ACM SIGCSE Bulletin

About ACM SIGCSE Bulletin

Overview

The ACM SIGCSE Bulletin is the quarterly newsletter and bulletin of the Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). It carries the print ISSN 0097-8418 and, in the Journals World record, the electronic ISSN 2331-3927, and it has been published since 1969, the year after SIGCSE itself was founded as ACM's community for computing educators. Calling it a journal without qualification would mislead, and this profile does not do so. The Bulletin is a membership publication: a place where a professional community talks to itself about teaching, curricula, conferences and its own affairs, and where, for long stretches of its history, the proceedings of major computing education conferences were also formally published. That dual character, newsletter on the one hand and proceedings vehicle on the other, is the key to understanding its contents, its citation record and its place in the history of computing education.

Today ACM describes SIGCSE membership benefits as including access to the quarterly SIGCSE Bulletin newsletter alongside four issues a year of the magazine ACM Inroads, a distinction that neatly separates the two publications with which the Bulletin is most often confused. The Bulletin continues in electronic form, while Inroads, launched in 2010, carries the polished magazine articles. This profile explains what the Bulletin is, how it evolved, what it has published, how its conference-proceedings era worked, how it is distributed and indexed in the ACM Digital Library, and how readers should cite and interpret material found under its name. It also states plainly what could not be verified, because a newsletter that has run for more than half a century under changing ACM practices does not have the single article processing charge, impact factor or commercial submission system that journal directories often try to attach to it.

Identity and bibliographic facts

The formal title in this record is ACM SIGCSE Bulletin. The publisher is the Association for Computing Machinery, as the Journals World record states, and the publishing community is ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, universally shortened to SIGCSE and pronounced as a word by its members. The print ISSN is 0097-8418, confirmed by ACM Digital Library catalogue data reproduced in library pathfinders, which list the title with that ISSN, ACM as publisher, and a description of SIGCSE's forum for university educators. The online ISSN in this record is 2331-3927, reflecting the electronic edition under which the Bulletin is now distributed. Its DOI pattern in the ACM Digital Library is the familiar ACM form beginning 10.1145, and individual Bulletin items, from curriculum reports to conference papers published in its proceedings issues, carry their own DOIs and are indexed item by item in the Digital Library.

The Bulletin's periodicity is quarterly, four issues a year, as both ACM's current membership pages and reference summaries of SIGCSE agree. Its volume numbering runs from its 1969 start, so volume 34 corresponds to 2002, volume 39 to 2007 and volume 41 to 2009, a simple check that helps readers date undated citations. Its subject is computer science education in the widest sense: the teaching and learning of computing at school and university level, curricula and programme design, and the professional life of the educators who do that teaching. Its geographic centre is ACM's home in the United States, ACM's headquarters are in New York, but SIGCSE's membership, conferences and authorship are international, with its Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education conference (ITiCSE) held in Europe and its community active on several continents.

History

SIGCSE was founded in 1968 as ACM's special interest group for computer science education, at a time when computer science was separating itself from mathematics and electrical engineering departments and needed its own answers to questions about what to teach and how. The Bulletin began in 1969, with early editorial notes appearing in its first volume, as the group's newsletter. Its founding purpose was practical communication: to let educators developing some of the first computer science programmes and courses share syllabi, problem sets, laboratory ideas, curricular arguments and news of meetings. A surviving description of the publication in a university guide to computing education venues calls it an informal quarterly publication of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, whose purpose is to create a forum to discuss common challenges among college educators attempting to develop and implement programmes and courses in computer science. That description, written while the Bulletin was in its print maturity, captures the tone well: informal in style, serious in content, and addressed to practitioners.

The Bulletin's most consequential development was its role as a proceedings publisher. As the same guide notes, each year two of its issues were the proceedings of conferences sponsored by SIGCSE, the SIGCSE Technical Symposium and ITiCSE. In practice this meant that papers presented at the flagship Technical Symposium, held each spring in the United States, and at ITiCSE, held in Europe, appeared as numbered issues of the Bulletin, with the Bulletin's volume, issue and page numbers attached. Volume 39, number 3, for September 2007, for example, is the proceedings of the twelfth ITiCSE conference, and volume 39, number 1 is the 2007 Technical Symposium proceedings. Generations of computing education researchers therefore made their early reputations in papers whose formal citation reads “SIGCSE Bulletin” even though the intellectual event was a peer-reviewed conference. Modern ACM practice publishes those proceedings as standalone proceedings volumes in the Digital Library rather than as Bulletin issues, but the historical arrangement explains the Bulletin's otherwise puzzling citation profile, in which a humble newsletter appears to publish some of the most cited papers in computing education.

