A First BMS History

In the Beginning – A Long Time Ago

Microcomputers, such as Apricot, Micral, Goupil and Appel II, were just becoming available in social science research in the early 1980s in France, and along with them came concerns regarding appropriate computer programs or software to use for data analysis in social science research. Discussion between colleagues at the relatively new Maison des Sciences de l’Homme (MSH) in central Paris – built with Ford Foundation backing on the grounds of the former military prison of Cherche Midi where Lieutenant Louis Dreyfus had been imprisoned – led to the idea of creating a journal on sociological methodology specifically adapted to this rapidly changing intellectual environment evolving under the rising tide of micro-informatics, which included not only microcomputers and their software, but also data storage and communication between computers and computers user through the European Academic Research Network (EARN), the European equivalent or extension of BITNET, the cooperative US university computer network founded in 1981 by Ira Fuchs. In the early 1990s, these networks gradually evolved into the Internet and Web we know today.

The MSH housed the LISH or Laboratoire d’Informatique pour les Sciences de l’Homme item with offices on the ground floor and also on the second basement floor. The later was officially a “car park” that had been converted immediately after building inspection approval into a computer center that was an appendix to the mainframe computer outside Paris at Saclay. During my first job as a researcher in 1972 at the cognitive psychology center of François Bresson in the MSH on the second floor, we would submit our “computer jobs” as packets of perforated IBM computer cards through a restaurant-style opening in a door down a hallway on the second basement floor and you would later receive the large-width “print-outs” through the same hole in the door.

Things had changed in the early 1980s when I became a member of the LISH as a CNRS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, similar to the US National Science Foundation) sociological researcher. Along with the rising tide of micro-informatics came significant financing for new and different projects such as putting microcomputers in prisons, which resulted in illiterate prisoners learning surprisingly quickly how to read and write. These projects were encouraged and financed by the head of the LISH, Michael Hainsworth, whose management methods and financial decisions later proved to be not at all to the liking of the senior SHS (Sciences de l’Homme et de la Société) management of the CNRS.

But before that happened, another member of the LISH, Philippe Cibois, and a member of the Centre des Mathématiques Sociales on the second floor of the MSH, Marie–Ange Schiltz, decided that it was a good idea to create a Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique or BMS with the backing of Hainsworth. Another member of the LISH, Lise Mounier, joined the project and things were put in motion: publishing in French and English, peer reviewing, quarterly publishing if possible, distribution free on request and sent by mail (“snail mail”, that is). Since almost all requests for the BMS came from researchers or university faculty members, we could use the then-tolerated “correspondence between civil servants” option with the French Post Office, an option that did not last very long.

And of course we knew that the financing of the printing of the BMS in the basement print shop of the MSH would not last for very long and we had to plan ahead to work on a paid subscription basis, which at the time was not the only journal that was suddenly created under these exceptional circumstances. There were several others, almost all dealing with micro–informatics, but the only ones to have survived until now (2017) are the BMS and Histoire et mesure (first issue in 1986), now an official journal of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), which is still housed at the MSH. One of the founders of the BMS, Philippe Cibois, also played a fundamental role in creating Histoire et mesure, publishing “Une méthode post-factorielle – Tri-deux. Application à l’évolution de la couleur des yeux de 1810 à 1940” in the first issue and being the journal’s second Editor.

