The Rutherford Journal is a peer-reviewed

Peer review

Peer review is a process of self-regulation by a profession or a process of evaluation involving qualified individuals within the relevant field. Peer review methods are employed to maintain standards, improve performance and provide credibility...

 academic journal

Academic journal

An academic journal is a peer-reviewed periodical in which scholarship relating to a particular academic discipline is published. Academic journals serve as forums for the introduction and presentation for scrutiny of new research, and the critique of existing research...

 that covers the history

History of science

The history of science is the study of the historical development of human understandings of the natural world and the domains of the social sciences....

 and philosophy of science

Philosophy of science

The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, methods and implications of science. It is also concerned with the use and merit of science and sometimes overlaps metaphysics and epistemology by exploring whether scientific results are actually a study of truth...

 and technology

Philosophy of technology

The philosophy of technology is a philosophical field dedicated to studying the nature of technology and its social effects.- History :Considered under the rubric of the Greek term techne , the philosophy of technology goes to the very roots of Western philosophy.* In his Republic, Plato sees...

.

It publishes invited articles and is edited by Jack Copeland

Jack Copeland

Brian Jack Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.Copeland received a BPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford in philosophy, where he undertook research on modal and non-classical logic.He is the Director of the Turing Archive for the...

 (Department of Philosophy, University of Canterbury

University of Canterbury

The University of Canterbury , New Zealand's second-oldest university, operates its main campus in the suburb of Ilam in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand...

, New Zealand). The journal is published annually, starting from December 2005. Full text of articles is freely available online in HTML

HTML

HyperText Markup Language is the predominant markup language for web pages. HTML elements are the basic building-blocks of webpages....

 format.

Notable authors include Jack Copeland

Jack Copeland

Brian Jack Copeland is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.Copeland received a BPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford in philosophy, where he undertook research on modal and non-classical logic.He is the Director of the Turing Archive for the...

, Margaret Boden

Margaret Boden

Dr Margaret A. Boden, OBE, is a combinative researcher in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Psychology, Philosophy, Cognitive and Computer Science...

, Martin Campbell-Kelly

Martin Campbell-Kelly

Martin Campbell-Kelly is an English computer scientist based at the University of Warwick who has specialised in the history of computing.Campbell-Kelly is professor emeritus in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick. He is on the editorial board of the IEEE Annals of the...

, Alan Chalmers

Alan Chalmers

Alan Francis Chalmers has been a visiting scholar at the Flinders University Philosophy Department since 1999. For the 2007 fall semester he will be a visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh. He was born in Bristol, England in 1939, and attained a BSc in physics at the University of...

, Horace Romano Harré, and Alan Musgrave

Alan Musgrave

Alan Musgrave is an English born New Zealand philosopher. Musgrave was educated at the London School of Economics with a BA Honours Philosophy and Economics 1961. Sir Karl Popper supervised Musgrave's PhD which was completed in 1969. Musgrave worked as Popper's Research Assistant initially then...

.

In 2010 the journal published "A Special Issue on the History of Computing". Other past issues have focused on Alan Turing

Alan Turing

Alan Mathison Turing, OBE, FRS , was an English mathematician, logician, cryptanalyst, and computer scientist. He was highly influential in the development of computer science, providing a formalisation of the concepts of "algorithm" and "computation" with the Turing machine, which played a...

, cognitive science

Cognitive science

Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on how information is processed , represented, and transformed in behaviour, nervous system or machine...

, and artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence is the intelligence of machines and the branch of computer science that aims to create it. AI textbooks define the field as "the study and design of intelligent agents" where an intelligent agent is a system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its...

.

The Rutherford Journal is named after the chemist

Chemistry

Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....

 and physicist

Physics

Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...

 Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford

Ernest Rutherford, 1st Baron Rutherford of Nelson OM, FRS was a New Zealand-born British chemist and physicist who became known as the father of nuclear physics...

 (1871–1937), a New Zealander who studied for a BA at the Canterbury College

University of Canterbury

The University of Canterbury , New Zealand's second-oldest university, operates its main campus in the suburb of Ilam in the city of Christchurch, New Zealand...

 (Christchurch

Christchurch

Christchurch is the largest city in the South Island of New Zealand, and the country's second-largest urban area after Auckland. It lies one third of the way down the South Island's east coast, just north of Banks Peninsula which itself, since 2006, lies within the formal limits of...

) in 1890. He is highly regarded for a number of important discoveries.