Joseph Jérôme de Lalande Compiles the First Major Chronological Bibliography of Any Science

Subject bibliographies are most commonly arranged by author. Bibliographie astronomique; avec l'historie de l'astronomie depuis 1781 jusqu'à 1802 by French astronomer and writer Joseph Jérôme de Lalande, published in Paris by the Imprimerie de la République in 1803, was prefaced by a vast 660-page often annotated chronological bibliography of the literature of astronomy. Lalande acknowledged that he was dependent for the earliest literature on references in Johann Frideric Weidler's Bibliographia astronomica. . . . (1775), a pioneering work which he frequently cited. Weidler followed a chronological arrangement, and it is probable that Lalande found it convenient as well as useful to improve and build upon Weidler's work. Lalande's chronological order in his brief first section on books composed "before the discovery of printing" was somewhat shakey, with entries from the ancient world inexact and sometimes out of chronological sequence in the first three pages. But by around the time of Cassiodorus, which Lalande set a bit inaccurately at 530 CE, Lalande found himself on firmer chronological ground. Once he passed to printed books he assumed greater authority, and many of his thousands of entries indicate that he examined the actual edition himself, and commented on the contents, reflecting an extraordinary familiarity with the a high percentage of the vast historical literature of astronomy.

Though it is difficult to generalize in this way, It is probable that de la Lande's book is the first major chronological bibliography in the history of science other than medicine.