The First Issues – Getting Going and Social Networks

The first issue of the BMS came out in October 1983 and consisted of only three articles in French: “Sociologie de la criminalité d’affaires – Deux méthode différentes – Deux représentations sociales distinctes” (Sociology of White-Collar Crime – Two Different Methods – Two Distinct Social Representations), by me; “L’élimination des modalités non pertinentes dans un dépouillement d’enquête par analyse factorielle” (Eliminating Non–essential Modalities in a Research Survey by Factorial Analysis), by Marie–Ange Schiltz; and “Méthodes post-factorielles pour le dépouillement d’enquête” (Post–factorial Methods for Survey Analysis), by Philippe Cibois. This 83-page issue was completely typed out in non–proportional Courrier font at the LISH by Pierrette Andres on an Olivetti word-processing machine and printed in the MSH print shop. The 110-page second issue was completely typed out by Philippe Cibois on the same machine and included again only research articles but in French and in English: “La notion de ‘régularité’ dans l’analyse des réseax sociaux” (The Notion of ‘Regularity’ in Social Network Analysis), by Alain Degennes and Claude Flament; “Social Clubs, Policy-Planning Groups, and Coroporations – A Network Study of Ruling-Class Cohesiveness”, by G. William Domhoff; “The Power Network in Pheonix – An Application of Smallest Space Analysis”, by Edmund M. LcLaughlin; and “Interlocking Directorates in the Top US Corporations – A Graph Theory Approach”, by John A. Sonquist and Thomas Koening. The issue was clearly a social network analysis issue, although it was not declared as such a thematic issue. It was largely the result of my meeting with Domhoff at a recent American Sociological Association congress in Washington DC and his agreement to let us republish the three selected articles in English that came from Domhoff’s thematic issue of the Insurgent Sociologist on social network analysis applied to the study of American political and economic elites. Alain Degennes, who was then my Research Director, and Claude Flament provided what became one of the first French contributions to the study of social networks.

If I remember correctly, I typed out the 27-page third issue of the BMS on the MSH’s only available Apple Macintosh computer, but when we realized that Apple text files were not compatible with different models, we decided immedately that the BMS would be done only on IBM-compatible “personal computers” or PCs. Since the Olivetti word-processor was also not IBM-compatible, that meant we had no useable computer files for those first issues of the BMS, at least until they were all scanned and put on the Web by SAGE Publications in 2010. That third issue included no research articles and only research information divided into five sections: Ouvrages (Books), Périodiques (Periodicals), Centres, Réunions (Meetings) and Avis (Calls). These five sections soon became part of the nine information sections that the BMS continued publishing until 2017 Centres, Books/Livres, Journals/Reviews/Reports, Articles, Computers/Ordinateurs/Internet, New Meetings/Nouvelles réuions, Past Meetings/Réunions passées and Calls/Appels. As of the fourth issue, each BMS had research articles and information sections.

Meeting RC33 “Logic and Methodology” – Moving From the MSH to L'Harmattan

Moreover, by that time, the BMS had met up with RC33, the International Sociological Association (ISA) Research Committee 33 on “Logic and Methodology”, of which well-known French sociologist Raymond Boudon had been a founding member. Marie-Ange Schiltz had come across a copy of a small “RC33 Newsletter” published by RC33 Secretary Manfred Küchler in Mannheim. It looked rather interesting and RC33 was doing exactly the same things that interested the BMS; that is, sociological methodology. And RC33 was organizing a conference at that time in Amsterdam. However, the director of the CMS and the journal, Mathématiques et science sociales – for which the BMS could be considered a rival by certain persons – had told Marie–Ange that he wouldn’t back her going to the Amsterdam conference. Marie-Ange and I decided that the conference would be of interest to the BMS and its readers, and that I should go, which I did.

Already in the third issue of the BMS, we had mentioned RC33 and the organization of its conference on 3–5 October 1984 in Amsterdam (see pages 20–21, BMS, N. 3). In issue number 5, January 1985, the BMS published a call for papers for the ISA World Congress of Sociology that was to take place in New Delhi, India, on 18–23 August 1986. That issue N. 5 also included a “Report from the President of RC33” and the RC33 call for session organizers for the New Delhi ISA Congress. This was not an official issue of the “RC33 Newsletter”, but almost. Then in July 1985, the BMS (N. 7) published a “Brief Overview of Soviet Literature on Mathematical Methods in Sociology”, by V. G. Andreyenkov and Ju. N. Tolstova, a document “written upon request by RC33 for national reports on work in sociological methodology”. The first real “RC33 Newsletter” (the fall 1985 issue) that appeared in the BMS was in January 1986, the N. 9 issue: pages 79–96. Things had gotten off to a good start and this BMS-RC33 cooperation has continued up to today and will continue in the future.

