He has specialized in the study of the periodic table of the elements, including its historical origins and its philosophical significance.

In January 2021, the project issued a provisional report in IUPAC's news magazine Chemistry International suggesting Sc, Y, Lu and Lr.

[8] This accords with a previous IUPAC report from 1988, as well as a suggestion by Lev Landau and Evgeny Lifshitz in their Course of Theoretical Physics.

Most recently (2016) he proposed a new evolutionary approach to the philosophy of science based on seven case studies of little known scientists such as John Nicholson, Anton Van den Broek and Edmund Stoner.

Scerri has argued that these lesser known figures are just as significant as the heroic personalities in that they constitute the missing gaps in a gradual evolutionary and organic growth in the body of scientific knowledge.