Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800-1900 (Royal Society)
Periodicals Indexed: 1,555
Citations: 849,199
Number of Volumes: 19
Publishing Years: 1867 – 1925
Published by: George Edward Wyre and William Spottswoode, London
The Catalogue of Scientific Papers, originally the idea of a young engineer in the United States and the accomplishment of the Royal Society in Great Britain, was an unprecedented attempt to gather citations to scientific literature. It effectively changed scholarly publishing after 1867.
Search the nearly 850,000 author/title citations that appeared in the nineteen volumes of the Catalogue of Scientific Papers in Eight Centuries. Scholars looking to search entries by subject can access the Catalogue of Scientific Papers Subject Indexes, a later—albeit more limited—work also available through Eight Centuries.
The inspiration for what would become the Catalogue of Scientific Papers (CSP) occurred in 1855 in the mind of Edward Bissell Hunt, an engineer working for the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey. A year earlier, Hunt had created a ten year index to Survey papers in response to their low level of organization.1 Seeing the increased utility that indexing brought to the Survey literature, Hunt then widened his aspirations. Looking to William Frederick Poole’s groundbreaking Index to Periodical Literature as a model, the engineer imagined a “complete Index for Physical Science.” Hunt quickly relayed his vision of the project to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Dr. Joseph Henry.2
Henry personally supported Hunt’s vision, but possibly saw it as counter to the Smithsonian’s mission as he subsequently passed the idea for the catalogue on to the British Association.3 The Association formed a committee in 1856 to determine the feasibility of producing such a catalogue, ultimately giving the project to the Royal Society in 1857.4 The Society—an organization somewhat on the decline by the 1850s—took on the project as a means of rejuvenating its place in the scientific environment.5
The Royal Society embraced the massive project with zeal, cataloguing almost every pertinent item in their own library by 1864.6 The first volume of the first series appeared in 1867, covering authors’ names from “A” through “Clu” published from 1800 to 1863. Publication of volumes would continue for over a half century—the last volume appeared in 1925—with the scope eventually stretching to cover papers published from 1800 to 1900.7
The CSP did more than just make scientific papers more accessible: it also fundamentally changed the way scientific research was published and shifted the metrics by which individual scientists were judged. Prior to the publication of the CSP, the primary mode of scientific publishing was the monograph. In fact, shorter papers were looked down upon as being incomplete and hard to use. In 1867, one scientist called them “broken pieces of fact, which every scientific worker throws out to the world, hoping that on them, some time or other, some truth may come to land.”8
However after the CSP appeared, this notion changed. Papers quickly outpaced monographs as the primary vector for scientific research. This papers-as-superior attitude was even codified in certain organizations’ bylaws, as evidenced by historian of science Alex Csiszar:
In natural-historical fields, such as zoology, the act of publishing a paper was proclaimed as essential to establishing the identity of a species. The ‘Law of Priority’, set out by a Zoological Committee of the British Association in 1842, formalized the idea that a name and description were valid only once they had been published, preferably in a periodical.9
Furthermore, after 1867 scientists were increasingly judged by their output of papers, greatly accelerating the onset of the age of citation. One’s stature as a person of science depended on having a robust list of articles in the CSP. As early as the 1870s, obituaries for prominent scientists were citing entries in the CSP as proof of a life well spent in the pursuit of science. The catalogue became a means of “keeping score.”10
The original run of the CSP stretched from 1867 until 1925 and totaled nineteen volumes. The publication was divided into four series covering sequential scopes: 1800 – 1863, 1864 – 1873, 1874 – 1883, and 1884 – 1900. It also included a supplemental volume adding index entries to the period 1800 – 1883. The original nineteen volumes of the CSP are broken down as follows:
| Volume | Year Published | Date Range | Notes |
| I | 1867 | 1800 - 1863 | A – Clu |
| II | 1868 | 1800 - 1863 | Coa – Gra |
| III | 1869 | 1800 - 1863 | Gra - Lez |
| IV | 1870 | 1800 - 1863 | Lhe - Poz |
| V | 1871 | 1800 - 1863 | Pra - Tiz |
| VI | 1872 | 1800 - 1863 | Tka - Z |
| VII | 1877 | 1864 - 1873 | Abbe - Hyr |
| VIII | 1879 | 1864 - 1873 | Iba - Zwi |
| IX | 1891 | 1874 - 1883 | A - Gis |
| X | 1894 | 1874 - 1883 | Gis - Pet |
| XI | 1896 | 1874 - 1883 | Pet - Zyb |
| XII | 1902 | 1800 - 1883 | Supp. volume |
| XIII | 1914 | 1884 - 1900 | A - B |
| XIV | 1915 | 1884 - 1900 | C - Fitting |
| XV | 1916 | 1884 - 1900 | Fitting - Hyslop |
| XVI | 1918 | 1884 - 1900 | I - Marbut |
| XVII | 1921 | 1884 - 1900 | Mar - P |
| XVIII | 1923 | 1884 - 1900 | Q - S |
| XIX | 1925 | 1884 - 1900 | T – Z |
The CSP editors detailed the scope and manner in which catalogue entries are laid out in the introduction to the first volume in 1867:
The following Catalogue is intended to contain the Title of every Scientific Memoir which appears in the various Transactions and Proceedings of Scientific Societies, and in the Scientific Journals published within the time which it comprehends; with the Reference, the Date, the Author’s name, and the number of pages in the Memoir.11
Entries appear much the same when searching Eight Centuries. Clicking “About” on a record displays all pertinent information including article language, with the addition of full-text links to articles where available. Certain widely-cited publishers and authors are also hyperlinked, giving the option to easily perform a wider search of that particular publisher or author.
