Kowalski was the founding editor of the Journal of Chemometics, the first issue of which came out in January 1987. The editorial of the first issue, written by Kowalski, Steven Brown and Bernard Vandeginst, explains that after 10 years of the founding of the field of chemometrics and 20 years of researchers actually doing chemometrics and having their publications "widely distributed through the literature," it was time for a journal "to bring together papers on how chemists use mathematics and statistics in their work in novel ways and also on potentially new tools that chemists may find useful in the future." After his death the journal published a special issue in his honor in May 2014. It also established the annual Kowalski Prize for the best theoretical and applied papers published in the journal in the two preceding years.