An open access discovery service for the history of science.
Built on 50-years of data in the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science.
The Isis Bibliography from Its Origins to the Present Day: One Hundred Years of Evolution of a Classification System
Weldon, Stephen P.
2009
source: Google Books
The article surveys the evolution of the Isis bibliographical classification systems over the past century. Begun in 1913 by George Sarton, the Isis Bibliography is continued to this day under the auspices of the History of Science Society. The classification systems have developed and changed gradually over the years, the most recent change being in 2002 when the author took charge of the publication as bibliographer. Changes in both scholarly interests and practice, on the one hand, and digital research technologies, on the other, have guided these most recent revisions. Each citation in the Isis bibliography receives two types of subject tagging, an ordered classification into a fixed category and indexing according to an expandable thesaurus. Precisely how these two types of subject tagging work now and how they came to be this way is the focus of this paper.
Bibliography (from Ancient Greek: βιβλίον, romanized: biblion, lit. 'book' and -γραφία, -graphía, 'writing'), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from Ancient Greek: -λογία, romanized: -logía). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes bibliography as a word having two senses: one, a list of books for further study or of works consulted by an author (or enumerative bibliography); the other one, applicable for collectors, is "the study of books as physical objects" and "the systematic description of books as objects" (or descriptive bibliography).
What's New with the IsisCB
Similar Citations
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Our new interface provides users with more information in a more intuitive format, putting the relationships between scholarship, scholars, and subjects front and center.
Playground
The new playground tools provide users with interactive data visualizations that allow you to see and make meaning from our database of citations, concepts, people, places, historians, time periods and the rich connections between them.
Get to Know Us
Stephen Weldon
Editor and Bibliographer, Isis Bibliography
spweldon[at]ou[dot]eduou.edu/cas/hsci/people/faculty/stephen-weldon
About IsisCB Explore
IsisCB Explore is an open access discovery service. Opened in 2015, it utilizes citation data in the Isis Bibliography dataset to power a robust search engine. Using Explore, you can discover publications, people, and concepts in all areas of history of science, technology, and medicine. The project is funded by the History of Science Society and the University of Oklahoma. It was also the recipient of a major grant through the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in 2014.
IsisCB Explore enables users to search for citations, authors, editors, publisher, journals, and concepts using a dataset of over 220,000 citations to historical works across more than four decades of research in the field. The content is updated daily, so users always have the most up-to-date resources in the field.
The innovative design works through a relational network graph of the data based on two record types: citations (the bibliographic entries that have been classified and indexed) and authorities (the identity records for subjects, categories, authors, contributors, publishers, journals, places, people, and institutions).
All of our source code is at GitHub. Our data is open for use following the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Isis Cumulative Bibliography, 1913-1975 is now available to browse: cumulative.isiscb.org.
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