Public Understanding of Science (Journal)

Public Understanding of Science is one of several academic journals focusing on the broad field of public communication of science and technology. [Page 620]First published in 1992, the journal is deliberately international in scope (its first few years, abstracts were published in French and Spanish as well as English) and eclectic in its conceptual orientation. The journal is consistently highly ranked among similar journals tracked by the Institute for Scientific Information.

The creation of Public Understanding of Science followed the growth of the field in the 1980s. Until then, research about the field had appeared sporadically in a wide range of journals. Some appeared in scientific journals such as Science and Nature. Others appeared in journals devoted to subsets of the field, such as Public Opinion Quarterly, Journalism Quarterly, and Curator. As researchers came to focus more directly on science communication, however, the difficulty of speaking to each other in scholarly forums became increasingly evident. In the days before widespread Internet access and circulation of electronic copies of articles, scholars had few ways of exchanging their ideas other than shared journals.

The problem became especially acute after a spate of research projects funded in the wake of the 1985 Royal Society's influential report, Public Understanding of Science. Historian of science John Durant, who had recently taken up the post of professor of public understanding of science at Imperial College London, with a joint appointment in the science communication unit of the London Science Museum, recruited an editorial board from around the world, and the journal published its first issue in January 1992. The journal declared that it intended to cover “all aspects” of the relationships among science, technology, medicine, and the public. Topics in which the journal declared its interest included surveys of public understanding and attitudes, perceptions, popular representations, scientific and parascientific belief systems, science in schools, the history of both science education and popular science, science and the media, science fiction, scientific lobbying, evaluative studies of exhibits, scientific information services, popular protest against science (so-called antiscience), science in developing countries, and the concept of “appropriate technology.” All in all, this was an ambitious agenda.

A series of “launch perspectives” discussions narrowed the focus. The largest number of these addressed essentially the same question: What is it reasonable and/or desirable that the general public should know about science and technology? Only later would the normative nature of the question become clearer, as would the issue of social power underlying it. Who, after all, gets to decide what anyone “should” know? Outside the formal schooling system, who enforces “should”? The answers suggested in the journal ranged from the scientific community to the public policy establishment, to local communities, to individuals.

In the following decade, the division between the deficit model and the engagement model came to be commonly stated, although many people who used these terms missed understanding that true engagement would mean a radical shifting of power away from the scientific community. Dealing with these issues was a key element of the journal's success. Over its first 15 years of publication, 5 of the 10 most cited articles dealt with questions of engagement and power. The single most cited article was sociologist Brian Wynne's “Misunderstood Misunderstandings” (1992) from the journal's very first year, which argued that “public uptake of science” was closely related to levels of trust and credibility, and thus to social relationships, elements never free of specific interests and very compatible with the public engagement model. Yet only two articles further down the “most cited” list was political scientist Jon Miller's “Measurement of Civic Science Literacy” (1998), which was a detailed exposition on how to measure and interpret scientific knowledge and attitudes, a perspective firmly grounded in the deficit model approach.

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