Isis’s Contributors and Intellectual Contexts, 1953–2023

In this essay, we examine the institutional affiliations of Isis contributors and editors in the second half of the twentieth century and the first decades of the twenty-first, and analyze what the articles and book reviews in Isis suggest about contributors' engagement with the field of science studies more broadly. For much of the late twentieth century, we argue, Isis was a US-dominated journal, in terms of both the affiliations of its contributors and the intellectual trends it engaged with. Methodological developments in European science and technology studies (STS), for example, were generally not reflected in Isis's research content until many years after they were originated, although the Isis book reviews frequently considered books by STS researchers. This US dominance has begun to change in recent years, however, with the establishments of editorial offices outside the United States and an increasing number of contributions from scholars outside the US. Current citation patterns in Isis reveal that the journal's research articles reflect strong engagement with STS more broadly.