Authors

Who wrote for the Royal Society, and when

Names are surface forms. Author counts group by the exact name string in the source metadata. Two spellings of the same person (e.g. Newton, Isaac and Sir Isaac Newton) are counted separately. 1,643 articles (19%) have no listed author.

The catalogue records 2679 distinct author names across 7,638 author-article links.

The most prolific authors

(a)

(b)

Figure 1

Career span vs. publication count

Each dot is an author. Hover for the name. The horizontal axis is the number of years between their first and last article in the catalogue (career span, not active years); the vertical axis is their total article count.

Figure 2

Timelines of the 30 most prolific authors

One row per author; one marker per year in which they published. Marker size encodes how many articles in that year.

Figure 3

How many authors per article?

Figure 4

Single-author work dominates this period, with co-authored pieces remaining unusual until the late 19th century.