Science s STKE

About Science s STKE

About Science's STKE

Science's STKE was the online knowledge environment published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) under the full name Science's Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment. Its electronic ISSN is 1525-8882, the identifier carried on the JournalsWorld record for post 335487 and confirmed on the archive information for its successor. STKE is best understood honestly as a hybrid: part weekly online journal, part curated database, and part teaching and reference resource devoted to how cells receive, relay and interpret signals. It was established in 1999, and it ceased publication under the STKE name with volume 2007, issue 417, on 18 December 2007. On 8 January 2008 it was relaunched, with volume numbering restarted at volume 1, as Science Signaling. That successor is a different bibliographic record, with print ISSN 1945-0877 and online ISSN 1937-9145, and it has its own separate JournalsWorld entry. Readers should therefore cite STKE material under STKE, with its own ISSN and its 1999 to 2007 dates, and cite post-2007 material under Science Signaling.

That distinction matters more than it may first appear. In library catalogues, citation databases and reference lists, a title change combined with a new ISSN normally marks a new serial record, even when the editorial mission continues. STKE and Science Signaling are closely related by publisher, subject and editorial lineage, but they are not interchangeable names for one undifferentiated run. A paper dated 2005 cannot be a Science Signaling paper, and a paper dated 2010 cannot be an STKE paper. Keeping the boundary at the end of 2007 protects the accuracy of literature searches, interlibrary requests and tenure or promotion dossiers that rely on exact journal titles and dates.

At a glance

• Full name: Science's Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment, shortened to Science's STKE.
• Publisher: American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), United States — the publisher named on the JournalsWorld record.
• ISSN: 1525-8882, electronic.
• Run under this title: 1999 to 2007; last issue identified in the successor's history as volume 2007, issue 417, 18 December 2007.
• Successor: Science Signaling, from 8 January 2008, print ISSN 1945-0877 and online ISSN 1937-9145.
• Language: English.
• Field: signal transduction, cell signalling, cellular regulation and the molecular pathways by which cells respond to hormones, growth factors, neurotransmitters and other stimuli.
• Form: an online knowledge environment combining original perspectives and reviews, research summaries, protocols, a Connections Maps pathway database, teaching resources and a glossary.
• Current submission status: STKE itself no longer accepts submissions, because the title ended in 2007. Authors seeking the successor venue should consult Science Signaling directly; submission information for the closed title is not publicly disclosed as a live route.

Why a knowledge environment, and why in 1999?

STKE appeared at a moment when the language of cell biology was changing. Research in the 1990s had moved beyond cataloguing individual receptors and second messengers toward describing whole cascades: a ligand binding at the cell surface, adaptor proteins assembling, kinases phosphorylating successive targets, transcription factors moving to the nucleus, and feedback loops damping or amplifying the response. A conventional print journal could publish the experiments, but it was poorly suited to representing a pathway as a navigable structure, linking each protein to the evidence for its interactions, or updating a diagram when a new connection was reported. An online environment, updated weekly, could do those things, and AAAS used the reach of Science to build one.

Contemporary AAAS reporting described the new resource in exactly those terms: launched in 1999, updated weekly, offering original perspectives on signal transduction from leading scientists and summaries of cutting-edge articles, with a Virtual Journal drawing together signalling research from many other publications. That mixture explains the otherwise puzzling range of material a searcher still finds under the STKE imprint. Some items read like review articles. Others are short expert commentaries on a paper published elsewhere. Others are protocols, database records or teaching pages. Judging all of them by the conventions of a single modern research-article journal would misread what STKE set out to be.

The Connections Maps idea

The most distinctive STKE contribution was its Connections Maps database. A connections map presented a signalling pathway as a structured diagram of components and the relations between them, rather than as a static figure embedded in one paper. Each component could be followed outward to related pathways and inward to the evidence behind it. The scholarly value was synthesis: pathways cross, share kinases and second messengers, and behave differently in different cell types, so a map made relationships visible that a linear narrative tends to flatten.

For present-day readers, the maps are also a historical record of how the field modelled signalling at the turn of the century, before later pathway databases and systems-biology platforms became routine. A map should be read as an expert-curated representation at a stated time, not as a timeless wiring diagram of the cell. Proteins acquire new names, isoforms are distinguished, and interactions reported in one experimental system may not hold in another. Good practice is to note the pathway and the date of the STKE version consulted, then check any interaction that will carry weight in new research against the primary experimental literature and a currently maintained database.