The initial policy of “free on request” meant that the BMS was soon publishing and distributing some 1,500 copies of each issue. But there had been a change of government in France and a change at the top of CNRS SHS. Word came down to me “Stop publishing the BMS”, to which I replied: “The actual message is that the CNRS will no longer let the LISH pay for the BMS”. That precise interpretation of the message was accepted by the new head of the LISH: “no more money”. The BMS had already warned its readers that the journal would soon be becoming a subscriber paid publication. We were counting on losing approximately two-thirds of our readers and therefore based our planned budget on approximately 500 subscriptions, which, to begin with, cost 80 Francs per year. The idea of 500 subscribers seemed reasonable because we had learnt that when Cambridge University Press published expensive sociological methodology books at that time, they only printed about 300 copies. So issue N. 12 (October 1986) was “free on request”, but issue N. 13 cost 20 FF per copy and the annual subscription was 80 FF, except for RC33 member who could subscribe at the reduced rate of 40 FF, and RC33 helped finance the difference in cost.

Having an offset print shop in the MSH was quite convenient since that meant we could work on the texts in the LISH and produce the layout there before walking down a hallway and turning it over to “Jacky” who ran the print shop. Also, that meant that the finished product could be wheeled out of the print shop and into a room of the LISH where we could put it in addressed brown manila envelopes which were then loaded onto a dolly that we could wheel down the rue de Cherche Midi to one of Paris’ major post offices that handled large mailings.

Unfortunately, the print shop equipment hadn’t been kept up to date with evolving technology or the new safety standards, particularly for a shop situated in a basement. This had been a point of contention for some time between “Jacky”, who wanted to improve things, and the head of the MSH, Clement Heller, who was reprehensive of the cost that would be involved. I knew Heller personally and got along well with him, and he appreciated having the BMS at the MSH. With this as background and the N. 30 March 1991 issue of the BMS in the print shop, “Jacky” delivered an ultimatum to Heller: modernize the print shop or we stop working. Heller, who didn’t like ultimatums, said “No” and the print shop was closed with the unfinished BMS N. 30 behind locked metal doors, but that was neither Heller’s or “Jacky’s” problem; it was ours.

I quickly began looking for a new printer who wouldn’t be asking typical “market value” prices, a sort of “militant” or “activist” publisher in sociology or social sciences. It just so happened that there was one in the Latin Quarter of Paris where we were, and he was an old political activist buddy of mine: Denis Pryen, who directed the Editions L’Harmattan and was just beginning to successfully expand into sociology publishing. Since I didn’t live far from Denis and L’Harmattan, and there was the major Science Faculty (Jussieu) post office nearby, that meant that the BMS could once again be printed, prepared for distribution and mailed without a major transportation effort or other difficulties. So we turned the printing of the N. 30 BMS over to L’Harmattan. The layout for the BMS would be turned in to L’Harmattan on rue des Ecoles and a week or two later the 300 to 500 copies of the BMS would be ready in cardboard boxes that we would wheel to my apartment near the Science Faculty and its post office. All available persons – often including family members – would print out address labels, stick them on envelops, put a BMS inside and close the envelopes. Organized by zip codes, the finished product was then wheeled to the nearby post office and sent throughout the world. The system worked well but was somewhat “labor intensive” and “time consuming”, but continued until SAGE took over that end of the operation in January 2010 with issue N. 105 of the BMS.

