On reading Ryan J. Huxtable’s review of J.L. Heilbron ed., The Oxford Companion to the History of Modern Science, Nature 3 July 2003, 17-18, I found it a bit strange. For example, it did not even attempt to position the articles in the book in relation to current debates within the field of history of science / STS.
Professor emeritus Huxtable is at the Department of Pharmacology, University of Arizona and his speciality is “pyrrolizidines and the lung/liver axis”, not history of science.
I have for some time now been thinking of doing a survey of reviews of STS / history of science literature in high-profile scientific journals like Nature and Science. In how many cases are people from the field doing reviews, how often is the author more like Huxtable? What kind of boundary work is going on here? How are the reviewers chosen?
One could contrast with reviews in other places. Take TLS, for example, which had Andrew Pickering review Galison’s Image and logic …
The paper is still in embryonic form, I don’t even have a first-draft yet. Comments are welcome!
Nature and New Scientist are by and for scientists, who for some reason consider themselves entitled to opinions on these subjects. With my scientist hat on, I would be very irritated if humanitiesists colonised the review pages of these last bastions of professional colloquy, even if I often wince at the reviews with my part-time philosopher’s hat on.
Maybe an occasional invited review article on “current trends in the history of science” would help build bridges, but there’s no point writing stuff that the audience can’t or won’t read, however fastidiously positioned it is in debates they no and care little about.
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