Scope in detail

STKE's subject was signal transduction in the broad sense: the processes by which a cell converts an external or internal signal into a functional response. In practice that covered receptor signalling, including G-protein-coupled receptors and receptor tyrosine kinases; intracellular messengers such as calcium and cyclic nucleotides; protein kinase and phosphatase cascades; signalling through lipids; pathways controlling gene expression; and the crosstalk between pathways that determines whether a cell divides, differentiates, moves, survives or dies. Because signalling is a mechanism rather than a single organ system, relevant work reached into immunology, neuroscience, endocrinology, developmental biology, cancer biology and pharmacology whenever the signalling mechanism was the point of the contribution.

The successor journal's published scope, which grew directly out of the STKE mission, describes the continuing territory as cell signalling and cellular regulation, signalling networks, synthetic and systems biology, drug discovery, and computation and modelling of regulatory pathways. Those phrases should not be pasted backwards as a formal STKE aims statement, but they do accurately map the subject neighbourhood STKE occupied. A contribution belonged in STKE when it helped readers understand, visualise, teach or experimentally investigate how signals move through molecular networks — not merely because it reported a molecule that happens to participate in a pathway.

What STKE published

Original perspectives and reviews formed the interpretive core. Written by specialists, they placed new findings in context, compared competing models of a pathway, and identified the experiments that would settle a dispute. Shorter editorial and summary material pointed readers to important signalling papers in Science and elsewhere, performing in an early online form some of the alerting work now done by feeds and recommendation services.

Protocols were a second, practical strand. Signalling experiments are sensitive to timing, dose, cell state and detection method, so a carefully described protocol — how a pathway was stimulated, how phosphorylation was measured, how controls excluded artefacts — had lasting laboratory value. Teaching resources and a glossary formed a third strand, aimed at students and at researchers entering signalling from a neighbouring field who needed the vocabulary and canonical diagrams before tackling the primary literature. Book and meeting material, journal-club style discussion and career or community features appeared in the wider Science online ecosystem of the period and are sometimes encountered alongside STKE content in archives; readers should check the individual item's own labelling rather than assuming every archived page was a peer-reviewed research contribution.

Editorial character and peer review

STKE was an AAAS Science family publication, edited within that family's editorial structure rather than as an independent society journal. Its authority rested on expert commissioning and editing: perspectives were solicited from scientists working on the pathway in question, and database content was curated rather than automatically harvested. That model differs from the modern original-research journal in an important way. Much STKE content was invited synthesis, expert commentary or curated reference material, so describing the whole title simply as a conventional peer-reviewed research journal, as short directory templates often do, flattens its real editorial character.

At the same time, it would be wrong to treat STKE items as unvetted web pages. The resource was produced by a major scientific publisher, its contributors were named specialists, and its reviews and perspectives entered the citable literature with volume and issue identifiers that are still resolved in reference lists today. The careful formulation is this: cite each STKE item for what it is — review, perspective, protocol, database record or summary — and do not present a perspective's interpretation as though it were the primary experimental finding it discusses. Where a claim matters, follow the citation through to the underlying study.

Indexing, identifiers and how citations resolve

STKE citations in the literature take forms such as Sci. STKE followed by a year and an article or page identifier, reflecting a born-digital serial that organised material by year as well as by issue. The ISSN 1525-8882 identifies the STKE serial itself. Individual items should be cited with author, title, year and the identifier given on the item, and a persistent link or DOI where the archive supplies one. Searchers should try both the full title and the abbreviation, because older databases index the resource under Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment, under Science's STKE, and under the abbreviation STKE alone.

Abstracting coverage for the successor and for STKE-era material overlaps the major biomedical services — the successor's history lists services including MEDLINE and PubMed, BIOSIS Previews, Chemical Abstracts and EMBASE among the services covering Science Signaling — but coverage statements describe a title at a point in time and can change. For a formal requirement, such as a promotion rule that counts only papers indexed in a named service, verify the specific STKE item in that service directly rather than relying on a directory summary, including this one.

Metrics: what can and cannot be said

No separate, current journal impact factor exists for a title that closed in 2007, and assigning Science Signaling's later metrics to STKE would be a factual error. Citation counts for individual STKE reviews and protocols can be looked up in the usual scholarly indexes and are the meaningful measure of a particular item's influence: some STKE perspectives and protocols have been cited for decades because they stated a model or a method clearly at the right moment. Journal-level prestige, by contrast, travelled with the Science name and the AAAS imprint, which is context, not a metric. Readers comparing venues today should therefore treat STKE as a closed, historically significant archive and evaluate its successor on the successor's own current record.

