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• Introduction

Descriptive bibliography

Critical bibliography.

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• Verywell Mind - How to Write a Bibliography in APA Format
• University of California - Bibliography
• Limestone University - What is a Bibliography?
• CORE - Bibliography (General)
• The Canadian Encyclopedia - Bibliography
• bibliography - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

bibliography , the systematic cataloging, study, and description of written and printed works, especially books.

Bibliography is either (1) the listing of works according to some system (descriptive, or enumerative, bibliography) or (2) the study of works as tangible objects (critical, or analytical , bibliography). The word bibliography is also used to describe the product of those activities: bibliographies may take the form of organized information about a particular author’s works, about all (or selected) works on a given subject, or about a particular country or period. A bibliography may also consist of meticulous descriptions of the physical features of a number of books, including the paper, binding , printing, typography, and production processes used. These bibliographies are then used by students and scholars to gain access to information about material for study in a given area and to help establish such facts about a book or other printed work as its date of publication, its authenticity, and its value for textual study.

The primary purpose of descriptive bibliography is to organize detailed information culled from a mass of materials in a systematic way so that others can have access to useful information. In the earliest bibliographies, the organizing principle was simply that of compiling all the works of a given writer into a list created either by the works’ author (autobibliography) or by an author’s biographer. The Greek physician Galen (2nd century) and St. Bede the Venerable (8th century) were among the earliest Western compilers of autobibliographies. One of the first biographers to include bibliographies in his lives of church writers was St. Jerome in his 4th-century De viris illustribus (“Concerning Famous Men”).

Bibliography was manageable when books were still manuscripts copied out in the scriptoria of medieval European monasteries. After the invention of printing in the 15th century, however, books proliferated, and organizing information about them became both more necessary and more practical. As early as 1545 the idea of a universal bibliography that would include all past and present writers roused the Swiss writer Conrad Gesner to compile his Bibliotheca universalis (1545; Universal Bibliography ). Three years later he published a second volume, Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium libri XXI (“Twenty-one Books of Encyclopaedias or Universal Divisions [of Knowledge]”), in which the entries, arranged alphabetically in the earlier volume, were rearranged under 21 subject headings. Gesner’s attempts at both universality and classification earned him the title “the father of bibliography.”

The vast numbers of books published in the 20th century required elaborate methods of classification, with the Dewey Decimal Classification , the Library of Congress Classification (based on its collection), and the Universal Decimal Classification becoming the most widely used. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the widespread use of computers in processing this systematized information revived the possibility of creating a universal bibliography.

Critical, or analytical, bibliography began early in the 20th century when scholars developed techniques to study the physical features of books. They were first successful at dating, identifying, and authenticating the earliest printed books, known as incunabula , which date from the second half of the 15th century. Methods pioneered at the British Museum and the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library were accurate in assigning early hand-printed books not only to countries and towns but to specific printers. Such methods were later extended to the study of the physical features of machine-printed books. The application of the techniques of critical bibliography to rare editions, questionable chronologies, and false editions has had important results for textual criticism .

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9 Bibliographical Sources: Use and Evaluation

Vara Lakshmi Rudrabhatla

I.  Objectives

The objectives of the module are

•    To introduce the concept of bibliographies

•    Describe the branches and types of bibliographies and their characteristics

•    Explain the National bibliographies and their importance with examples

•    Examine the trends in Web environment and the emergence of Webliographies

II.   Learning Outcome

After reading this module the student

•    Understands the evolution and meaning of bibliographies

•    Categorizes the branches and types of bibliographies

•    Explains the vital role of National bibliographies and bibliographic control apparatus

•    Able to compile a bibliography / Webliography

III.   Module Structure

1.     Introduction

2.     Evolution of the Concept

3.     Definition

3.1.  Distinction between Bibliographies, Catalogues and Indexes

3.2  Use of Bibliographies

3.3.  Scope

3.4.  Aims and Functions of Bibliographies

3.5   Arrangement

4.     Branches of Bibliography

4.1    Systematic / Enumerative

4.2   Analytical or Critical

4.2.1  Descriptive

4.2.2  Historical

4.2.3  Textual

5.      Types of Bibliographies

5.1   Incunabula or Book rarities

5.2. Trade Bibliographies

5.3  Selected or Eclectic Bibliographies

5.4  Subject Bibliographies

5.5  Author Bibliography or Bio Bibliography

5.6  Bibliography of Bibliographies

5.7  Bibliophilic Bibliographies

5.8  Universal or General Bibliography

5.9  National Bibliographies

5.9.1   Indian National Bibliography

5.9.2  National Union Catalo, USA

6.       Compilation of Bibliographies

7.        Webliography

8.       Evaluation of Bibliographies

9.       Summary

10.     References

1. Introduction

Bibliography means, most commonly, a list of books, films, videos, etc. but in a technical sense it can be the science of the transmission of literary documents. Bibliographies are systematically prepared guides or keys or pathfinders to the literature. Scholars and scientists depend on bibliographic sources to draw an overview of a subject and to find a document; otherwise they are bound to miss some part of literature. Compilation of a bibliography is a process or technique that belongs to the whole of scholarship and the world of learning.