It is important to note that the original CSP volumes presented a strict author/title indexing scheme. Plans to provide a subject index to the same material existed from the project’s outset, but implementation was delayed until 1898. Furthermore, production of the subject indexes was cut off after publication of the fourth volume in 1914 due to World War I and never picked up again, making it an incomplete series.12
Regardless, the CSP subject indexes are also available to search through Eight Centuries, as is the CSP’s successor, the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature (ICSL), which indexed papers published from 1901 to 1914. More information on their scope and history of the CSP subject indexes and the ICSL can be found on their respective resource description pages.
Further reading from Paratexting: The Paratexting Blog:
Sources as Windows to Narrative: Periodical Indexes – Harder to Access, Highly Insightful
Sample research topics addressed by the Catalogue of Scientific Papers in Eight Centuries:
How were snake bites treated during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century?
(John Moodie, “Case of a woman bitten by a viper,” Medical and Physical Journal 11, 1804)
(Francis Galton, “On blood-relationship,” Abstracts of the Papers printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 20, 1872)
What were contemporary reactions to Marie Curie’s revelations about radium?
(Marie Sklodowska Curie, “Rayons emis par les composes de l'uranium et du thorium,” Comptes Rendus Hebdomadaires des Seances de l'Academie des Sciences 126, 1898)
How did the Eiffel Tower in Paris contribute to meteorological knowledge in the 1890s?
(Adolf Wichard Friedrich Sprung, “Die tagliche Periode der Richtung [und Geschwindigkeit] des Windes auf dem Eiffel-Thurm,” Meteorologische Zeitschrift 11, 1894)
(Frank Charles Shrubsall, “Crania of African Bush Races,” Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 27, 1898)
What went into capturing aerial photographs in the era of ballooning?
(Percival Spencer, “Photography from balloons,” Aeronautical Journal 4, 1900)
[1] Donald deB. Beaver, “The Smithsonian Origin of the Royal Society Catalogue of Scientific Papers,” Social Sciences 2, no. 4 (October 1972): 385 – 387. https://www.jstor.org/stable/284508.
[2] Poole’s Index is also available to search via Eight Centuries, see the resource description for more information. Alex Csiszar, “How Lives became Lists and Scientific Papers became Data: Cataloguing Authorship during the Nineteenth Century,” The British Journal for the History of Science 50, no. 1 (March 2017): 27 – 28. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087417000012; Beaver, 387 – 388.
[3] Exactly why Henry declined to commit the Smithsonian to produce the catalogue despite his enthusiasm for the project remains a mystery to this day. Science historian Donald deB. Beaver speculated in 1972 that it may have stemmed from a power struggle within the young Smithsonian Institution. During Henry’s tenure, the Institution was split between those who saw it as a primarily archive-oriented organization and those who wanted it to fund research and publish as its core mission. Henry belonged to the latter group and may have feared that the catalogue project would have given too much sway to his opponents in the former. Beaver, 392 – 393.
[4] One of the issues that needed evaluation by the BA committee was what category of material they were to catalogue—in other words what constituted a “scientific paper” in the first place. As Alex Csiszar put it in 2017, “the ‘scientific paper’ was not a natural kind. Early descriptions used the term ‘memoir’ to describe the objects to be collected together, but what that meant left room for interpretation.” Csiszar, “Lives,” 29.
[5] Csiszar, “Lives,” 31.
[6] Csiszar, “Lives,” 32.
[7] “Preface,” Catalogue of Scientific Papers Fourth Series (1884 – 1900) Compiled by the Royal Society of London, Vol. XIII (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), v.
[8] Funnily enough, this scientist, a physiologist by the name of Michael Foster, became involved in the successor project to the CSP—the International Catalogue of Scientific Literature—in 1903. Csiszar, “Lives,” 23, 54 – 55.
[9] Csiszar, “Lives,” 26.
[10] Alex Csiszar, “The Catalogue that Made Metrics, and Changed Science,” Nature 551, no. 7679 (November 2017); Csiszar, “Lives,” 52.
[11] “Introduction,” Catalogue of Scientific Papers (1800 – 1863.) Compiled and Published by the Royal Society of London, Vol. I (London: George Edward Eyre and William Spottiswoode, 1867), vii.
[12] In fact, the editors conveyed their intentions to create a subject index as early as the introduction to CSP Vol. I. “Introduction,” Vol. I, iv, vi; “Preface,” Royal Society of London Catalogue of Scientific Papers, 1800 – 1900, Subject Index Volume I: Pure Mathematics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1908), v.