ISIDORE was created in 2009 by the CNRS, using its "Adonis large equipment" facilities, with a major participation from french companies Antidot, Sword and Mondeca.

Conceived by the TGE Adonis team following a study on the creation of a portal in humanities and social sciences, the site was started in 2009 and offered[2] in Beta version from 2010.

The latest version, extensively redesigned in 2018 with the help of teacher-researchers,[4] offers a connected space forming a vast scientific network.

ISIDORE harvests metadata and fulltext documents indexes them as digital data by enriching them with scientific terms and references (like thesaurus, taxonomies, etc.)

Enhancements resulting from semantic processing are accessible both via the platform's website (search engine functionalities) and via its API to be used by software like Zotero.