Biology Letters is a peer-reviewed

Peer review

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

 scientific journal

Scientific journal

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, and many more have been published at various points in the past...

. It was split off as a separate journal from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences

Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences is a peer-reviewed scientific journal published by the Royal Society. The ISO abbreviation for the journal is Phil. Trans. R. Soc...

in 2005 after having been published as a supplement. Originally it was published quarterly, but from 2007 it has been published bimonthly. The journal publishes short articles from across biology

Biology

Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...

. The editor-in-chief is Brian Charlesworth

Brian Charlesworth

Professor Brian Charlesworth FRS is a British evolutionary biologist at the University of Edinburgh, and editor of Biology Letters....

. As of 2010, Biology Letters has an impact factor

Impact factor

The impact factor, often abbreviated IF, is a measure reflecting the average number of citations to articles published in science and social science journals. It is frequently used as a proxy for the relative importance of a journal within its field, with journals with higher impact factors deemed...

 of 3.651 and is ranked 14th in Biology.

Contents and themes

All content is assigned to one of the following categories: Animal behaviour

Animal behaviour

Animal behaviour is the subject of:* The field of Ethology* Animal Behaviour, a scientific journal...

, Biomechanics

Biomechanics

Biomechanics is the application of mechanical principles to biological systems, such as humans, animals, plants, organs, and cells. Perhaps one of the best definitions was provided by Herbert Hatze in 1974: "Biomechanics is the study of the structure and function of biological systems by means of...

, Community ecology, Conservation, Evolutionary biology, Evolutionary developmental biology

Evolutionary developmental biology

Evolutionary developmental biology is a field of biology that compares the developmental processes of different organisms to determine the ancestral relationship between them, and to discover how developmental processes evolved...

, Genome biology

Genomics

Genomics is a discipline in genetics concerning the study of the genomes of organisms. The field includes intensive efforts to determine the entire DNA sequence of organisms and fine-scale genetic mapping efforts. The field also includes studies of intragenomic phenomena such as heterosis,...

, Global Change Biology, Marine biology

Marine biology

Marine biology is the scientific study of organisms in the ocean or other marine or brackish bodies of water. Given that in biology many phyla, families and genera have some species that live in the sea and others that live on land, marine biology classifies species based on the environment rather...

, Molecular evolution

Molecular evolution

Molecular evolution is in part a process of evolution at the scale of DNA, RNA, and proteins. Molecular evolution emerged as a scientific field in the 1960s as researchers from molecular biology, evolutionary biology and population genetics sought to understand recent discoveries on the structure...

, Neurobiology, Palaeontology, Pathogen Biology, Physiology

Physiology

Physiology is the science of the function of living systems. This includes how organisms, organ systems, organs, cells, and bio-molecules carry out the chemical or physical functions that exist in a living system. The highest honor awarded in physiology is the Nobel Prize in Physiology or...

, Phylogeny, Population ecology

Population ecology

Population ecology is a sub-field of ecology that deals with the dynamics of species populations and how these populations interact with the environment. It is the study of how the population sizes of species living together in groups change over time and space....

, or Population genetics

Population genetics

Population genetics is the study of allele frequency distribution and change under the influence of the four main evolutionary processes: natural selection, genetic drift, mutation and gene flow. It also takes into account the factors of recombination, population subdivision and population...

. The journal publishes research articles, opinion pieces, scientific meeting reports, comments, and invited reply articles.