The index is intended to document the "discourse" of the Enlightenment era, which encompassed and changed all sciences and deeply and momentously affected the public consciousness. This discourse took place primarily in the medium of journals, and there especially in the form of reviews and counter-reviews. Usually more widely distributed and more easily accessible than the reviewed works, these reviews determined the level of knowledge, insight and judgement of the time and awakened a broad readership of educated laymen beyond the scholars. However, these journals are virtually untapped, i.e. they are accessible to individual researchers only when the time required is quite uneconomical. The project, based in Göttingen, aims to make accessible these sources, which provides a wealth of information for the history of science and reception of various natural sciences and humanities disciplines, for interdisciplinary research and for much deeper insights into the modern Enlightenment movement.
The basis of this collection is the Systematic Index, in which the reviewed works are arranged in 16 subject areas with more than 700 differentiated topics. The Index of Authors lists all reviewed authors alphabetically with the titles of their works and the anonymous writings and refers to the positions in the Systematic Index. The Subject Index also provides an alphabetical list of relatively "broad" keywords. Finally, the Review Index lists the names of the contributors or their undeciphered sigles, and also refers to the numbers in the Systematic Register.
A total of 65 journals have been catalogued so far, for the most part completely, otherwise with several volumes, including some very long-lasting and extremely influential ones such as "Deutsche Acta Eruditorum", "Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek" and "Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen". A total of about 70,000 reviews were recorded. These title records are stored electronically in a database and serve as "reference files", i.e. they are constantly consulted for further cataloguing and used as a thesaurus for new entries. They also serve to an ever-increasing extent as a source of information for a wide variety of user enquiries.