Built on 50-years of data in the Isis Bibliography of the History of Science.
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.
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.