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 Nokia Bell Labs, originally named Bell Telephone Laboratories (1925–1984), then AT&T Bell Laboratories (1984–1996) and Bell Labs Innovations (1996–2007), is an American industrial research and scientific development company owned by mult ...

, published yearly by the

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...

society. The

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 edit ...

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 Inc. is an American multinational telecommunications holding company headquartered at Whitacre Tower in Downtown Dallas, Texas. It is the world's largest telecommunications company by revenue and the third largest provider of mobile te ...

(AT&T) in 1922, published under this name until 1983, when the breakup of the Bell System 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. 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 The Western Electric Company was an American electrical engineering and manufacturing company officially founded in 1869. A wholly owned subsidiary of American Telephone & Telegraph for most of its lifespan, it served as the primary equipment m ...

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 publicationby Clarivate Analytics (previously the intellectual property of Thomson Reuters). It has been integrated with the Web of Science and is accessed from the Web of Science-Core Collect ...

'', the journal has a 2020

impact factor The impact factor (IF) or journal impact factor (JIF) of an academic journal is a scientometric index calculated by Clarivate that reflects the yearly mean number of citations of articles published in the last two years in a given journal, as i ...

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 Clinton Joseph Davisson (October 22, 1881 – February 1, 1958) was an American physicist who won the 1937 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of electron diffraction in the famous Davisson–Germer experiment. Davisson shared the Nobel Pri ...

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 Claude Elwood Shannon (April 30, 1916 – February 24, 2001) was an American people, American mathematician, electrical engineering, electrical engineer, and cryptography, cryptographer known as a "father of information theory". As a 21-year-o ...

'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 sma ...

", 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 Direct distance dialing (DDD) is a telecommunication service feature in North America by which a caller may, without operator assistance, call any other user outside the local calling area. Direct dialing by subscribers typically requires extra d ...

(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 phreak Phreaking is a slang term coined to describe the activity of a culture of people who study, experiment with, or explore telecommunication systems, such as equipment and systems connected to public telephone networks. The term ''phreak'' is a ...

s to develop the

blue box A blue box is an 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 voice circuits. ...

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 and

George E. Smith George Elwood Smith (born May 10, 1930) is an American scientist, applied physicist, and co-inventor of the charge-coupled device (CCD). He was awarded a one-quarter share in the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physics for "the invention of an imaging semico ...

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