It was established in 1913 to preserve documents and findings as well as publishing an international statistical yearbook periodically.

The ISI is built upon statutes that aim at establishing strong statistical relationships between countries through research, publications, and teachings by professional statisticians.

These collaborations and overlaps have occurred most commonly over statistical ethics to be used worldwide, as well as having members be a part of both organizations at some point in time.

Current Special Interest Groups are: ISI publishes the following journals: The Karl Pearson Prize was commenced by the ISI in 2013 to acknowledge contributions, which must be a research article or book published within the last three decades, on statistical theory, methodology, practice, or applications.

[9] Peter McCullagh and John Nelder were the winners of the inaugural Karl Pearson Prize "for their monograph Generalized Linear Models (1983)".