Moving On with RC33 and SAGE Publications

The RC33 Asterdam conference proved to be quite interesting and we published a report on it in French, “Première conférence internationale sur la recherche méthodologique en sociologie dans l’hémisphère est” in the BMS, N. 5 (January 1985, pages 31–33). After the Amsterdam conference, RC33 immediately became an important source of articles and information published in the BMS, beginning with the Soviet overview in issue N. 7 mentioned above. The BMS also later published a brief history of RC33 itself describing its creation in May 1973 and participation in the 1974 ISA World Congress of Sociology in Toronto (see BMS, N. 11, July 1986, pages 44–48). The first RC33 Board included Chairman Stefan Nowak (Poland), Vice–Chairmen Abel Agenbegyan (USSR) and James Coleman (USA), Secretary Edgar F. Borgatta (USA), and Board Members Raymond Boudon (France), Louis Guttman (Israel) and several other persons. But the most important development for the BMS that came from the Amsterdam conference was my meeting with Manfred Küchler, the RC33 Secretary, during which I offered to have the BMS publish the “RC33 Newsletter” twice a year. This seemed like a very good idea for Manfred since he was overworked as head of the Mannheim sociological research centre and the then current president of RC33, David J. Jackson, was having serious trouble taking care of his RC33 responsabilities. So we made a verbal agreement that has lasted for over 30 years and until today, and always on the basis of just that initial verbal mutual agreement in Amsterdam.

The agreement has been systematically beneficial to both the BMS and RC33, and also to SAGE Publications which has continued to be the major publisher of sociological reseach done by the ISA and all of its branches, such as RC33. When I was elected to the ISA Executive Committee in 1986, I quickly learned how much SAGE was deeply involved in supporting the publication of ISA material such as journals and books. I also met and worked with Stephen Barr, the SAGE representative to the ISA and currently President, SAGE International. It wasn’t long before Stephen asked me: “Why don’t you have the BMS published at SAGE?” Good question! Our struggles with the senior management of the CNRS to stay alive and our desire to remain independent as a self-financed non-profit association – the AIMS or Association Internationale de Méthodologie Sociologique, the owner of the BMS title – with no paid personnel, meant that we four co–founders of the BMS and the AIMS had to do all the work involved in publishing a scientific journal. Becoming a SAGE journal would have greatly reduced the time and effort put into the BMS since we would only have to take care of the scientific and editorial part, not the publishing, printing, distribution and accounting part. SAGE would handle all that, plus the subscriptions and all other financial aspects. We kept in mind the SAGE proposal, which was renewed on several occasions by Stephen at ISA functions, and by other SAGE representatives who systematically attended all conferences organized by RC33.

At international sociological conferences of the ISA and RC33, the SAGE proposal to publish the BMS would come up now and then, and once I replied that we were particularly interested in maintaining our independence and autonomy – even at the cost of much labor on our part – but “why not accept the offer, if SAGE would accept a 51%/49% agreement”. That would mean the AIMS would be 51% owner of the BMS title, and SAGE a 49% owner. The quick answer from the SAGE representative at that conference was: “SAGE only does 50/50 agreements”, so it was left at that for some time. Our reasoning had been that in a 50/50 arrangement, if SAGE – or any other publisher, for that matter – no longer wanted to publish the BMS, with only 50% ownership, there would be a clear legal problem of whether or not we would have the right to continue to publish the BMS. We wanted very much to avoid that situation which would oblige us to pay for lawyers to be able to continue publishing.

Then, in the “Quarter of a Century”, N. 100 issue of the BMS (October 2008), which included the “Fall 2008 RC33 Newsleter”, RC33 President Jörg Blasius mentioned that we had talked about:

The opportunity of accepting an offer from SAGE or Springer to run the journal with four issues a year in the near future. The audience [at the Business Meeting of the recent RC33 Conference in Naples] agreed that the offer could only be considered provided that the journal keeps its bilingualism and its scientific independence. We decided that Karl van Meter, the editor of the BMS, should assume the task of bargaining with SAGE and Springer, or other possible commercial publishers.

