Aims and scope

Economic Botany is a quarterly journal published by The New York Botanical Garden for the Society for Economic Botany. Interdisciplinary in scope, Economic Botany bridges the gap between pure and applied botany by focusing on the uses of plants by people. The foremost publication of its kind in this field, Economic Botany documents the rich relationship that has always existed between plants and people around the world, encompassing the past, present, and potential uses of plants. The issues contain original research articles, review articles, book reviews, annotated bibliographies, and notes on economic plants.
 

Economic Botany does NOT publish papers that are:

• Primarily agronomic, anatomical, or horticultural
• Concerned mainly with analytical data on the chemical constituents of plants
• About issues of molecular or phylogenetic systematics WITHOUT hypotheses associated with useful plant characteristics
• Tests of existing taxonomies, even of plants with significant human use
• Lists of useful plants from some part of the world
  • unless they are the first description of their use in a particular culture or region, but this uniqueness must be specified and characterized in the paper. Even in such a special case, however, such a descriptive paper will require an analysis of the context of use of plants. How is plant use similar to or different from that of other cultures? Why is a particular species or group of species used? Is there a difference in use patterns between native and introduced species, etc. Note that it is not a sufficient justification for publication to report that botanical knowledge is being lost in the region of study.