Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical, a narrow but useful index of references to science, technology, and medicine in popular British periodicals published between 1800 and 1900, was shaped by expert scholarly insight.
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The industrialization of the printing industry in nineteenth-century Britain gave rise to the expansion of periodicals as a powerful form of communication. Periodicals became more affordably produced and more accessible to a public with increasing rates of literacy. These periodicals captured the zeitgeist of the period—how certain topics were reported on, thought of, or represented in fiction, poetry, and articles.
Recognizing the significance of this potential trove of research fodder, the small team of experts behind the Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical (SciPer) project sought to index references to scientific topics in 16 popular—that is, non-scientific—British periodicals from between 1800 and 1900.
The result is an online, open index that provides researchers with scholarly summaries of these references. While narrow in scope, SciPer is of use to the researcher interested in the treatment of science, medicine, and technology in popular periodicals.
SciPer indexes over 14,000 articles from publications including Edinburgh Review, Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, Christian Observer, and Mirror of Literature. It features references to more than 6,000 people, from scientists like Sir Issac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Michael Faraday to literary and other public figures like Jane Austen, Alexander Hamilton, Queen Victoria, and Lord Nelson. The index helps researchers contextualize their searches, making it easier to navigate the overwhelming results that might be returned by a full-text keyword search. SciPer also puts special emphasis on illustrative materials that are often overlooked in conventional indexing and rarely searchable in keyword full-text searching.
The Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical project was a collaboration between the School of English at the University of Sheffield and the Division of History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Leeds. Lasting from 1999 to 2006, the project engaged experts and scholars of the topic and era to index and provide summaries from selected runs of the 16 titles. In a later update, direct links were added, when available, to open access full text.
From the homepage, users can click on links to search the index, browse the index, or browse references to people, authors, illustrators, books, periodicals, and institutions/societies/etc. The homepage also links to an overview of the index, SciPer’s editorial policy, a list of indexed periodicals, and contact information for the project’s directors and indexers.
SciPer includes four types of searches: simple, standard, advanced, or register. With simple search, a user can search by keyword across all 16 indexed periodicals or in any single title and filter by date range. In standard search, users can also filter by the mention in articles of subjects, people, institutions/societies, publications, or periodicals, entering text freely or choosing from set lists. Advanced search adds the ability to filter by author or illustrator name or by genre, to search title keywords, or to filter to include articles with illustrations of a given type (for example, woodcut). The register search allows the user to search individual registers of the people, books, periodicals, institutions/societies/etc., and unidentified pseudonyms recorded in the index.
A simple search for the keyword “Newton” yields a numbered list of 163 article citations. Clicking on the first result—an essay by Matthew Arnold titled “The Literary Influence of Academies,” published in 1864 in Cornhill Magazine—leads to a landing page displaying the citation, link to the full article text, genre (“Essay”), subject terms (“Genius, Invention, Creativity, Institutions, Nationalism, Mathematics, Comparative Philology, Error, Education”), and, finally, the article summary. The summary explains that Arnold “argues for the creation of a French-style state-endowed literary academy in Britain”; Newton appears as a figure in his argument.
An advanced search for the subject of “Botany” and the genre “Poetry” renders 21 items. The first result is a short story and poem by Anon, together entitled “Observation,” that were published in Youth’s Magazine in 1835. The summary describes a story of a fictional walk where children and their parents are urged to observe and do fieldwork of the nature around them. The story ends with a poem entitled “The Orchis pyramidalis (In my Chamber Window)” by one of the walkers. Unfortunately, in this case there is no link to full text.
When it comes to accessibility, SciPer has some work to do. A WAVE report identified errors including missing labels, empty buttons and links, and a very low contrast warning. It also alerted to the lack of a heading structure, underlined text issues, unordered lists, and null or empty alternative text. These issues—the most urgent of which are a missing form label and button information for a search field—will primarily affect screen readers.
SciPer is an open database. The website makes no specific mention of restrictions regarding data mining, AI usage, rights for interlibrary loans, or redistribution of information. It features a copyright date of 2005–2020.
There is no authentication required to access or search the site. The links to articles, when present, are to open access versions of the full text .
ProQuest’s British Periodicals—a full-text database of 500 British periodicals from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries, offers similar content, although not open access and not indexed to science, technology, and medicine topics.
EBSCO’s History of Science, Technology & Medicine is a paid subscription database providing full-text access to resources on the topics of science, technology, and medicine. It is not specific to periodicals and includes maps, books, dissertations, and conference proceedings.
The Royal Society Journals Archive is a paid subscription database that contains full-color digital scans of journals published by the Royal Society between 1665 and 1996.
Victoria Research Web is another open access option that features a list of nineteenth-century British periodicals that are freely accessible online. However, it doesn’t include indexing or summaries, nor any registry of index terms, subjects, authors, etc.
SciPer’s About Us page mentions related work that was conducted by the Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Centuries Perspectives project. This project yielded a database that used relevant primary material from SciPer.
SciPer’s strength lies in the fact that it is indexed by knowledgeable researchers who have highlighted what they refer to as “non-trivial” references to science, technology, and medicine. Indexing standardizes terms and allows users to collocate references across titles, saving time and effort. The scholarly summaries provide excellent additional context.
Its weakness, perhaps, is that the scope is very narrow. The 16 titles represent a tiny fraction of the 125,000 periodicals and newspapers that, as noted on the About Page, were published in Britian during the period. The indexers acknowledge the intrinsic limitations of choosing a small subsection of titles on the website’s “Periodicals Indexed” page. However, they describe in detail their attempt to select titles from a useful range of genres and intended audiences. Date ranges are, in some cases, determined based on some feature of the publication itself—focus on a topic during a given period, or the involvement of particular personnel.
The fact that the index is open access and provides links to free full-text versions of the articles is admirable and makes it very accessible. However, because the project has concluded, there is no guarantee that links will be maintained.
SciPer provides expert scholarly insight into how science, technology, and medicine were presented in popular culture in nineteenth-century British periodicals. It would be of use to researchers, from secondary students through to graduate students and faculty, interested in the history of these topics.
Schroeder, H. (n.d.). Science, general. Michigan State University Libraries. https://libguides.lib.msu.edu/sb.php?subject_id=22154
Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical. (n.d.). About the Project – Introduction. https://www.sciper.org/about/introduction
Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical. (n.d.). Periodicals Indexed. https://www.sciper.org/about/coverage
Utah State University (Ed.). (n.d.). Wave Web Accessibility Evaluation Tools. WAVE Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool. https://wave.webaim.org/
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