TOCS-IN provides the tables of contents of a selection of Classics, Near Eastern Studies, and Religion journals, both in text format and through a Web search program. Where possible, links are given with articles of which the full text or an abstract is available online (about 15%).
The project began to archive current tables of contents in 1992; it now contains nearly 200 journals, and nearly 200,000 articles, in a database at Toronto. In addition, the project includes much additional material for journals before 1992, archived on the initative of Louvain mostly by John Buffone. Searches of all the data can be made at both sites.
Some collections of articles (e.g., Festschriften) are also now included on a fairly random basis. See the list of collections.
By way of entertainment we include some statistical musings based on comparisons of data for this century and last, some stats on the popularity of different topics for articles over the years, and other similarly tentative (misleading?) conclusions from searches of the archive. These can be found by clicking on "Drawing conclusions" above.
data organization | new articles | journals covered | texts and abstracts | email addresses
About TOCS-IN
TOCS-IN is an entirely volunteer project, started in 1992 on the original idea of R. Morstein-Marx (Santa Barbara, California), and currently managed by PMW Matheson (Toronto, Canada) and Jacques Poucet (Louvain, Belgium). It makes available - for searching, browsing, or downloading - the tables of contents of nearl 200 journals of interest to classicists. The main information file, inform.html, gives:
- the date of the last general update (file reorganization)
- the date when new articles were last added
- a list of the journals and issues covered
Over 125 volunteers from 16 countries have been instrumental in supplying TOCS-IN with the tables of contents in the archive over the years; these are listed in contrib.html. We are not currently recruiting more volunteers, as the method of collecting the tables of contents has changed drastically in the last 30 years, and is more efficiently done by a small team from the online websites of the journals.
Organization of the data files
The data files are both searchable and available for download as plain text <>-coded files. The results of a search are ordered alphabetically by journal name within each year, with the recently-added material appearing at the end in the order in which it came in.
In the ftp directory, the articles are formatted with SGML-style codes, for inclusion into bibliographical databases. All the data in TOCS-IN can be downloaded in a large (ca 20 Mb) single file, alltocs.toc. This file is updated everytime there is a general update of the new material into the main archive. For the date of the most recent updates, see inform.html.
New articles
New articles are added as they come in to the file new.toc (also in the ftp directory), with a copy formatted for the Web in new.html. About once a year, a general update of the data files takes place: the articles in new.toc are sorted and merged into the main alltocs.toc file, after which new.toc is renamed to old.toc, and another new.toc is started. The articles in all the ftp files - alltocs.toc, new.toc, and old.toc - are formatted with SGML-style <> codes, for use with bibliography programs.
In the search results screen, the new material is searched last, and appears at the end of the list.
Journals covered
To browse through the tables of contents of any of these journals, search for the journal name and the year, or for the name, vol, and issue number (e.g. AHB 9.1). To check the list of holdings (journal names and issues present in the archive), see inform.html. For a list of abbreviations and full names of the journals, see revues.txt.Note that electronic journals are not indexed by TOCS-IN: for a description of these, and where to find them, see Bibliotheca Classica Selecta, a compendious bibliography of classical studies set up by Jacques Poucet in Belgium.
Texts and abstracts online
Links to texts (and occasionally to abstracts) of articles made available online in a permanent manner by certain journals are given in the search results. Note that some of these (mostly marked 'restricted') are available by subscription only - if you have a university web address, and your university has signed up for the data of the project offering the texts, you will be able to read and download the files. If no link to the text is given in TOCS-IN, you may still be able to download the article from a commercial database available through personal or university subscription.
Email to TOCS-IN
We are pleased to hear from users by email, particularly with corrections in the data, sources for earlier issues of the journals we cover, and even suggestions for adding journals. Our criteria for accepting a new journal are:
- that it should be present in L'Année philologique and
- that it should appear at reasonably regular intervals.
- 1586: Fulke Answ. to P. Frarine 52. The priests then went vp into the steeple, and rang the bells backward, which they call Tocksaine, whereupon the people of the suburbs flocked togither. ...
- 1877: Mrs. Oliphant Makers Flor. Introd. 12. The tocsins of immemorial strife were sounding all about.
