Looking back on my journey as the editor-in-chief of Animal Bioscience

Abstract

Animal Bioscience (AB) is an international journal first published in 1988 under the title AsianAustralasian Journal of Animal Sciences (AJAS) by the Asian-Australasian Association of Animal Production Societies (AAAP). Since then, it has continued its publication journey. The current journal title was adopted in 2021. I was invited to become the Editor-in-Chief (EIC) of AJAS in 2001, which has been my second job since then and my sole volunteer activity after retirement from Seoul National University in 2013. According to a previous report [1], the idea of an official international journal publication was not well accepted initially by the AAAP member countries, perceiving no real need for such a journal and the absence of a firm belief in the success of such publication activities in Asia. However, a few dedicated frontier scientists led by Professor. In K. Han, the first EIC, turned AJAS into one of the most respected global journals in the animal science category. As expected, collecting the manuscripts during the early days was challenging. The journal received less than 50 manuscripts in the first year. However, the annual count rose to almost 1,000 in a few years. Presently, authors from more than 50 countries have chosen AB to report their research work. China and Korea are the major contributing countries, similar to the case with many other international journals. Approximately 70% of submissions are from the AAAP member countries, with the remaining 30% from the non-AAAP region. The journal has made a tremendous improvement in citation frequency. When first indexed by the SCIE in 1997, the impact factor (IF) of AJAS was below 0.1, which increased to 2.7 in 2021. The total number of citations in the first year was less than 100, increasing to almost 9,000 in 2021, an approximately 100-fold increase over the past 25 years [2]. Since AB began to publish articles with a new title in 2021 and IF is calculated based on citations in the last 2 years, the first IF of AB will be released sometime in June 2023. The IF of AB will likely be lower than that of AJAS in the next few years due to the shorter exposure time of AB. However, it will not influence the combined journal IF significantly.