Artificial Life (journal)

• 1. Introduction

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  Artificial Life is a peer-reviewed scientific journal with an unusual mandate: to publish research on systems that humans build but that behave like living things. Not biology in the traditional sense, and not computer science in the traditional sense. Something in between. The journal was established in 1993, and it has been the official publication of the International Society of Artificial Life ever since. It comes out through the MIT Press, both online and in print. What draws researchers to a field that asks machines, software, and even chemical systems to mirror the logic of life? That is the question this journal has spent decades helping to answer.

• 2. What Artificial Life Studies

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  The field covered by the journal takes its name seriously. Researchers working under the banner of artificial life study man-made systems that exhibit the behavioral characteristics of natural living systems. The articles published in the journal span three distinct domains. Software is one: programs that evolve, adapt, or self-organize. Hardware is another: physical machines or robots built to display life-like behavior. The third domain is wetware, a term for biological or chemical systems engineered outside the body. Each of these tracks asks a version of the same question: what is it about living systems that can be abstracted, replicated, or created from scratch?

• 3. Indexing and Reach

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  A scientific journal earns its credibility partly through the databases that choose to include it. Artificial Life appears in a notable range of them. PubMed and MEDLINE place it alongside biomedical research. The Science Citation Index Expanded tracks how often its papers are cited by other scientists. Scopus, Compendex, Inspec, and BIOSIS Previews each index it from different disciplinary angles, reflecting the field's genuinely cross-disciplinary reach. Biological Abstracts and The Zoological Record connect it to life sciences. EMBASE and Excerpta Medica link it to medicine. The breadth of that indexing list signals that artificial life research is read and cited by communities well beyond any single field, from engineers to biologists to medical researchers.