The first scientific journals, Paris and London in 1665

The first scientific journals appeared within ten weeks of each other in 1665. The Journal des sçavans came out in Paris on Monday 5 January, and Philosophical Transactions in London on 6 March (Vittu, 2002; Fyfe et al., 2022). Neither looked much like a journal today: one was a weekly digest of new books, the other a monthly newsletter stitched together from its editor's letters.

EdCitation publishes this history, drawn from the Royal Society's own pages, the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, the digitised volume the Bibliothèque nationale de France holds on Gallica, and published histories. We read each on 26 September 2026, and we flag the places where they disagree or where we were unable to check.

The earliest of these papers can still be cited. Philosophical Transactions articles from 1665 carry DOIs. Paste one into EdCitation's free Cite a source and the reference comes from the Royal Society's own deposit; Find sources turns up the histories written since, and Verify references tests a finished list.

What was the first scientific journal?

There are two answers, and each country has long preferred its own. Paris printed first; London printed only natural philosophy. The table sets them side by side.

Sources: Vittu (2002), Fyfe et al. (2022), Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres (n.d.).

The Journal des sçavans, 5 January 1665

Sallo, born in 1626, had sat in the Parlement from 1652 and travelled to the book markets of Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Frankfurt, Vienna and Venice (Vittu, 2002). With Colbert, Louis XIV's minister, behind him, he secured a privilege in August 1664 covering new books, memoirs and public demonstrations on every subject except matters of faith. The first issue was dated 5 January 1665, and the plan was 12 quarto pages every week (Vittu, 2002; Laeven, 1990).

Philosophical Transactions, 6 March 1665

Oldenburg, born in Bremen around 1619, had settled in London by 1660 and wrote to scholars all over Europe (University of St Andrews, n.d.). He brought the first issue before the Royal Society's Council on 1 March 1665, and it appeared on 6 March by the English calendar, which was 16 March in France (Fyfe et al., 2022). The Society's own history says Oldenburg acted as "publisher and editor", and that each issue sold for one shilling (Royal Society, n.d.).

What did the first issues contain?

The Paris journal promised a catalogue of important new books, obituaries of famous scholars, experiments in physics and chemistry, and the main legal decisions of Church and state; London promised experiments and observations and nothing on theology or law.

Paris: books, lives and the courts

The printer's note in the first issue set out those four aims, quoted in translation by Fyfe et al. (2022). The Gallica volume for 1665 shows what that meant in practice. Its fifth page, still inside the first issue, moves from a note on shadows seen in the bands of a planet straight into a review of James Howell's Latin dissertation on the precedence of the kings of France, Spain and England, a book, the reviewer notes, first written in English (Le Journal des sçavans, 1665). Books and astronomy shared a page.

London: sixteen pages of letters

Oldenburg's first issue ran to 16 quarto pages: a two-page introduction and ten items, from eight lines to almost six pages. Five were unsigned, seven came from overseas, and two were lifted from the Journal des sçavans without saying so. Only one began at the Royal Society itself, Robert Hooke's sighting of "a spot in one of the belts of Jupiter" (Fyfe et al., 2022). The others included Adrien Auzout's prediction of a comet's path, Robert Boyle's forthcoming book on cold, a "very odd monstrous calf", whaling off Bermuda, a trial of pendulum clocks for finding longitude at sea, and an obituary of an eminent magistrate lately dead in Toulouse.

The difference in kind showed early. From 1666 Oldenburg filled much of each issue with "accounts of books", but where the Paris journal judged the books it reviewed, his accounts generally avoided critical judgement (Fyfe et al., 2022).

How were the first journals licensed and paid for?

By a privilege in Paris and a licence in London, and in both cases by booksellers hoping to profit.

A royal privilege in Paris

The privilege gave Sallo's journal a monopoly on printed literary news, and it could be withdrawn. After a complaint from the papal legate, who had been sending issues to Rome with his remarks on their Gallican views, the journal was suspended in the spring of 1665 (Vittu, 2002). Its warm review of the Transactions, printed on 30 March, was its last item for over nine months (Fyfe et al., 2022), and it restarted in January 1666 under the abbé Jean Gallois (Laeven, 1990). It carried the Paris bookseller Jean Cusson's name until 1704, and his widow's until 1714 (Vittu, 2002). We found no price or print run for the first Paris issues.

A shilling an issue in London

The Royal Society's charter let it license books without the government's censors, so Oldenburg printed under its licence. The Council's order said each issue should be "first reviewed by some of the members", but Fyfe et al. (2022) find that oversight was "little more than notional"; our guide to the history of peer review follows what came of it.

