The proceedings of the International Congress of Phonetic Sciences (ICPhS) reflect the research in phonetics since 1932. Some important metadata like language of the authors for writing the papers, number of papers, geographical distribution of authors as well as paper format and structure shows substantial differences between the early period in the 1930s and the recent ICPhS meetings. As an example, for a historical research object, the introduction of 'coarticulation' as a core term in phonetics was analyzed with a focus on the early phase of ICPhS. This type of research was enabled by a digitization project of ICPhS proceedings at Saarland University.