Gatterer was a pioneer of "universal history", and with fellow Göttingen historian August Ludwig von Schlözer (1735–1809) he was instrumental in developing a modern, hermeneutical approach to history. He believed that historical events needed to be systematically arranged by describing their causal relationships, rather than simply providing a chronology of events. Gatterer used the phrase nexus rerum universalis to represent "a universal connection of things in the world".