The money was Oldenburg's venture, not the Society's. The printers first agreed to pay him three pounds a sheet. In the plague autumn of 1665 an Oxford printer took on 1,250 copies an issue and broke even at 300 sales, yet in 1667 Oldenburg complained that the journal had never earned him more than £40 a year, "little more than my house rent" (Fyfe et al., 2022).

How did letters turn into journals?

Both journals grew out of correspondence, and they recruited from the same network. In November 1664, before the Paris journal had printed a page, Oldenburg was invited to be its English correspondent (Fyfe et al., 2022). Vittu (2002) says Henri Justel or Adrien Auzout made the approach, and Fyfe et al. (2022) find no surviving letters between Oldenburg and Sallo.

Oldenburg had already tried to sell a handwritten weekly newsletter of state and literary news, at six to ten pounds a year, and struggled to find subscribers. When Sir Robert Moray, the Society's vice-president, told Christiaan Huygens about the new plan in February 1665, he said it would be like the Paris journal but "much more philosophical" (Fyfe et al., 2022). Letters stayed the raw material: in wartime, post for Oldenburg went to "Monsieur Grubendol", an anagram of his name (University of St Andrews, n.d.).

What happened to each journal afterwards?

Both survive, though neither ran without a break.

The Journal des savants

After Gallois, Jean-Paul de La Roque edited the journal from 1674 (Vittu, 2002). It won royal patronage in 1701, was suppressed in 1792 and re-established in 1816, and until 1900 the state paid for it. The Institut de France covered 1901 and 1902, and the Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres has published it since 1909. Today it appears in two issues a year and prints original research in the humanities (Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, n.d.).

Philosophical Transactions and the Royal Society

Oldenburg edited 136 issues until his death in the summer of 1677. Nehemiah Grew followed, then Robert Hooke, whose Philosophical Collections filled the gap irregularly until 1682. The next secretaries revived the title, and the Society offered its first financial support by buying copies (Fyfe et al., 2022). The Society took the journal over in 1752, and in 1887 it split into two series, now Philosophical Transactions A for the physical sciences and B for the biological (Royal Society, n.d.; Fyfe et al., 2022).

Which journals followed in the 17th and 18th centuries?

Dozens, then hundreds. Johann Albert Fabricius counted more than 400 learned periodicals by 1732 (Laeven, 1990). The best-documented early followers:

What the Acta Eruditorum's first issue shows

Mencke's circle settled on 1 January 1682 for the first issue before they had settled on its name, and chose Latin to reach readers outside Germany (Laeven, 1990). The first volume's title page dedicates it to the princes of Saxony and claims both imperial and Saxon privilege. Its programme repeated the Paris model with a twist: of 316 original articles printed from 1682 to 1706, 264 were on mathematics, while theology remained the largest subject among the reviews. We did not read a table of contents for the first issue itself.

Which was really first?

It depends on what counts as a journal. The Royal Society calls Philosophical Transactions "the world's first and longest-running scientific journal" (Royal Society, n.d.). The Académie calls the Journal des Savants the oldest literary journal in Europe (Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres, n.d.), and Vittu (2002) adds that it has kept its original title through almost uninterrupted publication since 1665, though it was suppressed from 1792 to 1816.

Fyfe et al. (2022) cut through it. Paris printed first; London printed only natural philosophy; and a national rivalry has also put forward the Miscellanea curiosa of 1670. None of the three, they write, was much like a modern research journal, and Philosophical Transactions is the oldest English periodical of any kind still in print. Which one you call first depends on whether a journal of all learning counts as scientific.

What could not be confirmed?

• The Paris first issue's date. Vittu (2002) and Laeven (1990) give 5 January 1665; a note in Fyfe et al. (2022) dates the printer's preface 7 January. Gallica's scan was behind a security check after one page, so we could not read the title page ourselves.
• Paris prices and print runs. None found.
• The Italian journals. Laeven (1990) names the Giornale de' letterati among the first four learned journals, but no page we read gave its founding year, so we give none.
• A slip in a good source. Vittu (2002) says Philosophical Transactions appeared from 1666; its first issue, on the Royal Society's own record, is dated 6 March 1665.
• Work we could not read. Alex Csiszar's essay in Nature was paywalled, and Aileen Fyfe and Anna Gielas's 2020 introduction on journal editors would not open for us, so nothing here rests on either.

How do I find, cite and check a 1665 article?

Search for the histories, open the article, build the entry from its DOI, and check the list. Each step below was run on 26 September 2026, and the output is quoted as it came back.

1. Look for the histories in Find sources, which searches about 300 million published works. Journal des sçavans 1665 returned 719 results, led by David Banks's 2009 "Starting science in the vernacular", cited by 39. Sorted by most cited, Oldenburg Philosophical Transactions history returned 1,592, with Banks first and E. N. da C. Andrade's 1965 "The birth and early days of the Philosophical Transactions" second (cited by 28).
2. Open each record. Betty Trebelle Morgan's history of the Paris journal came back dated 1929 and labelled an article; Vittu (2002) dates the book 1928. The record is a lead, not the last word.
3. Paste the DOI printed on the article into Cite a source.
4. Compare it with the page, especially the author and the journal's name.
5. Give the finished list to Verify references before it goes in.

