IsisCB Explore

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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.

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Article

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.

Concept

Bibliographies

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 Happening in the IsisCB

Latest Annual Bibliography

The 2023 Annual Bibliography was published at the end of December. You can find it at the University of Chicago Press Isis journal site.

Transactions of the IsisCB

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Pandemics Special Issue

See the 2023 special issue: Bibliographic Essays on the History of Pandemics.

About IsisCB Explore

Intuitive and Powerful Search

The Explore interface provides users with a lot of information in an intuitive format. It links scholarship, scholars, and subject matter together in especially useful ways. Build your bibliography quickly with recommendations from related citations.

Experimental Playground

Dig deep into our data about the discipline of history of science. The playground tools give interactive data visualizations, helping you to capture more about the discipline. See patterns in publications, discover historical trends, and explore connections between concepts. Try it out: https://data.isiscb.org/p/isis/playground

Tutorials

We have several tutorals to give you ideas about how to use IsisCB Explore for teaching and research: https://blog.isiscb.org/isiscb-explore-tutorials/.