Content description at Springer Nature: how a publisher facilitates understanding through classification

Springer Nature publishes over 3,000 journals covering science, technology, medicine and social sciences and thousands of new reference works, monographs, briefs, proceedings, textbooks and series every year, forming a broad range of different degrees of context. The Springer Nature Taxonomy (SN-T) serves as the controlled vocabulary used to describe this published content. This article initially illustrates how different contexts are captured through varying abstraction levels, highlighting the interpretive nature of abstraction. Consequently it describes the structure of the SN-T and Springer Nature’s classification strategy, and motivates the varying proportion of human versus machine contribution to this process.