A second transformation came around 2010. The Bulletin had long carried a popular section also called Inroads, consisting of accessible essays and columns about computing education. In 2010 ACM and SIGCSE developed that strand into a separate magazine, ACM Inroads, with its own ISSNs and its own record in this directory. The Bulletin itself continued, increasingly as an electronic newsletter carrying community news, calls, reports and shorter contributions. Reference summaries written after that change describe the Bulletin succinctly as a newsletter published once a quarter, started in 1969, and today published electronically. That is the Bulletin's current identity, and it is the one ACM's own current membership pages confirm by listing quarterly Bulletin access among SIGCSE member benefits for future membership years.

Scope and content

The Bulletin's scope is the life and work of the computing education community. Its characteristic contents include news and announcements from the SIGCSE board and committees; calls for papers, participation and nominations for SIGCSE's conferences, including the Technical Symposium, ITiCSE, the International Computing Education Research conference (ICER) and the global CompEd conference; reports from conferences, chapters and affiliated events around the world; announcements of SIGCSE's awards, including the award for Outstanding Contribution to Computer Science Education, given annually since 1981, and the award for Lifetime Service to Computer Science Education, given annually since 1997; information about SIGCSE programmes such as special project grants and travel support for students and educators; curricular reports and working group outputs, including historically influential curriculum documents debated and published through the Bulletin; and shorter articles, opinion pieces and columns about teaching practice.

That mixture is exactly what a healthy professional community needs and exactly what a research journal does not provide. A reader looking for the state of a debate about introductory programming, for the history of a curricular guideline, for who led the community in a given decade, or for how a conference series developed, will find the Bulletin indispensable. A reader looking for a venue with a conventional manuscript pipeline, a published acceptance rate or a journal citation ranking is looking in the wrong place, and this profile helps them redirect: SIGCSE's research community publishes its archival research mainly through its refereed conferences and through journals in the field such as ACM Transactions on Computing Education and Computer Science Education, while the Bulletin records and connects the community itself.

The proceedings era and how to cite it

Because so many citations point into the Bulletin's proceedings issues, a short guide to reading them is worthwhile. A citation of the form “SIGCSE Bulletin, volume 33, number 3” from 2001 identifies an ITiCSE proceedings issue, while a citation to volume 34, number 1, from 2002 identifies Technical Symposium proceedings. The ACM Digital Library resolves these items individually with DOIs, abstracts and PDF links, and usually names the conference explicitly in the item's record even when a printed citation gives only the Bulletin details. When appraising such a paper, the correct mental model is conference peer review: papers were submitted to the conference, reviewed by its programme committee and presented at the meeting, and the Bulletin issue is the archival form of those proceedings. Systematic reviewers in computing education routinely treat these papers as conference papers for exactly that reason. Conversely, a news item or column in an ordinary Bulletin issue should not be upgraded into a research paper merely because it shares the title; the issue's identity, proceedings or regular, decides the matter, and the Digital Library record will normally make it clear.

Publisher, distribution and access

ACM is both publisher and parent organisation. SIGCSE is one of ACM's special interest groups, run by an elected volunteer board, ACM's page for SIGCSE lists board terms and officers, supported by ACM's professional staff and publishing operation in New York. The Bulletin is a membership benefit: ACM currently lists access to the quarterly SIGCSE Bulletin newsletter among the benefits of SIGCSE membership, alongside mailing lists, reduced conference registration and eligibility for the group's grants and awards. Non-members have historically been able to subscribe, and library pathfinders reproduce older subscription details, but the modern route to the Bulletin is SIGCSE membership plus the ACM Digital Library, where the archive is held. Individual items in the Digital Library may be open or may require institutional or personal entitlement depending on ACM's current access programme; this profile does not promise a single access state for a heterogeneous archive that spans print, subscription and electronic eras.

No article processing charge for the Bulletin could be verified from an official source, and none is stated here. A membership newsletter does not sell publication; contributions are community submissions handled by its editor under SIGCSE's own arrangements. Authors interested in the magazine strand that grew out of the Bulletin should consult ACM Inroads and its author guidelines instead, and authors with research results should target SIGCSE's refereed conferences or the field's journals. Any third-party website offering paid publication in the ACM SIGCSE Bulletin should be treated with suspicion and checked against ACM's own pages before money or manuscripts change hands.

Indexing and discovery

The Bulletin's archive is discoverable through the ACM Digital Library, which is the authoritative source for its contents, DOIs and citation exports, and through general scholarly search services that index ACM content. Its proceedings-era papers are additionally woven into the bibliographies of computing education, so citation chasing from a known paper is an effective discovery method for that material. As a newsletter, the title is not the kind of publication for which Scopus or Web of Science journal source lists are the primary verification tool, although individual proceedings content published under its name was widely indexed in the services that cover ACM conferences. Verification should therefore start in the Digital Library by ISSN, title or DOI, and only then move outward to other databases, reversing the order a researcher would use for a commercial journal.

Metrics and standing

No Journal Impact Factor or similar journal metric is claimed for the Bulletin in this profile, and readers should be wary of sites that assign one to a newsletter title without naming a provider, a year and a category. The Bulletin's standing is of a different kind and is easy to evidence without numbers: it has served continuously since 1969 as the voice of the main professional community in its field; it carried the proceedings of two major conferences through their growth years; it published curricular debates that shaped degree programmes internationally; and it continues to be listed by ACM as a current member benefit. Longevity and function are the honest metrics here. Where bibliometric studies of computing education venues analyse the Bulletin, they do so largely because of its proceedings content, and their findings should be attributed to those studies rather than converted into a simple ranking for the newsletter itself.

Relationship to ACM Inroads: related, separate, not a duplicate

The Bulletin's relationship to ACM Inroads requires care, because Inroads began inside the Bulletin. The two are now separate serials: Inroads is a quarterly magazine with its own ISSNs, recorded on its own deep profile in this directory (post 370691, about three thousand words), devoted to magazine articles on computing education, while the Bulletin is the quarterly membership newsletter under the ISSNs in this record. They share a publisher, a sponsoring group and a subject, but they have different titles, different ISSNs, different formats and different editorial purposes, and both continued in parallel after 2010. This is a spinoff relationship, an owner-class case in cataloguing terms, not a duplicate pair, and the two records should not be merged. A reader who wants reflective, edited magazine writing should go to Inroads; a reader who wants the community's news, calls and historical record, including the proceedings archive, should come to the Bulletin. Because the Inroads record, though deep, describes a different publication with different ISSNs, it is not a deep twin of this post and does not trigger a hold on this profile.

Reading the Bulletin as a historical source

For historians and bibliometricians of computing, the Bulletin rewards a particular kind of reading. Its regular issues chart the concerns of a teaching community decade by decade: the language wars of introductory courses, the arrival of personal computers and laboratories, debates about mathematics requirements, the growth of enrolments and their periodic crises, the internationalisation of the field through ITiCSE and regional chapters, and the community's slow broadening of who counts as a computing educator. Its proceedings issues, meanwhile, preserve the research front as conferences presented it, including papers that were later eclipsed and working group reports whose recommendations quietly entered curricula worldwide. Because a newsletter prints ephemeral material that journals reject, calls, reports, obituaries of ideas as well as of people, it often documents turning points earlier and more candidly than the archival literature does. Researchers using it should nonetheless corroborate factual claims in news items against ACM's formal records, because a quarterly bulletin written by volunteers prioritises timeliness and community voice over the verification apparatus of a journal, and that trade-off is part of its character rather than a defect to be hidden.

Frequently asked questions

What is the ACM SIGCSE Bulletin? The quarterly newsletter and bulletin of ACM's Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, published since 1969 and now distributed electronically.

What are its ISSNs? Print ISSN 0097-8418, as confirmed in ACM Digital Library catalogue data, and online ISSN 2331-3927 in the Journals World record.

Is it a peer-reviewed journal? It is a membership bulletin, not a conventional journal. Its historical proceedings issues contain conference papers that were peer reviewed by the conferences they record; its news and community content is editorially produced.

Who publishes it? The Association for Computing Machinery, through its SIGCSE special interest group, as the Journals World record states.

Is it the same as ACM Inroads? No. Inroads is a separate magazine that developed from a Bulletin strand in 2010, with its own ISSNs and its own record in this directory.

How do I read it? Through SIGCSE membership benefits and the ACM Digital Library archive, where individual items carry DOIs.

Does it charge authors to publish? No author fee could be verified from an official source, and the Bulletin is a membership publication rather than a fee-based journal.

Sources and verification

This profile is based on the Journals World record for post 333273 (title ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, publisher Association for Computing Machinery, ISSNs 00978418 and 23313927), on ACM's own SIGCSE pages listing the quarterly Bulletin among current member benefits, on ACM Digital Library catalogue data for the title's ISSN and publisher, on a university guide to computing education venues describing the Bulletin's forum purpose and its proceedings role for the Technical Symposium and ITiCSE, and on reference summaries confirming its 1969 start, quarterly frequency and present electronic publication. The separate identity of ACM Inroads was checked against its own record in this directory, post 370691. Fields with no official source, including any author fee, are reported as not verified rather than filled by guesswork.