Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bulletin of Science, Technology and Society was founded in 1981, at a moment when researchers were beginning to ask a question that seemed almost obvious once someone said it aloud: how does science actually shape society, and how does society shape science back? That circular relationship - between laboratories and legislatures, between discovery and policy - had no single dedicated home in the peer-reviewed literature. The Bulletin was built to be that home.

  Six times a year, scholars submit papers to a journal that sits at the crossroads of three distinct fields: science policy, science and technology studies, and science education. Each of those fields has its own methods, its own vocabulary, its own professional tribes. The Bulletin holds them together in one place.

  What makes a journal like this worth reading? And what does it mean that the work appearing in its pages is indexed not only in science databases but also in Horticultural Science Abstracts - a detail that hints at how far the reach of science and technology studies actually extends?

• 2. Three Fields, One Journal

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  Science policy asks who decides which research gets funded, who sets priorities, and how governments respond to scientific uncertainty. Science and technology studies examines the social processes inside science itself - how knowledge claims get made, contested, and accepted. Science education looks at how the next generation of scientists and citizens comes to understand what science is and does. Each of these fields produces its own specialists, its own conferences, its own journals.

  Publishing papers across all three is a deliberate choice. The premise is that science policy cannot be made wisely without an understanding of how science actually works as a social practice - which is the territory of science and technology studies. And neither field matters much if the public and future researchers lack the scientific literacy to engage with the results. That chain of connection is what the Bulletin treats as a single subject rather than three separate ones.

  The journal appears six times a year as a bimonthly publication, a pace that keeps it current enough to engage with active policy debates while giving authors time to develop arguments at full academic length.

• 3. Publishing and Reach

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  SAGE Publications has been the Bulletin's publisher, and the journal carries the editorial leadership of Jeffry Will, based at the University of North Florida. An editor-in-chief at a regional university overseeing an international academic journal is a reminder that the geography of scholarship rarely follows the geography of institutional prestige.

  For a paper to be found by other researchers, it needs to appear in the right indexes. The Bulletin is abstracted and indexed in Scopus, one of the largest abstract and citation databases in academic publishing, which means its articles can be discovered and cited by scholars across disciplines worldwide. It also appears in ERIC, the database specifically dedicated to education research, which reflects the journal's commitment to science education as a core concern alongside policy and social studies.

  The presence of the Bulletin in Horticultural Science Abstracts is the kind of indexing detail that carries a real argument inside it. Agriculture and horticulture are deeply entangled with science policy - questions of agricultural research funding, biotechnology regulation, and extension education all sit exactly at the intersection the journal was designed to address. Academic Elite and Academic Premier round out the indexing coverage, placing the journal within the broad multidisciplinary discovery systems that general researchers use when following citations across field boundaries.