History of the Encyclopædia Britannica the criteria by which the articles were sorted were not obvious even to scholars, despite Dr. Adler's claims that the sorting followed naturally from the "Propædia's" outline of all knowledge. In 1985, the "Britannica" responded to reader requests by restoring the index as a two-volume set. The number of topics indexed by the "Britannica" has fluctuated from 500,000 (1985, the same as in 1954) to 400,000 (1989,1991) to 700,000 in the current 2007 print version. Presumably, this recent increase reflects the introduction of efficient electronic indexing, since the size of the encyclopedia has remained nearly constant at approximately 40 million
Encyclopedia Galactica as an "Encyclopedia" "Galactica" since early in its history (2005). These comparisons have been to both the Asimov version, and the Adams version, due to its comprehensive coverage. Encyclopedia Galactica The Encyclopedia Galactica is a fictional or hypothetical encyclopedia containing all the knowledge accumulated by a galaxy-spanning civilization. The name evokes the exhaustive aspects of the real-life "Encyclopædia Britannica". "Encyclopedia Galactica" first appeared in Isaac Asimov's short story "Foundation" ("Astounding Science Fiction", May 1942), later republished as "The Encyclopedists" in the short-story collection "Foundation" (1951). Asimov's "Encyclopedia Galactica" was a compendium of all knowledge then available in the Galactic Empire,