About this site

The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society is the longest-running scientific journal in the world. Its first volume appeared in 1665, and its back catalogue offers a remarkable window onto more than two centuries of European natural philosophy and early science: experiments, astronomical observations, letters from correspondents, and reports from the Society’s meetings. The articles indexed by this site span 1665–1886 — 8,545 items across 25 broad topical labels.

As a part of the Secrets to Patent project, we have crawled the publicly-available metadata for these articles from royalsocietypublishing.org and assembled it into a single SQLite catalogue. This site uses pre-computed aggregates of that catalogue to make topic distributions explorable.

The site offers five views: topics, authors, article length, a cross-filter dashboard, and a sortable per-article browse table.

What is and isn’t published

This site publishes:

  • Aggregate counts (articles per year, per topic, per topic × year).
  • Per-article bibliographic metadata for items in the focus view: title, DOI, year, topic, and author names — together with a link to the original article on royalsocietypublishing.org.

This site does not publish:

  • The raw SQLite metadata file.
  • Any internal paths or URLs

A note on author names

Author counts are based on the surface form of the name as stored in the source metadata. No disambiguation is applied in this prototype, so the same person under two spellings (“Newton, Isaac” vs. “Sir Isaac Newton”) appears as two distinct authors. Roughly 19 % of articles have no listed author in the source.

Team

Natacha Klein Käfer is the principal investigator. The crawl, database build, derivative pipeline, and Quarto site were assembled by Mathias Johansson using Python, SQLite, Quarto, Plotly, GitHub Pages, and Claude.

Citation

DOI

If you use this site or its derivative data in your work, please cite the Zenodo deposit: 10.5281/zenodo.20162091.

License

CC BY-NC 4.0

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).

Contact

For questions or feedback, contact Mathias Johansson at MathiasJohansson@kultur.lu.se.