With the invention of printing press and particularly after the internationalization of printing industries, there has been a tremendous growth of literature in all branches of learning by what is known as ‘information explosion’. This increased growth caused problems to scientists to keep themselves abreast of current developments, without a proper key or aid to access the mass of literature. This has lead to the emergence of bibliographical tools as means of controlling the literature of the world. Significant contributors to the field include W. W. G reg, Fredson Bowers, Philip Gaskell, and G. Thomas Tanselle.

2. Evolution of the Concept

The origin of bibliographies can be traced back to ancient Assyrian and Greek civilizations of 7th century B.C., when lists of clay tablets were prepared. Alexandrian library maintained subject lists of books. Before invention of printing, the word was used in the sense of copying. After 1763, the meaning was changed from the ‘writing of books’ to ‘writing about books’. Between 17th and 18th centuries the principles, concepts, practices and varieties of bibliography were laid down (P.Padhi, 1994). By 20th century beginning the bibliographies were clearly defined and the methods described.

Some earlier attempts in the evolution of the concept of bibliographies are:

1545 – First attempt for a bibliography was made by Konrad Gesner, a Zurich Physician. He prepared a list of scholarly publications in the world and named it as ‘Bibliotheca Universalis’. Though claimed as universal bibliography, it included books in three languages viz. Latin, Greek   and Hebrew. During the same period, Fair Catalogues or Mass Catalogues of books exhibited at famous book fairs at Frankfurt (1564-74) and at Leipzig (1595-1860) were developed.

1719 – Lists of private collections were also called as bibliography, for example, Michael Maittaire’s ‘Annals Typographia’, arranged chronologically listed information about printers and their publications.

1763 – The ‘Bibliographic Instructive: rare books’ by G.E. Bure, was not just a list but gave essential bibliographic examination. Henry Bradshaw of Cambridge University established this method of investigation into the physical nature of the book, its manufacturing and history. This was popularized as analytical method. Similar techniques were established to incunabula, 18th century plate books, etc.

1908 – British Museum had published first descriptive bibliography ‘Catalogue of books in the 15th century’. It recorded in predetermined order all relevant bibliographic elements of each document.

1909 – A. W. Pollard published textual bibliography on ‘Shakespeare Folios and Quartos: a Study of bibliographies of Shakespeare Plays.’ He made detailed examination of related works for their textual authenticity.

Thus by the start of 20th century four types of bibliographies, viz. Systematic/Enumerative, Historical/Analytical, Descriptive and Textual bibliographies were in use.

We can summarize the historical development of bibliographies as follows:

•    Early bibliographies were trade lists or trade catalogues;

•    Later attempts were made to compile universal bibliography; and subject wise lists of books with descriptive notes;

•    During 18th century, subject wise listing and critical bibliography;

•    19th and 20th centuries developed subject wise listing of books, periodicals and periodical articles called as documentation lists.

The library profession is mainly concerned with systematic bibliographies and the compilers are either bibliographers or librarians.

3. Definition

The term bibliography was derived from two Greek words – ‘Biblion’ and ‘Graphein’, i.e., writing of books/copying of books/mechanical reproducing. However, it now means a ‘list of books’.

Oxford English Dictionary defines “Bibliography as a list of books of a particular author, printer or country, or of those dealing with any particular theme; the literature of subject.”  Louise Shore defines it as, “Bibliography is a list of written, printed or otherwise produced records of civilization which may include books, serials, pictures, maps, films, recordings, museum objects, manuscripts and any other media of communication. The list of such records is bibliographies and the art of preparing them is bibliography.”

A.L.A.   Glossary of Library and Information Science defines bibliography as “A list of works, documents or bibliographic items, usually with some relationship between them, e.g., by a given author, on a given subject, or published in a given place, and differing from catalogue in that its contents are not restricted to the holding of a single collection, library or group of libraries.”

According to V.W.Clapp, it is “The systematic listing of records of human communication”. S.R.Ranganathan viewed it as “a list of documents listed together for some purpose. The purpose is to bring to the attention of the reader an exhaustive and selective list of documents relevant to his pursuit of study or enquiry”.

