July 3, 2026
- The complete London Review of Books archive is now indexed — every issue from October 1979 to the present, yielding just over 1,000 philosophy reviews (Hampshire, Williams, Malcolm, MacIntyre, and onward). New issues are scanned weekly. Links go to the LRB site; full text requires a subscription.
- PhilReviews goes multilingual. German-language coverage: ~6,000 review digests spanning the major German-press feuilletons — Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Die Zeit, Frankfurter Rundschau, taz, Deutschlandfunk, and others. French-language coverage: ~1,100 reviews from OpenEdition’s Lectures, La Vie des idées, and its English edition Books & Ideas (English versions linked where they exist). All scanned weekly.
- The Guardian’s full review archive screened for philosophy (~100 added) with weekly scanning ongoing; a rolling backfill of New York Times book reviews is working backward year by year.
- Site improvements: the homepage now renders instantly with the latest reviews, and roughly 70,000 links that previously required an institutional login were replaced with openly accessible search links.
- Database now contains ~228,000 reviews across nearly 1,500 sources.
June 21, 2026
- Book symposia are now reconstructed and grouped together. For symposia in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research and Philosophical Studies, a book’s précis, the critics’ commentaries, and the author’s replies now appear as a single linked symposium rather than scattered entries — around 190 symposia across the two journals, with several hundred previously-missing pieces (especially author replies) added.
- The Atlantic added as a regularly-scanned source: its book reviews are now picked up automatically each week, and we backfilled philosophy-relevant reviews from its archive (2021–present).
- Large data-quality pass across the historical catalogue: corrected roughly 180 author names where religious-order suffixes (O.P., S.J., and the like) had been mis-parsed into the name, untangled hundreds of entries where a publisher, translator, or title fragment had ended up in the author field, and cleaned up garbled and over-truncated titles.
April 26, 2026
- New eligibility filter for popular outlets and fringe academic journals — reviews from sources like Quillette, Law & Liberty, Public Discourse, Claremont Review of Books, Modern Theology, and a few others are now retained only when there's evidence the book is philosophy-relevant (the book or its author appears elsewhere in the database, or the reviewer has a track record of reviewing for academic philosophy journals). Removed ~1,400 non-philosophy entries.
- Significant expansion of the automated post-scrape data integrity check: now fixes concatenated author names (e.g. “MarkHopwood” → “Mark Hopwood”), splits “Author: Title” patterns common in HPS journals, fills missing reviewers from Project MUSE pages when Crossref lags, and looks up missing book authors via OpenAlex.
- Manual data quality pass: corrected dozens of titles, authors, and reviewer names; deleted ~10 false-positive non-review articles; fixed HTML-entity encoding in journal names (“Philosophy & Social Criticism”).
- Mainstream media verification hardened to reject articles where the byline matches the book author (catches cases where an op-ed by an author was misidentified as a review of their book).
April 8, 2026
- Major expansion of regular journal scanning — 26 journals brought under weekly or daily monitoring that were previously import-only:
- 23 journals added to the Crossref weekly scan, including Critical Inquiry, Modern Theology, American Political Thought, Film-Philosophy, and others
- 8 Springer-published journals added to the daily scan
- New dedicated scrapers for The Independent Review, Radical Philosophy, and Journal of Markets & Morality
- Backfilled ~830 reviews from newly-scanned journals, filling gaps of up to 6 years for some titles
- Added Reason and Jacobin to the mainstream media review scanner
- Consolidated 11 duplicate journal name variants (473 entries cleaned up)
- Crossref scan now covers 164 journals; Springer scan covers 31
- Database now contains ~221,500 reviews across 1,485 sources
April 5, 2026
- Added 9 new review sources across philosophy magazines, intellectual journals, and academic review sites — ~4,600 new reviews:
- Claremont Review of Books (~1,400 reviews, 2000–present)
- Law & Liberty (~1,340 reviews, 2012–present)
- Syndicate Network (~670 symposium posts across 73 book symposia)
- Philosophy Now (~350 reviews, full 1991–present archive)
- Public Discourse (~340 reviews, 2013–present)
- Quillette (~200 reviews, 2017–present)
- BJPS Review of Books (~125 reviews, philosophy of science)
- APA Blog Book Spotlights (~120 author presentations)
- The Philosophers’ Magazine archive (~90 reviews, 1998–2021)
- Mainstream media reviews now checked weekly — new reviews from TLS, NYRB, Guardian, NYT, and others are automatically found for books already in the database
