Although sustainable forest management (SFM) has become increasingly popular during recent decades, approaches towards it are still imprecise and lack consistency. Within this “chaos”, scientists are increasingly expected to further develop the concept across disciplinary boundaries, including normative statements relating to the future. However, we assume that disciplinary boundaries in the construction of SFM still exist due to prevalent interests and political intentions within scientific communities. Therefore, our aim is to analyse and explain qualitative differences in the construction of SFM between forest sciences and other sciences within contemporary scientific literature. To this end, we conduct a qualitative analysis of 44 papers about SFM using a conceptual framework based on the work of the sociologists of science Robert K. Merton and Bruno Latour. Results of this literature review indicate that 1) qualitative differences in the construction of SFM between forest sciences and other sciences do exist e.g. in terms of typical issues addressed; 2) these differences can be explained by the fact that scientists are embedded in the particular social context of scientific communities with their reward systems; and 3) forest scientific media is of high importance within both forest and other sciences for the reproduction of knowledge about SFM.