Who STKE was for, and who should still use it

The primary audience was researchers in cell and molecular biology who needed to keep pathways straight across a fast-moving literature, together with graduate students learning signalling and teachers needing authoritative diagrams and explanations. That audience has not entirely disappeared. A researcher reconstructing why a pathway is drawn the way it is, tracing the provenance of a widely used protocol, or preparing a lecture that shows the development of a signalling model will still find STKE material useful, provided its date is kept in view. A clinician or bench scientist needing the current consensus on a pathway, a drug target or a disease mechanism should start with current literature and use STKE as background and history.

Reading the archive critically

Three checks make STKE reading productive. First, date every claim. Signalling biology between 1999 and 2007 moved quickly, and a 2001 perspective may present as open a question that was settled by 2006. Second, distinguish evidence from representation: a connections map is a model assembled from many experiments in many systems, so an arrow means a reported relation under some conditions, not a universal law of the cell. Third, follow names forward. Gene and protein nomenclature has changed since STKE closed; searching a modern database under only the 2003 name can miss the current literature entirely, just as searching under only the modern name can miss the STKE original.

Relationship to Science and to Science Signaling

STKE belonged to the family of online knowledge environments that AAAS built around Science at the end of the 1990s, applying the web to a defined field rather than to general science news. Its transformation into Science Signaling in January 2008 also marked a change of emphasis described by the publisher at the time and reflected in later histories: from a knowledge environment centred on reviews, commentary and databases toward a primary research journal publishing original studies of signalling mechanisms. The archives, the subject and the readership are continuous; the bibliographic identity and the dominant article type are not. Both halves of that sentence belong in any accurate profile.

Frequently asked questions

Is Science's STKE still publishing? No. It published under that title from 1999 to 2007 and continued from January 2008 as Science Signaling.

What does STKE stand for? Signal Transduction Knowledge Environment, in the possessive form Science's STKE.

What is its ISSN? 1525-8882, electronic. That number belongs to STKE and should not be used for Science Signaling, which carries 1945-0877 in print and 1937-9145 online.

Who published it? The American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science.

Can I submit a manuscript to STKE? No live submission route exists for a title that ended in 2007. Authors with new signalling research should consult the current author information of Science Signaling and follow that journal's own instructions.

How should I cite an STKE item? By its author, title, year and item identifier as shown in the archive, under the STKE title and ISSN, adding a DOI or stable link where one is supplied.

How STKE fits into the history of online science publishing

STKE is a useful case study in what the early web changed and what it did not. It changed the unit of publication. A pathway, a protocol, a glossary entry and a short expert commentary could each be published, updated and linked on their own terms, rather than waiting to be assembled into a print issue. It changed the relationship between an article and its context: a review could point outward to the papers it discussed and to a database record for each protein, so reading became navigation. It also changed speed, with weekly updating at a time when many society journals still worked to monthly or quarterly print rhythms.

It did not change the need for editorial judgement, stable citation or preservation. The born-digital format created problems that print had solved by default: how to cite an item that might be updated, how to number a serial organised by year, and how to keep a database-driven resource readable after its platform is retired. The survival of STKE citations in the current literature, and the care with which the successor records the exact final issue and the exact date of the title change, show AAAS managing that transition as a bibliographic event rather than letting the old title quietly disappear. Researchers citing digital-only resources today face the same questions, which is one reason an accurate profile of a closed resource remains practical rather than merely antiquarian.

There is also a lesson about names. Knowledge Environment was the vocabulary of its moment, when publishers expected curated online environments to organise whole fields. The 2008 decision to rename the resource Science Signaling and to restart it as a recognisable journal reflected a consolidation around the journal as the durable unit of scholarly credit. The science barely changed on that January date; the packaging, the article types and the way authors would claim credit changed a great deal. Profiles that merge the two titles erase that institutional history.

Verification note

This profile is anchored to the JournalsWorld record for post 335487, which names AAAS as publisher, gives ISSN 1525-8882 and points to the former STKE site, and to the published history of the successor, which records the 1999 establishment, the final STKE issue in December 2007 and the January 2008 title change. Where a detail could not be verified from those sources — for example a separate impact factor for the closed title — it is identified above as not publicly disclosed or not applicable, rather than filled in from the successor's record.