Abstract :
Since its inception, the academic discipline of forestry has been placed soundly in the natural sciences. This remains the case. For example, when searching for forestry journals in the ISI Web of KnowledgeSM, they are included in the Science edition of Journal Citation Reports, not Social Sciences. While some forestry journals are now accepting papers from the social sciences, there is still a preponderance of papers dealing with natural sciences. This is well-illustrated by the Journal of Tropical Forest Science. Concerned with the development of tropical forest sciences, particularly the management and utilization of tropical forests, this journal might be expected to contain numerous papers about the people who manage and utilize forests, and their interactions with forests. However, a quick scan of the contents of the four 2008 issues of the journal, reveals only a couple of papers peripherally related to social sciences. With a few exceptions, the same pattern is repeated in many other forestry journals. Why is this the case?
