Perspecti will be a database capturing the unique publication fingerprint of research in the humanities, to offer reliable perspectives for researchers, librarians, institutions, governments, and funders. It aims to support the humanities and foster its bibliodiversity.
The need for representative publication metadata in the humanities is currently not properly answered. Existing tools primarily focus on journal content in English, published by the larger publishers and by doing so, they often miss books and draw an image of monoculture. Some recent tools are more comprehensive but only have limited or inaccurate citation linking. This biased coverage creates significant challenges for the humanities ecosystem, affecting the discoverability, visibility, and recognition of research in the humanities.
The core collection of Perspecti encompasses not just journal articles, but also a wide array of book content including monographs, text editions, conference proceedings, collected essays, festschrifts, and book chapters. This more inclusive approach enhances our understanding of the diverse publication landscape within the humanities.
Research in the humanities embraces multilingualism, including Romance, Germanic, Slavic, other Indo-European languages, as well as ancient languages. Perspecti aims to comprehensively capture this linguistic diversity, enabling meaningful data analysis and discovery across languages for the first time.
Perspecti is committed to covering not only the major academic publishing houses but also actively collaborates with the vast and vibrant landscape of medium and smaller presses which have a significant role in supporting research and bibliodiversity in the humanities.
Perspecti will display citation information, author affiliations, open access status, and funder information per publication. Citations will be collected directly from footnotes and bibliographies, providing more comprehensive and accurate citation information per book, chapter, or article than publicly available sources. This citation information focuses on references to other research publications, but will potentially be expanded at a later stage to other cited items important or typical to the humanities (grey literature, primary sources, research data or digital humanities outputs).
Perspecti is focused on academic publications from the following disciplines: Arts, Archaeology, Classics, History, Language and Literature, Museology, Music, Philosophy & Religious studies.
Present (2025)
Starting from December 2025, citation information is accessible through a plugin that is added to the bibliographical records from Brepolis Bibliographies (APh, IMB,…;).
Future (2027)
In the next phase (2027), publication and citation details will be available on an open dedicated platform (for personal, non-commercial use). Subscribers will have access to aggregated data (e.g. university profiles) and advanced features. Possibilities to integrate data directly into existing institutional environments to enrich and link will be offered at a later stage.
In developing Perspecti, Brepols carefully considers the possible uses of the database and their implications, in close collaboration with an Academic Board, to ensure the needs of the academic community are represented.
“For many years, scholars have advocated for more comprehensive understanding of the humanities. With Perspecti, Brepols is taking the lead in developing an infrastructure that will facilitate deeper understanding of humanities scholarship.”
[After going through those books, I understood that what T. had told me about them was true]
Holbergius (Ludouicus Holbergius; Ludvig Holberg) who in 1741 described an utopian journey to the centre of the earth//
