Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
A Dynamic Reference Work†∗∗Colin Allen , Uri Nodelman , Edward N. Zalta†Stanford University and Texas A&M University
colin-allen@tamu.edu, nodelman@stanford.edu, zalta@stanford.edu∗The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy <http://plato.stanford.edu/> is a dynamic reference work that has been
rapidly growing over the past 2 years. We have been working towards making it a self-sustaining project and recently
did an extensive user survey of our readership towards thatend. Our particular project is to produce an authoritativeand comprehensive dynamic reference work devoted to theacademic discipline of philosophy that will be kept up todate dynamically so as to remain useful to those in academia
and the general public.
Our concept of a dynamic reference work is defined ina way which distinguishes it from other online publishingprojects, namely: (1) it is published in a continuously revisable electronic medium, (2) it offers a comprehensive setof entries on topics in a target discipline, (3) it provides theauthors of the entries with electronic access to the reference
work’s central web server, so that they can remotely edit
and update private copies of their entries and submit themfor publication according to a regular update schedule andat any other time it becomes necessary to revise, (4) it maintains quality by way of a distinguished Board of Editors, themembers of which commission the entries and referee boththe initial versions of the entries and subsequent substantive modifications, prior to publication on the web, and (5)it creates, and makes publicly available, archives of the entries on at least a quarterly basis (i.e., these contain fixedversions of the entries, which can be cited in scholarly publications). A dynamic reference work based on this model
constantly evolves and becomes responsive to new research.
Thus, a dynamic reference work is not merely a revisable
work or one that is published online. Successful implementation of the dynamic aspects of this definition depend upon
the ease with which the authors, subject editors, and theprincipal editor have access to the tools and informationthat allow entries at all stages of the work flow to be managed asynchronously. In such an environment, each entry
has its own deadlines and it is necessary to track electronically the location of every entry in the work flow and provide
automated reminders to individuals with work pending.
Over the past two years, the encyclopedia has grown rapidly.
We have been publishing new entries at an average rate ofover 10 entries per month (having published just over 240
entries over that period). To maintain this growth we havebeen: (1) working to insure that the asynchronous publication schedule for the entries is met even though there is
Copyright is held by the author/owner.
JCDL’03, May 27-31, 2003, Houston, TX, USA
ACM 1-58113-513-0/02/0007.

no pre-determined publication date, (2) working to enablea small support staff on a small budget (compared to traditional reference work publishing) to manage the project in
the face of rapid growth, and (3) working to help our users
more quickly access and navigate the growing reference work
as more entries become available.
As we have grown we have begun to examine ways inwhich our project can become self-sustaining. In that direction, we have done an extensive user survey to better understand our readers and how they are using the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. In our demonstration, we will
have more detailed analysis of our survey results available.
We will also demonstrate how our password-protected webinterfaces, back-end processing system, and new front-end
features, work together to facilitate the collaborative effortof creating and managing the dynamic reference work. We
will highlight the newest parts of the system, including: (1)our new dynamically generated citation and version history
information available for each entry to all of our users, thatis essential for scholarly purposes, (2) an integrated calendar reminder system that allows the principal editor to trackand manage deadlines whether or not associated with any
particular entry (such as deadlines for subject editors tosuggest new entries in their field), and (3) our new systems
supporting efficient delivery of feedback from subject editors
to authors.
When compared to other online publishing efforts of similar scale, we face some unique technical challenges. For
example, most serial publications do not require re-crossreferencing of their documents as new articles are published.
People who want to navigate thematically do so throughsearches which can return irrelevant results that are easily
ignored. Because our documents contain links to the related entries, we must maintain those links properly – lest
the irrelevant links become part of the document itself.
A more in-depth discussion of the concept of a dynamic
reference work, our implementation of it, and a discussionof the current state and future of our project is available inour recent paper ‘The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
A Developed Dynamic Reference Work’, by the present authors, Metaphilosophy, 33/1-2 (January 2002): 210-228 —available at the URL <http://plato.stanford.edu/sep.pdf>.
Technical specifications are available at the URL: <http://plato.stanford.edu/ editors/NSF/project-description.pdf>
This research is supported by NSF grant #IIS-9981549.