Editorial: A decade of Public Understanding

With this issue, the journal Public Understanding of Science begins its second decade. Such a milestone deserves some comment, a moment for assessing where we’ve been and where we might go. Founding editor John Durant began this journal because of his conviction that an outlet was needed for the increasing number of research studies that examined issues associated with the public’s interaction with science.1 Unlike other publications devoted to increasing public understanding (whatever that might mean) or to providing comment on public interactions with science, we are fundamentally a scholarly journal, committed to publishing researchbased material that will enhance communal knowledge about the nature of public interaction with science. Our growth over the decade confirms Durant’s original belief: we have both studies to publish and an audience interested in that work. We have other markers of success as well. The most recent Journal Citation Reports published by the Institute for Scientific Information (for the year 2000) indicates that articles from Public Understanding of Science were cited more than 150 times that year. While that number puts us only in the middle of the 43 “communication” journals, we rank fourth in the “impact factor” for that category, above such frequently cited journals as Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Communication, and Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, as well as more specialty journals including ones frequently used by our own colleagues and authors, such as Health Communication and Science Communication. As befits a multidisciplinary, multi-perspectival journal such as ours, we also appear in the JCR’s “history and philosophy of science” category, where our total citations again put us about halfway down the list of 28 journals. But also again the impact factor is much higher—we are third highest in impact, following only Social Studies of Science and Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science. Many of the contributors to this journal will be quick to note the limitations of quantitative data. For them, we have other markers. First is the anecdotal data, such as the messages that come in saying “I’ve just learned of your journal and it’s exactly what I’m looking for!” or the report from a colleague visiting India that his hosts immediately asked, “Isn’t Public Understanding of Science edited at your school?” But most interesting, I think, is our place in Daniel Greenberg’s new book, Science, Money, and Politics (reviewed later in this issue).2 Greenberg, a science journalist since the late 1950s and the longtime editor and publisher of the highly-regarded newsletter Science and Government Report, devotes two full chapters to the scientific community’s use of “public understanding of science.” He identifies in the United States—as many of our readers and contributors have identified earlier in Europe—a “public understanding of science” movement that equates better “understanding” with better public support of unfettered government financing for basic scientific research.3 He is sharply critical of this position, arguing that “whatever is meant by public understanding of science, no evidence is offered, because none exists, of a consistent relationship, negative or positive, between public understanding of the whole or parts of science and the provision of public money for research.” As part of his indictment, Greenberg notes a bit scornfully that “academic respectability for the public-