"Significant characteristics of modern scientific journals, including their role in the certification and registration of scientific knowledge, emerged only toward the end of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. The nineteenth century was a period of rapid expansion and diversification in scientific periodicals, and this collection sets the historical exploration of those periodicals on a new footing, examining their distinctive purposes and character. Specifically, it shows the important role they played in expanding, developing, and organizing communities of scientific practitioners and devotees during a century that witnessed blanket transformations in the scientific enterprise"--