The ''Bell Labs Technical Journal'' is the in-house

scientific journal In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication intended to further the progress of science, usually by reporting new research. Content Articles in scientific journals are mostly written by active scientists such as s ...

for scientists of Nokia Bell Labs, published yearly by the IEEE society. The managing editor is Charles Bahr. The journal was originally established as the ''Bell System Technical Journal'' (BSTJ) in New York by the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) in 1922, published under this name until 1983, when the

breakup of the Bell System The breakup of the Bell System was mandated on January 8, 1982, by an agreed consent decree providing that AT&T Corporation would, as had been initially proposed by AT&T, relinquish control of the Bell Operating Companies, which had provided loc ...

placed various parts of the system into separate companies. The journal was devoted to the scientific fields and engineering disciplines practiced in the Bell System for improvements in the wide field of

electrical communication Telecommunication is the transmission of information by various types of technologies over wire, radio, optical, or other electromagnetic systems. It has its origin in the desire of humans for communication over a distance greater than that ...

. After the restructuring of Bell Labs in 1984, the journal was renamed to ''AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal''. In 1985, it was published as the ''AT&T Technical Journal'' until 1996, when it was renamed to ''Bell Labs Technical Journal''.

History

The ''Bell System Technical Journal'' was published by AT&T in New York City through its Information Department, on behalf of Western Electric Company and the Associated Companies of the Bell System. The first issue was released in July 1922, under the editorship of R. W. King and an eight-member editorial board. Its mission was to fill the desire for a technical journal to "''collect, print, reprint, and make readily the more important articles''" for the electrical communication engineer in a broad array of related disciplines, that were previously scattered in numerous other industry publications. From 1922 to 1951, the publication schedule was quarterly. It was bimonthly until 1964, and finally produced ten monthly issues per year until the end of 1983, combining the four summer months into two issues in May and July. Publication of the journal under the name ''Bell System Technical Journal'' ended with Volume 62 by the end of 1983, because of the divestiture of AT&T. Under new organization, publication continued as ''AT&T Bell Laboratories Technical Journal'' in 1984 with Volume 63, maintaining the volume sequence numbers established since 1922. In 1985, ''Bell Laboratories'' was removed from the title, resulting in ''AT&T Technical Journal'' until 1995 (Volume 74). In 1996, the journal was revamped under the name ''Bell Labs Technical Journal'', and publication management was transferred to Wiley Periodicals, Inc., establishing a new volume sequence (Volume 1).

Editors

The journal was directed by the following former editors: *1922 (July) R.W. King *1954 J.D. Tebo *1957 (May) W.D. Bulloch *1959 (January) H.S. Renne *1961 (March) G.E. Schindler, Jr.

Abstracting and indexing

The following abstracting and indexing services cover the journal: According to the '' Journal Citation Reports'', the journal has a 2020 impact factor of 0.333.

Notable papers

The Bell System Technical Journal and its successors published many papers on seminal works and revolutionary achievements at Bell Labs, including the following: * In 1928, Clinton Joseph Davisson published a paper on electron diffraction by nickel crystal, thus unambiguously establishing the wave nature of electron. This discovery led to a widespread acceptance of particle-wave duality of matter and won him the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics. * Claude Shannon's paper " A Mathematical Theory of Communication", which founded the field of

information theory Information theory is the scientific study of the quantification (science), quantification, computer data storage, storage, and telecommunication, communication of information. The field was originally established by the works of Harry Nyquist a ...

, was published as two-part article in July and October issue of 1948. * The journal previously published numerous articles disclosing the internal operation of the long-distance switching system used in direct distance dialing (DDD) in the Bell System in the 1950s and 1960s. Articles such as those by A.Weaver and N.A. Newel (''In-Band Single-Frequency Signaling''), and by C. Breen and C.A. Dahlbom (''Signaling Systems for Control of Telephone Switching'') enabled phone phreaks to develop the blue box apparatus, which mimicked the switching system's signals to allow them to make free long-distance calls. * Many landmark papers from the developers of the

UNIX operating system Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and o ...

appeared in the UNIX themed July and August 1978 issue. * The 2009 Nobel Prize physicists

Willard Boyle Willard Sterling Boyle, (August 19, 1924May 7, 2011) was a Canadian physicist. He was a pioneer in the field of laser technology and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device. As director of Space Science and Exploratory Studies at Bellcomm he h ...

and George E. Smith described their new charge-coupled device in the journal in a 1970 paper.

References

External links