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
Encyclopædia Britannica past year's events. A given edition of the "Book of the Year" is named in terms of the year of its publication, though the edition actually covers the events of the previous year. Articles dating back to the 1994 edition are included online. The company also publishes several specialized reference works, such as "Shakespeare: The Essential Guide to the Life and Works of the Bard" (Wiley, 2006). The "Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite 2012 DVD" contains over 100,000 articles. This includes regular "Britannica" articles, as well as others drawn from the "Britannica Student Encyclopædia", and the "Britannica Elementary Encyclopædia." The package