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

scientific journal In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, schola ...

for scientists of

Bell Labs Nokia Bell Labs, commonly referred to as ''Bell Labs'', is an American industrial research and development company owned by Finnish technology company Nokia. With headquarters located in Murray Hill, New Jersey, Murray Hill, New Jersey, the compa ...

, published yearly by the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

society. The journal was originally established as ''The Bell System Technical Journal'' (BSTJ) in New York by the

American Telephone and Telegraph Company AT&T Corporation, an abbreviation for its former name, the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, was an American telecommunications company that provided voice, video, data, and Internet telecommunications and professional services to busi ...

(AT&T) in 1922. It was published under this name until 1983, when the

breakup of the Bell System The Bell System held a virtual monopoly over telephony infrastructure in the United States since the early 20th century until January 8, 1982. This divestiture of the Bell Operating Companies was initiated in 1974 when the United States Departme ...

placed various parts of the companies in the system into independent corporate entities. 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. 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''. The journal was discontinued in 2020. The last

managing editor A managing editor (ME) is a senior member of a publication's management team. Typically, the managing editor reports directly to the editor-in-chief and oversees all aspects of the publication. United States In the United States, a managing edi ...

was Charles Bahr.

History

The Bell System Technical Journal was published by ''The Information Department of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company'' in New York City, 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 ''Journal Citation Reports'' (''JCR'') is an annual publication by Clarivate. It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science Core Collection. It provides information about academic journals in the natur ...

'', the journal has a 2020

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a type of journal ranking. Journals with higher impact factor values are considered more prestigious or important within their field. The Impact Factor of a journa ...

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 the electron. This discovery led to a widespread acceptance of the particle-wave duality of matter and won him the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics. *

Claude Shannon Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American mathematician, electrical engineer, computer scientist, cryptographer and inventor known as the "father of information theory" and the man who laid the foundations of th ...

's paper "

A Mathematical Theory of Communication "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" is an article by mathematician Claude E. Shannon published in '' Bell System Technical Journal'' in 1948. It was renamed ''The Mathematical Theory of Communication'' in the 1949 book of the same name, a s ...

", which founded the field of

information theory Information theory is the mathematical study of the quantification (science), quantification, Data storage, storage, and telecommunications, communication of information. The field was established and formalized by Claude Shannon in the 1940s, ...

, was published as a 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 Direct distance dialing (DDD) is a telecommunications service in North America by which a caller may call any other subscriber outside the local calling area without operator assistance, DDD was introduced in the United States in 1951, on a tri ...

(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 A blue box is an Electronics, electronic device that produces tones used to generate the in-band signaling tones formerly used within the North American long-distance telephone network to send line status and called number information over voi ...

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 appeared in the UNIX themed July and August 1978 issue. * The 2009 Nobel Prize physicists Willard Boyle and George E. Smith described their new

charge-coupled device A charge-coupled device (CCD) is an integrated circuit containing an array of linked, or coupled, capacitors. Under the control of an external circuit, each capacitor can transfer its electric charge to a neighboring capacitor. CCD sensors are a ...

in the journal in a 1970 paper.

References

External links