- Improved symposium detection: automatic clustering of 3+ reviews of the same book, now active for Metascience and History of European Ideas
- Data quality: fixed ~250 Metascience entries (missing reviews + author replies), cleaned ~160 garbled Dialogue entries, fixed Crossref parser for multi-author subtitles
- Database now contains ~220,700 reviews across 1,340+ sources
March 23, 2026
- Added 3 new journals: New Blackfriars (~2,300 reviews), Phenomenological Reviews (~400), and Journal for Continental Philosophy of Religion (~25)
- Improved review detection for Kantian Review, Hegel Bulletin, and Kant-Studien — backfilled ~275 previously missed reviews
- Data quality sweep: cleaned ~820 garbled titles across multiple journals (HTML tags, publisher info, swapped fields)
- Fixed weekly update crash caused by conflicting LaunchAgent configuration
- Added 301 redirects for old GitHub Pages URLs flagged by Google Search Console
March 21, 2026
- New browsable pages for each of 1,200+ journals and 15 subfields — browse all journals or browse by subfield
- Added XML sitemap and Google Search Console integration for better discoverability
- Clicking an author or reviewer name now filters by that name without clearing other active filters
- New “Share” button copies a link to your current search
- Improved search: possessive terms (Kant’s, Hume’s) now match correctly
- Added /health endpoint and HTTP health checks on Fly.io
- Infrastructure: consolidated deployment code, added automated weekly backups, standardized logging across all scrapers
March 16, 2026
- New navigation: book titles now link directly to the review; new “Info” button expands detail panel with subfield, access badges, and related reviews
- “Other reviews of this book” link in the detail panel lets you quickly find all reviews of the same book
- New source: The Unpopulist book reviews, integrated into weekly update pipeline
- Performance fix: symposia queries reduced from 19s to under 200ms
March 8, 2026
- Added 2,676 reviews from mainstream outlets including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Guardian, New Yorker, Atlantic, and 100+ other publications
- History of Political Economy gap fill: added 861 reviews that were missing due to inconsistent Crossref metadata formatting
- Database now at 212,600+ reviews
March 5, 2026
- Migrated from GitHub Pages to a dynamic Flask app on Fly.io — page load dropped from 81 MB to ~15 KB, with server-side full-text search via SQLite FTS5
- All filtering, sorting, and pagination now handled server-side; search results returned in milliseconds
- Weekly automated updates resumed (had been blocked by GitHub Pages build size limits)
March 2, 2026
- Major data expansion: 36,000+ new reviews, bringing the database to 208,700+ reviews across 1,320+ journals
- Subfield classification expanded to 99.1% coverage via Haiku batch API
- Massive NYRB expansion: 3,900+ book reviews from The New York Review of Books (1963–2026), filtered for philosophical relevance
- Added 9 journals to weekly Crossref scan: Teaching Philosophy, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, The Journal of Philosophy, HOPOS, Kantian Review, Research in Phenomenology, Journal for General Philosophy of Science, Argumentation, Philosophy & Rhetoric
- Added 17 Jacobin book reviews on political philosophy
- Name normalization: consolidated variant author/reviewer name forms
- Journal display: dropped leading “The” from journal names for cleaner alphabetical sorting
March 1, 2026
- Major data expansion: 77,000+ new entries from 834 newly indexed journals, bringing coverage to 168,000+ reviews across 1,178 journals
- Significant new international coverage including French, Dutch, German, Spanish, and Italian philosophy journals
- Book symposia coverage expanded from 270 to 432 symposia (1,840 entries) across 60+ journals, including Philosophical Studies, Jurisprudence, Metascience, History of European Ideas, and more
- Added 12 reviews from non-academic sources (3:AM Magazine, Reason Magazine)
February 28, 2026
- New subfield filter: browse reviews by philosophical subfield (ethics, epistemology, political philosophy, etc.) — 15 subfields, 99.6% of entries classified via journal mapping and LLM
- Subfield badges now shown in expanded review details
- Added 6 new journals: Political Studies Review (2,980), The Thomist (2,037), The Journal of Symbolic Logic (1,810), Metascience (1,542), History of European Ideas (261), Contemporary Political Theory (189)
- Data cleanup: fixed 180 ALL CAPS titles, 36 leading punctuation artifacts, 27 HTML entities, 25 HTML tags, 10 editor annotations in author fields, 41 swapped first/last names; deleted 26 empty “Book review” entries
- Backfilled 601 missing reviewer names: 576 for Journal of Markets & Morality via API, 25 for mainstream outlets (TLS, The Guardian, The Nation, and others) via page scraping
February 27, 2026
- Added 16 new journals including The Heythrop Journal (3,358), Topoi (348), Noûs (231), Ratio Juris (210), Husserl Studies (183), and 11 others; fixed detection for 3 undercounted journals: Kant-Studien (2 → 788), Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (6 → 763), Theoria (42 → 309)