But to get to the point where SAGE would be publishing the BMS instead of the AIMS, and smoothly move from our system with L’Harmattan to that of SAGE required some serious work and a calendar manipulation since the text-to-print-to-distribution time with our system was a question of two or three weeks, while with SAGE it was at least three months. And there were two major obstacles: the sections “Calls for Papers” and “New Meetings” had to greatly extend their time lag, if possible, or otherwise be dropped. And we also had to prepare and publish two issues of the BMS at the same time: the first issue with SAGE (105, January 2010) whose manuscript had to be turned in on 21 September 2009; and issue 104, October 2009, the last issue published with our original BMS system whose manuscript had to be turned in also in September 2009. Actually, I believe the editorial work for the N. 105 SAGE issue was finished and turned over to SAGE for printing before we finished the layout for the N. 104 issue for which we were still entirely responsible. With that, it was a “smooth” but rather complicated and labor-intensive switch over. Now, the current change of editorship of the BMS is proving to be much less complicated and involves far fewer serious problems.

BMS on the International Scene

The evolution and development of the BMS has been continuous in the mathematical sense of a continuous function – that is to say without “breaks” or “sharp turns” – but this trajectory can perhaps best be characterized or described by some of the particular events, moments, incidents that have marked it in the past. Perhaps the first time the BMS appeared on the international scene is when Edgar Borgatta, using his ISA and particularly RC33 contacts, asked me to write the “French Sociology” entry for the 1992 Encyclopedia of Sociology he was preparing with his wife, Marie L. Borgatta, for MacMillan. Borgatta was one of the original founders of RC33 along with well–known French sociologist and good friend Raymond Boudon. I accepted the offer if the entry (volume 2: 725–730) could be signed by the BMS; that is by the four members of the BMS Editorial Board. Borgatta didn’t want a journal cited as a source of an encyclopedia entry but he did accept that the four of us sign with our names as the Groupe de Méthodologie Sociologique. The four of us soon came to agree that we should cover Pierre Bourdieu, Raymond Boudon and Alain Touraine, just as other French sociologists such as Pierre Ansart had already done at that time. In particular, BMS Scientific Committee member and colleague Henry Rouanet had recently done that rather nicely in an unpublished text in French, so I asked him if I could begin with his work and write an English encyclopedia entry based on his work. He accepted and the final text was agreed upon by the four of us of the BMS disguised as the Groupe de Méthodologie Sociologique.

Also in 1992, there was another “international” mention of the BMS. Back in August 1985, I attended the American Sociological Association (ASA) congress in Washington DC where I discovered classification work by Charles Cappelle and Thomas Guterbock on co-membership in different specialized sections of the ASA. I asked the authors if they would be interested in publishing these “initial results” in the BMS. They agreed, as long as it was clearly indicated that the work was “initial results”. This became Charles L. Cappelle and Thomas M. Guterbock, “Dimensions of Association in Sociology – An Organizational Map of an Academic Discipline”, Bulletin de Méthodologie Sociologique, 1986, 9: 23–39. The “final” report was published six years later in 1992 in the American Sociological Review, citing the “initial results” in the BMS.: Charles L. Cappell and Thomas M. Guterbock, “Visible Colleges – The Social and Conceptual Structure of Sociology Specialties”, American Sociological Review, 1992, 57(2): 266–73.

