The online version of IESBS 2/e – International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, Second Edition / James D Wright, editor-in-chief (26 volumes. Elsevier, 2015) provides a 14-year update to a reference work whose first edition was called by its reviewers, “the largest corpus of knowledge abou the social and behavioral sciences in existence” and “the atomic bomb of reference works.”

IESBS 2/e was, like its predecessor, a mammoth undertaking:

• 4,999 contributors – including 37 Penn authors and editors!
• More than 3,900 articles.

The subjects defined and reviewed in IESBS 2/e fall into 53 broad topical areas that include:

• Core fields: Political science, Anthropology, Statistics, Psychology, Economics, Sociology, and Social thought.
• Applied fields: Applied psychology, Economic development, Experimental psychology, and Econometrics.
• Related fields: Archaeology, Demography, Education, Geography, History, Law, Linguistics, and Philosophy.
• Overarching topics: Institutions and infrastructure, History of the field, Ethics of research and application, Biographies, Modern cultural concerns, and Integrative issues and concepts.
• Methodologies: Statistics, Mathematics and Computer sciences, Logic of inquiry and Research design.
• Intersecting and emerging fields: Evolutionary sciences, Genetics, behavior, and society, Behavioral and cognitive neurosciences, Psychiatry, Health, Gender studies, Religious studies, Expressive forms, Environmental/Ecological sciences, Science and technology studies, and Area and international studies.
• Applications: Organizational and management studies, Media studies and commercial applications, Urban studies and planning, and Public policy.

IESBS 2/e expands the coverage of its four predecessors – International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (IESBS 1/e) (Neil J. Smelser and Paul B. Baltes, eds.-in-chief. 26 v. Elsevier, 2001), International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (David L. Sills, ed. 19 v. Macmillan, 1968-1991), and Encyclopaedia of the social sciences (Edwin R. A. Seligman, ed.-in-chief. 15 v. Macmillian, 1930-1935) – through an inclusive editorial policy that invited international coverage moving beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic); psychological articles are more numerous, as are applied social and behavioral sciences; and living-person and collective biographies are provided. While some articles from IESBS 1/e were retained as “legacy articles”, all other articles were either updated or written anew.

The Elsevier ScienceDirect platform for IESBS 2/e supports fulltext searching. Individual IESBS 2/e articles provide URLs for direct hyperlinking. In some cases, bibliographic references in IESBS 2/e articles are directly hyperlinked to source fulltext.