News from the Editor:

The New Dictionary of Scientific Biography was published in December, 2007, but for a short time I will leave posted on this web site reports on the planning process.

From Fall, 2004:

Charles Scribner's Sons is planning to publish eight new volumes of the Dictionary of Scientific Biography. Especially exciting is their plan to issue an electronic version of the original DSB that will then be integrated with the e-version of the new volumes. (Imagine being able to do electronic searches of this massive reference work!)

There will be new, revised articles on some of the key figures in the past, but all of the original articles will be retained. And of course, there will be lots of new entries on 20thC scientists.

In the new volumes we plan to:

• fill in missing scientists from the earlier period that were
  omitted, such as E. E. Just and Alfred Kinsey
• update entries to reflect current scholarship, e.g.,
  new perspectives on Robert Boyle
• add scientists from the last half of the twentieth
  century, such as Richard Feynman and Barbara
  McClintock
• cover scientists who have pioneered new
  disciplines, such as ethology and neuroscience

Thus there are two major prongs to the project: The first is to decide which articles in the original DSB should be updated; the second is to identify which scientists from the latter part of the twentieth century should be included.

At the Austin Meeting, an ad-hoc advisory committee (see the website at http://www.gale-edit.com/ndsb/editorial_board.htm for a list of its members) agreed on the following recommendations:

*the revisions of entries in the original DSB should take the form of Commentaries that would include new historiographic insights but would not repeat the ground covered in the original articles

*whereas the criterion for inclusion of the original DSB was something like "significant contribution," the dramatic increase in the number of scientists means that we must raise the bar to something like "major impact on the discipline"

*for a variety of reasons, the new figures covered will almost always be deceased

*there will be strict limits on the length of articles in order that we can cover more people

*the articles should carry on the high scholarly standards of the original DSB but we will also make a concerted effort to make them readable