In their articles for this special issue on digital humanities, Jeremy Burman (2018) and Ivan Flis and Nees Jan van Eck (Flis & van Eck, 2018) examine how psychology journals can be used as sources for large-scale data sets that might illuminate the development of psychology as a research discipline. In my commentary, I seek to situate these two articles in a broader history of scientific publishing and offer further thoughts on the possibilities and pitfalls of data-based methods for the history of scientific publishing. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved)