About Animal Nutrition

Animal Nutrition

Animal Nutrition is an open-access, peer-reviewed journal devoted entirely to the nutrition of farm animals and aquatic species. Published by KeAi, with Elsevier publishing services, as the official journal of the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine in Beijing, it was launched in 2015 and publishes quarterly. It covers feed science, nutrient metabolism, gut health and sustainable livestock production, serving China's feed and animal industries as well as an international research readership. It is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed Central and Scopus, and this directory lists it from Beijing, the base of its sponsoring association and its editorial office.

Launch in 2015 and the KeAi partnership

KeAi — a joint venture between Elsevier and China Science Publishing & Media Ltd — announced the launch of Animal Nutrition in partnership with the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine, with the journal publishing its first issue in 2015. The launch notice described it as a new open-access journal focusing on all areas relating to animal nutrition and feed technology. Within its first year, the publisher reported, the journal had attracted high-quality research articles and reviews from experts around the world and recorded 32,000 downloads on ScienceDirect between March and December 2015 — an early indication that a China-launched English journal in this field could find an international audience quickly. The journal carries ISSN 2405-6383 and 2405-6545.

Official journal of the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine

Animal Nutrition is the official journal of the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine, and peer review is carried out under the responsibility of that association. Its editorial office is in Beijing, at No. 2 Yuanmingyuan West Road, Haidian District — an address in the capital's university and research quarter. Official-journal status gives the title a defined community: the association's members work across animal science and veterinary medicine in universities, institutes, feed companies and production enterprises throughout China. The journal is the English-language, internationally distributed face of that community's nutrition research, at a time when China is one of the world's largest producers of animal feed and of livestock products.

A scope covering the full gamut of nutritional science

The journal states that it encompasses the full gamut of animal nutritional sciences. Its fundamental coverage includes nutritional requirements, metabolic studies, body composition, energetics, immunology, neuroscience, microbiology, genetics, and molecular and cell biology related to nutrition. That list shows how far animal nutrition has moved from simply formulating rations. A modern nutrition paper may measure how energy is partitioned in the body, how a nutrient changes gene expression, how the immune system responds to a diet, or how the microbes of the gut transform feed — and all of those approaches sit inside this journal's declared scope, provided they relate primarily to the nutrition of farm animals and aquatic species.

Applied nutrition: ingredients, additives and feed safety

Alongside the fundamental work, the journal explicitly covers applied aspects of animal nutrition: raw material evaluation, feed additives, the nutritive value of novel ingredients, and feed safety. These are the daily concerns of the feed industry. Raw materials vary in composition from batch to batch and source to source, so their evaluation is a continuing scientific task rather than a one-off measurement. Novel ingredients — alternative protein sources, by-products, new plant materials — need their nutritive value established before they can be used with confidence. Feed additives, from enzymes to other functional ingredients, must show real effects under controlled conditions. And feed safety research addresses contamination and quality risks in the chain that leads from raw material to animal to human food.

Gut health, metabolism and sustainable production

Two themes named in this directory's description of the journal — gut health and sustainable livestock production — run strongly through its field. The gut is where nutrition, microbiology and immunology meet: the composition of the diet shapes the microbial community of the digestive tract, which in turn affects nutrient absorption, health and the need for interventions. Nutrient metabolism research, meanwhile, connects what an animal eats to what it produces and what it excretes; improving the efficiency with which animals use protein and energy is both an economic goal for producers and an environmental one, because nutrients not retained by the animal enter the environment. A journal that holds fundamental metabolism, microbiology and applied feed evaluation together gives those connected questions a single home.

Farm animals and aquatic species

The journal's scope is defined primarily around farm animals and aquatic species. That pairing reflects the structure of animal production in China, where pig, poultry and ruminant production operate at very large scale and aquaculture is a major source of animal protein. The nutritional problems differ — a ruminant ferments feed in the rumen before digestion, a pig or chicken digests directly, and an aquatic species feeds in water, which changes how feed is delivered and wasted — but the underlying scientific questions about requirements, metabolism, ingredient value and gut health are shared. Publishing them in one journal lets findings and methods move between terrestrial and aquatic nutrition, two communities that in many countries publish almost entirely apart from each other.

Article types, peer review and open access

Contributions considered for publication fall into three categories: original research papers, reviews, and short communications. The journal describes itself as an international, open-access and peer-reviewed journal, published quarterly. All articles are immediately and permanently free for everyone to read and download, with authors retaining copyright under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) licence as described in its author guidance, and the costs of the publishing service are met through article processing charges on accepted articles. Submissions are screened using iThenticate's CrossCheck within the editorial system to detect plagiarism and overlapping text, a standard integrity step the journal states openly in its guide for authors.

Indexing and international reach

Animal Nutrition is indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed Central and Scopus, and it is also listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. PubMed Central archiving means its articles are freely retrievable through the same system biomedical researchers use daily — appropriate for a journal whose content includes immunology, microbiology and metabolic research alongside feed studies. Its articles are hosted on ScienceDirect, Elsevier's platform, which the publisher credited with the rapid growth in downloads in the launch year. For a journal launched only in 2015, presence in the main citation indexes and on a major platform within its early years established it as a recognised rather than marginal title in animal nutrition.

Serving China's feed and animal industries

This directory's description notes that the journal serves China's feed and animal industries, and that service role distinguishes it from a purely academic title. Feed manufacture is a large, technically demanding industry: formulation decisions depend on published evaluations of ingredients and additives, safety standards depend on published evidence about risks, and production efficiency depends on published requirement and metabolism studies. An open-access journal in English, sponsored by the national association, makes that evidence available without subscription barriers to the industry's own researchers and to the international companies and institutes working with them. At the same time, its review articles synthesise fast-moving areas — gut health, novel ingredients, nutrient metabolism — for readers who need the state of knowledge rather than a single experiment.

Place in animal-nutrition publishing

Specialist nutrition journals exist in several countries, but Animal Nutrition was created to be, in its publisher's launch words, a China-launched English-language journal in animal nutrition and feed science that would stand comparison internationally — described at its first anniversary as one of a kind among Chinese-launched English journals in the field. A decade after its 2015 launch, it remains the official journal of the Chinese Association of Animal Science and Veterinary Medicine, published quarterly by KeAi, fully open access, and indexed in the Science Citation Index Expanded, PubMed Central and Scopus. For anyone tracing how the world's largest feed-producing country studies what its animals eat, it is a central source.