re: #137 publicityStunted

Oh hai, I was hoping you’d show up :) Can you tell me if this is a journal that does rigorous peer review? Or is more informal, like a magazine?

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society

_{I ask because I believe they just published some Koch-funded propaganda…}

Your link doesn’t work…

But I took the time to look them up since I had never heard of them (which should tell you something). Their homepage has the following:

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society

Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society (BSTS), peer-reviewed and published bi-monthly, provides a means of communication within as wide of a spectrum of the STS community as possible, including faculty and students from sciences, engineering, the humanities, and social science. Its scope is that which is of value in STS pedagogy at either the university or K-12 level.

Let’s look at the red flags all over the place in this mission statement:

1. So what do you cover? Everything?
2. What is the Science, Technology and Society community? How does one join? What are the requirements?
3. Its scope is that which is of value in STS pedagogy at either the university or K-12 level So you are writing articles to teach people, that is what pedagogy means, from kindergarten through university! Really there are journals about how to teach. But any scientific journal cares about reporting results to professionals! Teaching is left for textbooks.
4. Perusing their articles shows a definite political bias.

So I don’t want to badmouth a little journal I have never heard of before too much… but no one in it is anyone I know of, they don’t come from places I have heard of as being particular centers of research and a lot of the stuff in it looks suspicious.

They are also hard to find information about as an organization on the web. This is particularly bad news.

Compare that to an actual top flight journal like Physical Review.

You can instantly find that they are published by the American Physical Society. You can find that what they care about is current physics research. You can look through any number of top flight researchers presenting their latest work.