We envision that the results and methods of this work will be of use to the community of historians from a methodological point of view, mainly to show the potential hiding in big chemistry data, which could only be analysed through context-specific methodologies such as those devised here and in other previous works . Chemists and educators may also benefit from this work from an epistemological and pedagogical perspective, as this represents a comeback to the compound-based vision of the periodic system.