Back in the USSR and From Russia with Love

There were also a few unique “international incidents” that involved the BMS and RC33 together. From the beginning, RC33 had had Soviet and then Russian members who were interested in sociological methodology. I had learned through colleagues that the Soviet/Russian weekly Argumenti y Fakti, in Moscow, was actually publishing questionnaire survey results concerning health care, housing and other typical social issues. The problem was that “sociology” didn’t officially exist since such work was part of Marxist–Leninist Philosophy in the Academy of Science. The crypo-sociologists at the Academy of Science were actually constructing typical pencil-and-paper survey questionnaires that they would pass on to Argumenti y Fakti that would then publish them as “tear-out” pages of the weekly for eventually interested respondents who could fill out the questionnaire and send it back to the journal. Once the survey terminated, the finished questionnaires were then given to the crypo-sociologists for data analysis, since they had access to the few personal computers that existed and the necessary software, such as pirated versions of SAS. The results were discussed between the crypo–sociologists and Argumenti y Fakti journalists who would write up and publish the results in the weekly. And there were actually Soviet “professors of sociology” inside Marxist–Leninist Philosophy, one of whom was Vladimir Yadov who was on the Executive Committee of the ISA with me in 1990–1994. Vladimir, a short but wide-shouldered amiable man with a bright smile on a finely–featured smallish head, often asked me if there was any miracle medicine in the West for his ailing shoulder which kept him from using his axe to chop firewood. I didn’t have anything of major interest to propose him, but he did have something for me, for RC33 and for the BMS: one of his former doctoral students had defended her thesis in “sociology” and very much wanted Vladimir to organize a “real sociology” conference in the USSR. Her name was Raisa Maximovna Gorbacheva who was the wife of the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev. In May 1988, the Soviet Central Committee had decided that sociology was a science unto itself, and changed the name the Institute for Sociological Research to that of the Institute of Sociology with Vladimir as temporary director and its own independent budget for research and operations.

The request for an international sociology conference in the USSR came just as RC33 and the BMS were preparing to organize the first “real sociology” conference in East Germany. Manfred Küchler, as RC33 President, and me, as RC33 Secretary and BMS Editor, decided that it was more important to make sure the Soviet conference took place even if it came soon after the already–planned East German conference, but both meetings required respecting UNESCO and ISA requirements for an open international conference. Relying heavily on West German colleagues, East German “sociologists” organized the “Workshop on Computer Aided Sociological Research” in the village of Holzhau, near Dresden, on 2–6 October 1989. During the conference, East Germans were fleeing East Germany to take refuge in the West German embassy in Prague, from where they were transported in closed, locked trains through East German to West Germany where they were released “to freedom”. It was rather hard to stick to sociological methodology with these events taking place, but we managed to do so and a conference report was published in the BMS, N. 25, December 1989, pages 13–16.

But then there was also the Moscow conference to organize. With several French colleagues, we were in the process of doing a social network analysis of the geographical key words in the official biographies of all members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the USSR, trying to see if we could find “cliques” or other social structures. What a wonderful occasion to “test” the international acceptability of a Moscow “sociology” conference by submitting our work on the Central Committee for presentation! It was done, accepted and the conference took place on 24–26 October 1988: the “International Symposium on Methodological Aspects of Empirical Research in Sociology”, the first and the only sociology conference to have ever taken place in the USSR. There were some 30 participants from Western Europe and North America and approximately 50 came from the Soviet Union and other Eastern European countries (BMS, N. 21, January 1989: 8–23).

It was with some apprehension on 24 October 1988, in front of that audience, that I presented “East Meets West – Official Biographies of Members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union between 1981 and 1987 Analysed with Western Social Network Analysis Methods”, by Karl M. van Meter, Philippe Cibois, Lise Mounier and Jacques Jenny. When I finished there was a silence in the vast, cold conference hall until a Soviet participant simply said: “OK, and now what happens in the USSR?” I was not at all prepared for such easy acceptance, but the “now what happens” was rather obvious with our results showing a very wide statistical and sociological separation between Baltic Republics, on one hand, and Central Asian Republics, on the other, with Moscow, Leningrad (later St. Petersburg) and Stavropol (Mikhail Gorbachev’s home town and seat of power) situated between these extremes. I suggested that “holding all that together” was going to be very difficult. Another Soviet participant confirmed that view and suggested an example of the difference between the rather well–run and modern Baltic Republics and, for example, Uzbekistan where the Central Committee had recently been put before a firing squad for corruption and wasting the entire cotton crop of that Republic. The presentation was later published in Connections (Winter 1989: 32–36) under the same title since we authors had decided that it was more important publishing it in the US social network analysis community than keeping the article for the BMS.