- Extensive data cleanup: removed ~2,600 false positives, recovered 795 missing book authors, normalized 12,500+ whitespace fields, fixed ~5,300 ALL CAPS titles/names, cleaned 1,380+ editor markers and trailing commas, decoded HTML entities, corrected 250 name suffixes
February 26, 2026
- New data source: Brave Search API scan of 16 mainstream outlets — added 468 verified reviews from TLS, LARB, NYT, NYRB, LRB, The Guardian, Kirkus, Boston Review, WSJ, and others
- Extensive false-positive cleanup: removed ~155 non-reviews (obituaries, profiles, interviews, opinion pieces, wrong-book matches) and corrected ~20 entries matched to the wrong book
- Journal sort order now ignores leading “The”
February 25, 2026
- New data source: Daily Nous “Online Philosophy Resources Weekly Update” — 737 new reviews from 50+ non-academic media outlets (TLS, LARB, WSJ, The Guardian, NYRB, LRB, Kirkus, and others)
- Author, reviewer, and journal names in the review table are now clickable — clicking filters to show all related reviews
- Data cleanup: removed ~2,750 false positive entries (regular articles and precis/replies misidentified as reviews) across 70+ journals via Crossref type verification, fixed ~210 garbled titles and bogus author fields, cleaned HTML entities
February 23, 2026
- Added site logo, favicon, and Open Graph / Twitter Card meta tags for social sharing previews
- Massive JSTOR metadata import: 31,038 new reviews from JSTOR’s complete metadata archive, expanding the database from 46,313 to 77,351 reviews across 158 journals
- Added 41 new journals from JSTOR, including History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences (1,928 reviews), Utopian Studies (1,457), Iyyun (1,098), The Journal of Philosophy (774), and 37 others
- Enriched 18,405 existing entries with JSTOR metadata across 25+ journals
- Expanded non-western philosophy coverage: Dao expanded from 16 to 436 reviews, plus 6 new journals (Comparative Philosophy, Filosofia Theoretica, South African Journal of Philosophy, Arabic Sciences and Philosophy, Journal of Chinese Philosophy, Journal of Indian Philosophy)
- Added Africana philosophy journals: The Black Scholar (157 reviews) and The CLR James Journal (22 reviews)
- Expanded applied ethics coverage with 9 new journals including Journal of Business Ethics, Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal, and Journal of Applied Philosophy
- Added 123 symposium contributions across new symposia in Philosophical Studies, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, and Sophia
- Added automation: weekly Crossref content check and daily Springer Nature API scan with automatic site rebuild
- Major data cleanup: fixed ~14,500 entries with garbled author names, title metadata, and HTML entities from JSTOR imports
- Enriched 778 missing book authors via Crossref DOI parsing and internal cross-referencing
February 22, 2026
- Added book symposia support: 1,272 symposium contributions across 237 symposia from 30+ journals, each with a “Symposium” badge and links to other contributions in the same symposium
- Added two new journals via direct website scraping: Cosmos + Taxis (73 reviews + 141 symposium contributions) and Constitutional Political Economy (16 reviews)
- Removed ~1,500 false positive entries (research articles, editorials) across 20+ journals
- Data quality cleanup: fixed ~1,400 garbled author entries and 900+ book titles with HTML entities or embedded bibliographic metadata
- Made the Sources section collapsible to reduce page clutter
February 21, 2026
- Added 37 new journals including Journal of the History of Philosophy (3,100 reviews), Dialectica (199), The Journal of Speculative Philosophy (149), Philosophia Mathematica (128), and 33 others
- Added Open Library as a new data source for book author lookup, fixing 1,800+ missing authors
- Fixed 450+ additional missing book authors via OpenAlex and Crossref
- Data integrity cleanup: removed 64 false positive entries, fixed hundreds of garbled author names
February 20, 2026
- Added 9 new journals including Philosophy of the Social Sciences (641 reviews), The Review of Politics (220), and Philosophical Psychology (65)
- Removed ~2,900 misidentified research articles across all journals
- Fixed 575+ missing book authors via Crossref and OpenAlex
- Added multi-review detection for journals with dual-review formats
February 19, 2026
- Added 16 new journals including Philosophy in Review (6,682 reviews), The Independent Review (1,030), Hypatia (1,050), Political Theory (773), History of Political Economy (572), and Business Ethics Quarterly (538)
- New UI features: always-visible filter bar, multi-select journal dropdown, URL persistence for sharing filtered views
- Fixed 1,187 missing book authors and cleaned 222 book titles with embedded bibliographic metadata
- Added footer links, GoatCounter analytics, and this update log page
February 18, 2026
- Initial journal coverage and static site build
