An ongoing effort is verification of publication contents and secondary bibliographic sources against the database, with the goals being data accuracy and to improve the coverage of speculative fiction to 100 percent.

Several speculative fiction author bibliographies were posted to the USENET newsgroup rec.arts.sf.written from 1984 to 1994 by Jerry Boyajian, Gregory J. E. Rawlins and John Wenn.

In 1995, Al von Ruff and "Ahasuerus" (a prolific contributor to rec.arts.sf.written) started to construct the ISFDB, based on experience with the SFCH and the bibliographic format finalized by John Wenn.

[4][6][7] The ISFDB was first located at an ISP in Champaign Illinois, but it suffered from constrained resources in disk space and database support, which limited its growth.

[8][9] In February 2003, it began to be hosted by The Cushing Library Science Fiction and Fantasy Research Collection and Institute for Scientific Computation at Texas A&M University.

[16] In late 2022, the ISFDB faced public criticism for refusing to update its entry for the transgender author Lee Mandelo to reflect his new name.

[3] In April 2009, Zenkat wrote that "it is widely considered one of the most authoritative sources about Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror literature available on the Internet".

He concludes by calling it "a tremendous asset to researchers and fans of speculative fiction", stating that no other online bibliographies have "the breadth, depth, and sophistication of this database".