Journal of the History of Biology provides a fifty-year long record for examining the evolution of the history of biology as a scholarly discipline. In this paper, we present a new dataset and preliminary quantitative analysis of the thematic content of JHB from the perspectives of geography, organisms, and thematic fields. The geographic diversity of authors whose work appears in JHB has increased steadily since 1968, but the geographic coverage of the content of JHB articles remains strongly lopsided toward the United States, United Kingdom, and western Europe and has diversified much less dramatically over time. The taxonomic diversity of organisms discussed in JHB increased steadily between 1968 and the late 1990s but declined in later years, mirroring broader patterns of diversification previously reported in the biomedical research literature. Finally, we used a combination of topic modeling and nonlinear dimensionality reduction techniques to develop a model of multi-article fields within JHB. We found evidence for directional changes in the representation of fields on multiple scales. The diversity of JHB with regard to the representation of thematic fields has increased overall, with most of that diversification occurring in recent years. Drawing on the dataset generated in the course of this analysis, as well as web services in the emerging digital history and philosophy of science ecosystem, we have developed an interactive web platform for exploring the content of JHB, and we provide a brief overview of the platform in this article. As a whole, the data and analyses presented here provide a starting-place for further critical reflection on the evolution of the history of biology over the past half-century.

中文翻译：

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生物学史杂志五十年的定量观点

Journal of the History of Biology 提供了长达 50 年的记录，用于检查生物学历史作为一门学术学科的演变。在本文中，我们从地理、生物和主题领域的角度提出了一个新的数据集和对 JHB 主题内容的初步定量分析。自 1968 年以来，在 JHB 上发表作品的作者的地理多样性稳步增加，但 JHB 文章内容的地理覆盖范围仍然严重偏向美国、英国和西欧，而且随着时间的推移，多样化程度要小得多。JHB 中讨论的生物分类多样性在 1968 年至 1990 年代后期稳步增加，但在以后几年下降，反映了之前在生物医学研究文献中报道的更广泛的多样化模式。最后，我们结合使用主题建模和非线性降维技术来开发 JHB 内的多文章字段模型。我们发现了多个尺度上字段表示方向变化的证据。JHB 在主题领域的代表性方面的多样性总体上有所增加，其中大部分是近年来发生的。利用在此分析过程中生成的数据集，以及新兴的数字历史和科学哲学生态系统中的网络服务，我们开发了一个交互式网络平台，用于探索 JHB 的内容，并简要概述了本文中的平台。总的来说，