[First posted in AWOL 23 October 2014, updates 3 January 2020]
TOCS-IN: Tables of Contents of Journals of Interest to Classicists
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, and now contains nearly 200 journals, and over 75,000 articles, in a database at Toronto. In addition, the Louvain mirror site archives much additional material for some of the journals before 1992. Searches of all data can be made at both sites.
Some collections of articles (e.g., Festschriften) are also now included. See the list of collections.
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 about 185 journals of interest to classicists. The main information file, inform.html, gives:
About TOCS-IN
There are now over 80 volunteers from 16 countries who have been instrumental in supplying TOCS-IN with the tables of contents in the archive; these are listed in contrib.html. Volunteers are needed for all journals listed at the end of inform.html.
- 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
The data files are both WWW-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 and ftp-all directories, the articles are formatted with SGML-style codes, for inclusion into bibliographical databases. The ftp directory now contains data only up to 2006, divided by subject into Classics [cla], Archaeology [arch], Religion and Near Eastern Studies [rlne], and Miscellaneous [misc]; the directories they are stored in are named by the year (e.g., cla92, arch93, rlne94, misc95, etc.), and the journals are grouped in files within these directories (cla92-3, arch93-6, rlne94-1, etc.) more or less alphabetically. These files can all be downloaded from the ftp directory.
From 2006 on, all the articles are available in <>-coded files in the ftp-all directory, with one file for each year [eg, all1992.toc] containing all the articles for that year from all the journals, alphabetically by journal. These files are updated when a general update takes place.
New articles are added as they come in to the file new.toc, 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 distributed into the appropriate year files, after which new.toc is renamed to old.toc, and another new.toc is started. The articles in new.toc and old.toc are are formatted with SGML-style codes, for use with bibliography programs. In the WWW search results screen, the new material is searched last, and appears at the end of the list.
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 maintained by Jacques Poucet in Belgium.
Some journals make full texts or pre-prints or abstracts of their articles available on the internet. Links to these (about 15 in 100 of the articles in TOCS-IN) are given in the WWW 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. If you know of any articles covered in TOCS-IN which are available online without charge, and for which no link is given in TOCS-IN, please let us know.
We are pleased to hear from users by email, particularly with corrections in the data, offers to volunteer for 'orphaned' journals, sources for earlier issues of the journals we cover, and even suggestions for adding journals. Be warned, however, that you are likely to be asked if you will contribute any new journal you suggest. Our criteria for accepting a new journal are:
- that it should be present in L'Année philologique and
- that there should be a contributor willing to take it on (from 1992 to the current issue), and keep it up to date.
Philippa MW Matheson material from 1992 on Jacques Poucet pre-1992 material
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