Bell Labs Technical Journal

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 the Western Electric Company and the Associated Companies of the Bell System.

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. After reorganization, publication continued as the 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{{cite web | access-date =2013-01-20}}

• 1959 (January) H.S. Renne

• 1961 (March) G.E. Schindler Jr.

Abstracting and indexing

The following abstracting and indexing services cover the journal:

• EBSCO databases
• CSA Illumina
• Compendex
• Current Contents/Engineering, Computing & Technology
• Current Index to Statistics
• Expanded Academic ASAP
• FIZ Karlsruhe – CompuScience Database
• METADEX
• Science Citation Index Expanded
• Scopus 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 the electron.
• Claude Shannon's paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication", which founded the field of information theory, was published as a two-part article in July and October issue of 1948. |hdl-access=free |hdl-access=free
• 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),
• 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 in the journal in a 1970 paper.

References

References

1. "The Bell System Technical Journal". Bell Telephone Quarterly.
2. (July 1922). "Foreword". Bell System Technical Journal.
3. (14 February 2023). "Bell Labs Technical Journal". [[Nokia Bell Labs]].
4. "Bell Labs Technical Journal". [[Nokia Bell Labs]].
5. 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.Editorial Board, ''Foreword'', The Bell System Technical Journal '''1'''(1)1, July 1922.
6. [http://www.historyofphonephreaking.org/docs/blr-1954-toc.pdf The History of Phone Phreaking]. 1954.
7. (2021). "2020 Journal Citation Reports". [[Thomson Reuters]].