Scholarpedia

At the end of 2005 Eugene M. Izhikevich, then a senior fellow in theoretical neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, conceived Scholarpedia while he was contributing to Wikipedia.⁠[1][2]

Scholarpedia was founded in 2006, using the MediaWiki software designed for Wikipedia. Its self-description article, written by Izhikevich, was accepted on February 5, 2006, and numbered volume 1, issue 2, article 1. Scholarpedia is inspired by Wikipedia but aims to complement it by providing in-depth scholarly treatment of topics in mathematics and the sciences, including the physical, biological, behavioral and social sciences.⁠[3][1][1][1][1]

Until October 20, 2011, Scholarpedia relied on its editors to identify and persuade leading experts to write articles, with assistant editors helping them, building up nearly a thousand peer-reviewed articles in dynamical systems, computational neuroscience and physics. After that date anyone could propose an article, but it first had to be sponsored by a Scholarpedia editor or curator in order to reserve the topic and eventually be published.⁠[1][1][1]

Scholarpedia’s focused encyclopedias began to be published as printed volumes by Springer/Atlantis Press, the first being Scholarpedia of Touch, published in Paris in 2016 and edited by Tony J. Prescott, Ehud Ahissar and Eugene Izhikevich.⁠[4][4]

In December 2021 The Encyclopedia Herald of Ukraine, the annual of the Institute of Encyclopedic Research of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, published a paper by Oleksandr Ishchenko analyzing the editorial models of digital encyclopedias including Scholarpedia. He found that most issues of volume 15 (2020) of the Scholarpedia journal contained no articles, with only issues 6, 7, 9 and 11 carrying one article each, and argued that this showed articles were appearing rather slowly and that the release of issues and volumes was a formality meant to attest to the scholarly character of the entries; Scholarpedia then had 1,812 reviewed articles.⁠[3][3][3][3][3]

Scholarpedia does not publish original research or position papers; instead it collects “living reviews,” encyclopedia articles written once and maintained over time by current and future experts. A new article must first be sponsored: a trusted curator or editor publicly vouches that the authors are who they claim to be, that the author team includes a recognized leading expert on the topic, and that the topic is scholarly and does not duplicate an existing article; sponsored authors then have exclusive rights to the topic for a limited time. When the final draft is ready, the authors or sponsor invite curators to review it, and publication requires public approval by two Scholarpedia curators, editors or scholars; approvals are public, while rejections are anonymous. According to the instructions for authors, publication takes eight steps: creating an account, proposing an article, finding a sponsor, inviting co-authors (optional), writing, inviting peer reviewers, revising and approving the article for publication.⁠[5][5][5][5][5][5][5][5][1][1][1][1][1][1]

Once published, an article is assigned a DOI and included in that month’s Scholarpedia Journal (ISSN 1941-6016), can be cited like any other peer-reviewed article, and lists its authors beside the title. The most established expert among the authors becomes the article’s sole curator, with the final say over future revisions; any registered user may propose changes, which appear only once approved by the curator or, if no one objects, unanimously approved by at least two other article contributors. Scholarpedia holds that having a single curator per article avoids diluting responsibility.⁠[6][1][1][1][1][7][7]

Published articles are free to read, authors are never charged to publish reviews, and content is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0); all member activity is public by default, and participants must use their real names.⁠[1][1]

As of October 2026, Scholarpedia lists its focal areas as astrophysics, celestial mechanics, computational neuroscience, computational intelligence, dynamical systems, physics and touch, and its featured encyclopedias on the main page also include applied mathematics; authors of the computational neuroscience encyclopedia include J.J. Hopfield, T. Kohonen, E. Moser and W. Singer. Its editor-in-chief is Eugene Izhikevich. Most of the articles newly published from 2022 to 2024 are on physics topics such as particle physics and gravitational waves.⁠[4][4][8][8][8][8][4][4][4][4][4]

Scholarpedia runs on a limited budget covering basic maintenance and server costs, funded by Brain Corporation, of which Izhikevich has been chairman and chief executive since 2009 and which benefits from Scholarpedia’s extensive coverage of computational neuroscience. As of October 17, 2026, the site statistics listed 1,818 content pages, 19,157 registered users, 2 active users who had performed an action in the previous 30 days, and 4,379 users with curator rights.⁠[6][2][9][9][9]

Scholarpedia: Official website: http://www.scholarpedia.org/ (opens in a new window).⁠[3]