The Philosopher’s Index
is the Most Authoritative Online Bibliography in Philosophy
This premier bibliographic database is designed to help researchers easily find publications of interest in the field of philosophy.
Serving philosophers worldwide, it contains records from publications that date back to the 1740s and originate from over 1,100 publishers in 148 countries in 44 languages.
This ready source of information covers all subject areas of philosophy and related disciplines.
The Index features high-quality content with complete and accurate citations, and author-written abstracts for most articles. Many of these abstracts cannot be found in other reference resources; they are unique to The Index.
The Philosopher’s Index provides the highest quality indexing, which yields superior search results.
- Our editors prescreen each publication to ensure that it pertains to philosophy. You will not find extraneous information from other disciplines in The Index.
- Expert indexing is done by a small team of 10 associate and assistant editors, who are philosophers.
- Our assistant editors scan each article and book. They then capture the “aboutness” of each publication by assigning relevant keywords (subject headings and names) to all records. All of our indexing is done by philosophers without the assistance of machine indexing.
- To insure consistency, indexing is done using our Custom, Standardized Thesaurus to assign keywords to all records except Book Reviews.
- Our Thesaurus contains over 25,000 subject headings and over 59,000 names.
- On average our assistant editors assign 8-10 keywords per record. Some records have as many as 17 keywords.
- The Index does not allow users to enter data into the database because it would compromise the quality and integrity of the database.
