

What are its metrics? With sources: CiteScore 1.5 and SNIP 0.42 in Scopus-based summaries (Q3, Animal Science and Zoology), an impact factor reported as 1.0 in directory summaries of Journal Citation Reports data, and, from OpenAlex, 7,827 works, 72,289 citations and an h-index of 83. Always quote the database and year alongside any figure.

Where do I submit? Through Manuscript Central, linked from the Society's publishing page, following the instructions to authors hosted on BioOne.

Sources and Verification

Based on the Zoological Society of Japan's publishing page (history, frequency, scope, submission and editorial links, and the descriptions of Zoological Letters and ZooDiversity Web), the journal's BioOne page (publisher, scope wording, most-read and most-cited content), the OpenAlex source record S34358731 retrieved through the OpenAlex API under ISSN 0289-0003, Scopus- and SCImago-based directory summaries for CiteScore, SNIP, SJR and quartile (attributed in the text), and Directory of Open Access Journals search-API checks for ISSN 0289-0003, which returned no record — consistent with its subscription model. Any detail that could not be verified from a fetched source is described in the text as not publicly disclosed in the sources fetched.