BioScience

• 1. Introduction

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  BioScience carries a name that only goes back to 1964. That year, Oxford University Press and the American Institute of Biological Sciences replaced an older title, the AIBS Bulletin, published from 1951 to 1963. A monthly journal took its place, one built to hold more than straightforward research summaries. What else fills its pages every month, and why? Decades later, how does a single scientific journal end up measured against every other title in its field?

• 2. What Fills Its Pages

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  Literature reviews anchor every issue, each one summarizing current research drawn from across biology's many subfields. Alongside those reviews, BioScience runs essays and discussion sections that step outside a single experiment. These pieces take up education, public policy, the history of biology, and theoretical questions researchers still debate. A reader flipping through one issue might move from a research summary straight into an essay on education or on public policy. That mix of research summary and open debate is unusual for a monthly science journal. It sets up the audience the journal built over the decades that followed, from lab scientists to indexers cataloguing its reach.

• 3. Where It Gets Indexed

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  MEDLINE and PubMed indexed BioScience for the years 1973 to 1979, cataloguing its articles for medical researchers searching those databases. The journal is also picked up by the Science Citation Index and by Current Contents, in its Agriculture, Biology and Environmental Sciences edition. Two more services add it to their records: The Zoological Record and BIOSIS Previews. That spread of indexing services put BioScience inside the standard search tools biologists and librarians used to track published research. That reach across indexing services fed into how the wider scientific world would come to score the journal against its rivals.

• 4. A Score Among Peers

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  The Journal Citation Reports assigned BioScience a 2020 impact factor of 8.589, a score meant to reflect how often its articles are cited elsewhere. That figure lets BioScience be measured against many other journals inside the same report. Anyone comparing biology journals today can look up that same figure, 8.589, on file with Journal Citation Reports for the year 2020.