Science Communication

Two niche journals serve as the dominant homes for today's science communication scholarship. One of them—and the topic of this entry—is the journal Science Communication. The second is Public Understanding of Science. Both are published by SAGE Publications, although Science Communication originated in the United States, while Public Understanding of Science originated in the United Kingdom.

Although ostensibly launched in 1994, Science Communication actually evolved from an earlier journal called Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization, which had debuted in 1979. That evolution was catalyzed and guided by Science Communication's first editor, Marcel C. LaFollette. Knowledge had been born with an ambitious agenda: to apply social science scholarship to communication, policy, and politics. A group called the Knowledge Utilization Society had given the new journal a small subscriber base.

LaFollette, a distinguished science communication scholar, assumed the editorship in 1991 with a strong commitment to Knowledge's original goals but an equally strong sense that a more specific emphasis on understanding science communication processes would make an important intellectual contribution. The transition to this new focus reached fruition in 1994, when LaFollette announced both a change in the journal's name and a new focus on a wide variety of communication processes relevant to science, from communication among experts within specialties, to the mediated communication of science to lay audiences, to the influence of messages on science policy. LaFollette saw this shift as marking the next [Page 696]stage for an existing publication rather than as a new journal in its own right, so readers of that first issue of Science Communication found themselves looking at volume 16, issue 1.

In her debut issue under the new title, LaFollette laid out a broad agenda for the journal, making it clear that “science communication” was not synonymous with “science education,” and that she would reject the then-current convention of prob-lematizing the audience. Instead, she would insist that scholarship should target communication processes and reflect a corresponding ethical perspective; namely, that communication is both a critical part of knowledge making and a moral responsibility for experts. She brought on board three senior contributing editors—Chris Foreman (then at the Brookings Institution), Carol L. Rogers (University of Maryland), and Holly Stocking (Indiana University)—to help facilitate the journal's shift to science communication scholarship.

But LaFollette also wanted to make sure that the journal remained squarely within the larger community of science studies scholars; she wanted to ensure that the explorations of communication process that would become the bread and butter of Science Communication would continue to be seen as closely related to science as a way of knowing, to the social structure of science, and to science policy. To that end, she sought scholarly contributions from researchers across a variety of disciplines and made sure that her editorial advisory board contained an equally wide array of scholars.

This broad embrace for a science communication journal was nowhere more evident than in the September 1998 issue (volume 20, issue 1), which celebrated the journal's 20th anniversary with 19 reflective essays by the editor and members of the journal's board. Those essays looked at everything from the distribution of knowledge in society, to environmental policy reform, to the stirrings of a nascent “civic science” movement, making the issue striking in the breadth of its definition of “communication.”

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