Building an entry for Hooke's note

From the DOI 10.1098/rstl.1665.0005, Cite a source pulled the record Crossref holds, found no retraction notice, and returned this APA 7 entry:

Hooke, R. (1665). A spot in one of the belts of Jupiter. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1665.0005

The entry is formed correctly, with the journal and volume in italics on the site. Two things are worth knowing. The record credits Hooke, but the unsigned item reports in the third person what "the Ingenious Mr. Hook" had told a friend. And the journal name is today's; in 1665 the title page read Philosophical Transactions with a long subtitle (University of St Andrews, n.d.). We kept the record's name, which is the one the DOI resolves to. For Oldenburg's unsigned introduction (10.1098/rstl.1665.0002), the record names no author, so the entry began with the title, "An introduction to this tract", and cited it in the text as (“An Introduction to This Tract,” 1665).

Testing three entries

We pasted three references into Verify references. Hooke's note came back verified: "The DOI resolves to this record and the title matches." Andrade's article, dated 1966, came back "check this": "The work was published in 1965, not 1966; the record has no date in 1966." A letter from Sallo we invented came back not found: "No publisher's or registry's record matches this reference." Give a paper that came in parts its full title: with the subtitle cut off, Vittu's first instalment was matched to his second. A lookup that fails reads could not check, never not found.

Which EdCitation tool fits historical sources best?

Cite a source is the best free tool for a centuries-old article with a DOI, because every field of the entry comes from the publisher's deposit and none is guessed. That matters here: the first issue's items are part-signed, part-anonymous and part-borrowed, and a chatbot guessing at 1665 has nothing to look up. Starting from a DOI, PubMed ID, ISBN, title or web address, EdCitation sets the reference in six styles (APA 7, MLA 9, Harvard, IEEE, Vancouver and Chicago 18 author-date) and screens the source for a retraction.

Find sources and Verify references are free too, with no account. For a whole draft, References from a file is part of Pro, $8 a month (pricing): it reads the document, checks each reference, and pairs the citations in your text with the entries they point to. Each tool looks things up; none drafts a sentence for you. For choosing where your own work goes, see how to choose a journal and avoid predatory ones.

Quick questions

What was the first scientific journal?

The Journal des sçavans, first issued in Paris on 5 January 1665, printed first; Philosophical Transactions, from 6 March 1665 in London, was the first given to natural philosophy alone.

Who founded Philosophical Transactions?

Henry Oldenburg, the Royal Society's first Secretary, launched it in March 1665 as his own venture, printed under the Society's licence.

Is Philosophical Transactions still published?

Yes. The Royal Society publishes it in two series, A for the physical sciences and B for the biological, a split made in 1887.

How do I cite an article from 1665?

Start from its DOI: paste it into EdCitation's free Cite a source, then compare the author and journal name with the article itself.

What was the Acta Eruditorum?

A monthly Latin journal founded in Leipzig in January 1682 by Otto Mencke, reviewing books across all learning and printing original mathematics.

References

• Académie des inscriptions et belles-lettres. (n.d.). Journal des Savants. https://aibl.fr/categories-publications/journal-des-savants/
• Fyfe, A., Moxham, N., McDougall-Waters, J., & Røstvik, C. M. (2022). A history of scientific journals: Publishing at the Royal Society, 1665–2015. UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781800082328
• Hooke, R. (1665). A spot in one of the belts of Jupiter. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1(1), 3. https://doi.org/10.1098/rstl.1665.0005
• Laeven, H. (1990). The "Acta Eruditorum" under the editorship of Otto Mencke (1644–1707): The history of an international learned journal between 1682 and 1707 (L. Richards, Trans.). APA-Holland University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2066/19041
• Le Journal des sçavans. (1665). [Digitised volume for 1665]. Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k56523g
• Royal Society. (n.d.). History of Philosophical Transactions. https://royalsociety.org/journals/publishing-activities/publishing350/history-philosophical-transactions/
• University of St Andrews. (n.d.). Philosophical Transactions in the 17th century. A History of Scientific Journals. https://arts.st-andrews.ac.uk/philosophicaltransactions/brief-history-of-phil-trans/phil-trans-in-17th-century/
• Vittu, J.-P. (2002). La formation d'une institution scientifique : Le Journal des savants de 1665 à 1714 [Premier article : D'une entreprise privée à une semi-institution]. Journal des Savants, (1), 179–203. https://doi.org/10.3406/jds.2002.1653