Back on the “Local” Scene with the CNRS

Besides these two “international incidents” – and there were others – the BMS has also lived through several “local incidents”, such as the two mentioned above when the BMS had to change from “free on request” to paid subscriptions, and when suddenly the BMS could no longer be printed at the MSH. There were often “evaluation committees” set up by the CNRS to judge the quality of the various publications in which the CNRS was involved, by which we mean the CNRS could give a stamp of “approval” to a journal, it could provide financing or even provide personnel. The BMS did not require any of these three, but it was nonetheless “evaluated” several times, along with many other journals. In the early 1990s, the CNRS SHS Board decided to “evaluate” the BMS rather clearly in an effort to stop its publication. In preparation for this crisis, the BMS Editorial Board decided that Philippe Cibois, who was no longer with the CNRS but at the Sorbonne, should be designated BMS Editor. If I remember correctly, the Sorbonne even decided that the BMS constituted a “Jeune Equipe” (a “New Team”) just before the Sociology Commission of CNRS SHS was to “evaluate” us, despite the fact that the BMS was not asking the CNRS for anything at all. According to members of the Commission, who will remain anonymous, a representative of CNRS SHS even intervened directly in the discussion asking that the BMS be “condemned”, when the representative of the CNRS is statutorily only an “observer” on such commissions and not supposed to take part in discussions. When the CNRS SHS representative stated that “the BMS is van Meter’s journal and you can even pay subscriptions in US dollars to him”, a member of the Commission corrected that person by stating that Philippe Cibois was the Editor and van Meter, being an American citizen, had a US dollar account which could cash US dollar checks for subscriptions from abroad without losing any money to banking charges.

That didn’t seem to change much and CNRS SHS wrote me a letter stating that “the poor evaluation of your journal means that you should no longer put any time into working on it”. The BMS in reality had been evaluated as above average, or even positively, and better than certain other journals the CNRS was either “approving”, financing or providing personal. The impossible part of such an administrative decision was that if the CNRS SHS decision was to be implemented, that meant that the director of the LISH where I worked would have to be looking over my shoulder all the time to be sure I wasn’t working on the BMS. Since I had several other research project underway, that would have been impossible to do. A sudden change of the Social and Human Sciences Board of the CNRS and the approval of my transfer to the research centre of Alain Degenne, the LASMAS (Laboratoire d’analyse secondaire et des méthodes appliquées à la sociologie), where I had asked to go for quite some time, ended that particular “local” incident. There have continued to be CNRS SHS “evaluation committees”, but their work has often been administratively motivated and not scientifically sound, to such a point that, in at least one case, another committee had to be formed to “undo” the work of its predecessor. Such “local” incidents never had a real impact on the BMS, other than the stress and emotion involved in such situations, but it did encourage us to find an independent publisher that couldn’t be influenced by changes in the direction of the CNRS or the universities.

Continuity and Change at the BMS

In going over the issues of the BMS since its beginning, one can note certain constants – such as the cover – and certain changes. The periodicity of the BMS has been systematically four issues per year, but the dates of publication have varied somewhat. Issue 1 was dated October 1983, issue 2 came out in April 1984, issue 3 in July, issue 4 in October, and then it came out each year in January, April, July and October, until issue 22 which came out in March 1989, not in April, and we adopted a June, September, December, March calendar because of RC33 schedules and the fact that the “RC33 Newsletter” had been moved to the front of the journal. With issue 60, October 1998, RC33 moved back from the opening section to “Centre” section of the journal and the BMS went back to the January, April, July, October calendar where it has stayed until today.

In 3 issue (July 1984), we presented for the first time the International Network for Social Network Analysis (INSNA), which was founded in 1977. At the time of our presentation, the INSNA had 300 members, published three issues per year of a membership journal, Connections, and was responsible for the scientific quarterly Social Networks. The contact person was of course Barry Wellman, a good friend, and the BMS, Barry and INSNA have remained close together and helped to encouraged the development of social network analysis in France, which has since then taken off and expanded quite successfully while often providing the BMS with research articles and even thematic issues (see below).

