Trends in Classics

TOCS-IN contains many journals with articles that are not about the classical Greek and Roman worlds. They may include modern philosophy as well as ancient, modern political theory as well as ancient, modern history, other cultures: Egyptian, Persian, Arab, Muslim, even American and European. In an issue where a few articles do address the ancient world, the whole contents is archived including these not strictly relevant titles (many of which are nevertheless of interest to classicists). The statistics given here are based on the entire archive, without any attempt to exclude such non-classical titles. They must therefore be treated as a very imprecise indication of the relative frequency of a given term in classical studies: for instance, the odd article among those with "State" in the title may have to do with the United States or the state of Roman pottery or a state museum ...

The pre-2000 column gives the number of articles containing the search term found in journals for which we have the full run, from the first issue published up to 1991, as well as the number of mentions of that topic in articles published from 1992 (when the project began archiving recent tables of contents) and 1999. The span of years in the pre-1992 issues is very variable, with some journals not represented and others, like TAPhA, going back to 1871. The total number of articles in the archive published between 1900 and 1999 is ca 93700.

The 2000- column shows the number of articles with the search term in the title published in 2000 up to the current date (August 2023). The total number of articles in the 21st century to date is ca 86800. Modern journals are more likely to range beyond the strictly classical -- probably the collection from the 20th century is more focussed on Greek and Roman topics than the articles from the 21st century.

In order to compare the relative frequency of the search terms, for each century we give both the number of articles published that contain the search term, and, in parentheses after it, the percentage that number represents of all the articles in the archive published that century. If the percentage of article titles mentioning a certain topic was greater in the 20th century than so far in the 21st century, the topic is shown in red.

Next, we give a listing of the popularity of the same terms, presented in order of their frequency in the titles of all the journal articles in TOCS-IN.