Built on 50-years of data in the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science.
The COVID-19 pandemic has raised questions about what efforts were made across the world to prepare governments and healthcare systems for such an event. This spotlight article looks at developments made in “pre-pandemic preparedness planning” following a number of outbreaks of influenza type A virus in 1997. At that time, a specific avian influenza subtype, referred to as A(H5N1), wreaked havoc among fowl but also infected humans through direct transmission. The potential for slight genetic mutations that could make A(H5N1) more infectious, allowing human-to-human transmission, presented the threat of a deadly influenza pandemic. As a result, the U.S. government (and others coordinating through the World Health Organization) launched a pandemic preparation plan, including strategies to develop vaccines against A(H5N1) and its genetic lineages each year. This spotlight article discusses the events that led to the specific concern about A(H5N1) among public health officials, as well as early efforts to derive and stockpile an appropriate vaccine to protect against a possible pandemic. This perspective presents the challenges the world has faced, in recent history, in striving to keep one step ahead of pandemic threats.
IsisCB now uses subject tags and citation metadata to generate recommendations for other citations you might be interested in. You'll find these recommendations alongside any citation record.
Our new interface provides users with more information in a more intuitive format, putting the relationships between scholarship, scholars, and subjects front and center.
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.
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.