In BMS 4, we presented the “fichier Francis” of the CDSH (Centre de Documentation Sciences Humaines), part of the INIST (Institut d’Information Scientifique et Technique), which set up any exchange with the BMS: the BMS would include a page of publicity in each issue for Francis and Francis would give the BMS abstracts of all new entries that had the key words “sociological methodology”. This exchange worked well until Prime Minister Edith Cresson (15 May 1991 to 2 April 1992) forcible relocated the INIST to Nancy in the east and the quality of Francis declined to the point that the only new entries under the key word “sociological methodology” were from the BMS itself, so we terminated that fruitless “exchange”. Also in issue 4, we presented our Groupe de travail – Méthodologie sociologique, accredited by the French cybernetic association AFCET (Association française pour la cybérnetique économique et technique). This Groupe de Méthodologie sociologique organized a seminar at the LISH for quite some time and also signed the encyclopedia entry mentioned above.

In issues 1 through 5, the BMS opened with an “Editorial” but it was only in French, and then with issue 6 it was in both French and English, and this continued up to and including issue 22 (March 1989), but not issue 23 (June 1989), which nonetheless for the first time introduced the eight information sections mentioned above and have been with the BMS until now. Then the “Editorial” came back, in English and French, with the issue 43 June 1994 issue and has also continued until now.

Such continuation has of course resulted in a few “anniversaries”, the first of which was issue 41 of December 1993, celebrating 10 years of BMS publishing. In the “Brochures / Reviews / Reports” section of that issue, we published the tables of content of issues 1 to 40 (pages 62–91), and the alphabetic index of authors of research articles (92–94), and the alphabetic index of research article titles and research centre names (94–98). However, there was no attempt to analyse this scientific production.

No “milestone” was celebrated with the publication of the BMS 50, March 1996, but with the issue 81 in January 2004, we did celebrate “10 more years of BMS publishing” and that time we did do some analysis of what had been done: Karl M. van Meter, Philippe Cibois and Mathilde de Saint Léger, “Correspondence and Co-Word Analysis of Ten Years of BMS Articles (1993–2003)” (pages 48–65). We presented the results of these analyses, followed by the complete list of tables of contents, the author index and the article–title index for the articles and reports analysed.

Then in October 2008, in issue 100, we celebrated a “Quarter of Century” in the BMS with three articles analysing the entire scientific production of the journal. This was also the occasion to set up an Internet Blog (http://karlvanmeter.wordpress.com/) on which we posted all the English abstracts and French résumés of BMS articles and research notes up until that date. Our intention is to keep this list up to date so that researchers can have quick and free access to the description of all published BMS material.

Since the BMS joined SAGE Publications in January 2010 (issue 105), it has published several thematic issues, the first being issue 110 (April 2011): “What’s New in Social Neworks?/Quoi de neuf en réseaux sociaux?”, by guest editors Ainhoa de Federico de la Rua and Catherine Comet. “Social Networks” was also the topic of thematic issue 121 (January 2014) with six texts on “Negative Ties, Lost Ties, Latent Ties”. And Claire Bidart and Arnaud Dupray guest edited a “double thematic issue” (124, October 2014, and 125, January 2015) on “Social Trajectories”, which included a total of eight research articles.

And then of course there was the thematic “30th Anniversary Issue” (120, October 2013) with nine articles and notes on the BMS, its history and development, several of which included further analysis of BMS scientific production by several different methods. Particularly appreciated were Alain Degenne’s “Les 30 ans du BMS” and Stephen Barr’s “Comment on 30 Years of the BMS”, notes by two persons who have known, helped or encouraged the BMS from almost the very beginning. We are very grateful to both of them, but also to the many contributors to the BMS who have been with us and who have worked with us, sometimes for many years. We can only hope that this momentum will continue and develop further under the new editorship of Sophie Duchesne and Viviane Le Hay.