Therefore, a b ibliography is a systematic listing, either indicative or comprehensive, of works:

•    by a particular author

•    on a particular subject

•    published in a particular country

•    published in a specified period

•    mentioned in, or relevant to, a particular work (a bibliography of this type, sometimes called a reference list should normally appear at the end of any paper in scientific literature )

3.1  Distinction between Bibliography, Catalogue and Index

•  Bibliographies differ from library catalogs by including all relevant publications rather than items actually found in a particular library. However, some national libraries’ catalogues also serve as national bibliographies, as they contain (almost) all their countries’ publications.

•  Catalogue is a list of books and other items arranged in a definite order. It records, describes and indexes the resources of a collection, a library or group of libraries, where as bibliography provides single access point to information, generally the first author.

• An index provides multiple access points to the document through several concepts treated in the document. Generally bibliographies focus on macro thought, i.e., books etc. while indexes aims to cover micro thought, i.e., primary literature. Further, an index achieves exhaustiveness but bibliography does  not.

1.  Key to a given collection

2.  Can serve as a bibliography

3.  Provides physical access to documents

4.  Tools for libraries

5.  Must be comprehensive

6.  Distribution difficult (if in card form)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1.        Key to literary sources on a subject

2.        Can’t serve as a catalogue

3.        Helps to know existence of documents

4.        Tools for scholars / scientists

5.        May be comprehensive or selective

6.        It can be distributed

3.2  Use of bibliographies

The bibliographies have made a significant contribution in the communication and utility of scientific information. In the earlier times, the scholars used to browse, scan the published literature in their field and keep abreast of the current developments. With the proliferation of literature it became difficult for them to do so. Hence bibliographies have a vital role to retrieve relevant information and thus save the time of the user. They bridge the gap between the original document and the user acting as a key to the treasure of primary knowledge. The uses can be summarized as:

•    Helps to locate information on the subject in question

•    Provide a means for verifying such items as authors’ name, complete title, place of publication, edition, etc.

•    If annotated, indicate the scope of the work and its usefulness.

•    Gives more information than available in catalogue.

•    Groups work according to form, location and period.

•    Helps to find out basic and best books on a subject.

The use of bibliographies depends on their scope. The scope varies depending on the type – it can be universal, national, complete partial, comprehensive or a reading list.

3.4  Aims and Functions of Bibliographies

The UNESCO and the Library of Congress, in their survey report, 1950 stated the following aims and functions of bibliography:

1. Its aim is to make it possible for intellectual workers, to learn of publications of recording the developments in their fields of interest not only in their own countries but also throughout the world.

2. Promote the effectiveness of a particular project in research.

3. Contribute to the cultural development and enjoyment, which are derived from records of learning and culture.

4. Assist in promoting useful applications of existing knowledge and making the applications which have been developed in one country, widely known to all countries.

Quick and easy access to information is vital to the development of various fields of knowledge. In this respect, bibliography plays an important role.

•    A scholar can very well know about the existence of a document(s) in a particular field of knowledge.

•    He can also identify a document by knowing its bibliographical details.

•    It can serve as book selection tool for the librarians.

•    In well-established libraries, the bibliographies are frequently consulted for verification of bibliographical details and the location of material.

•    It is useful for general reader as well as for research scholar. The primary function of bibliography is a reference tool. It helps;

•    to locate a book of known or not much known author

•    to locate books in any literary form like poems, plays, short stories, etc.

•    to study and compile bibliographies on a topic by researcher

•    to provide readers with a list of current books on a specific topic

•    to select basic books for children or youth in a library

•    to provide bibliographical information of a particular book.

3.5  Arrangement

A bibliography may be arranged by author, date, topic or some other scheme. Annotated bibliographies give descriptions about how each source is useful to an author in constructing a paper or argument. Creating these blurbs, usually a few sentences long, establishes a summary for and expresses the relevance of each source prior to writing.

4.  Branches of Bibliographies

The major branches of bibliographies are:

4.1  Systematic/Enumerative

It is a systematic listing and description of books according to some system or reference plan, for example, by author, by subject, or by date. The implication is that the listings will be short, usually providing only the author’s name, the book’s title, and date and place of publication. Bowers (1949) refers to enumerative bibliography as a procedure that identifies books in “specific collections or libraries”, in a specific discipline, by an author, printer, or period of production. He refers to descriptive bibliography as the systematic description of a book as a material or physical artifact (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography). Enumerative bibliography (systematic bibliography) attempts to record and list, rather than to describe minutely. Little or no information is likely to be provided about physical aspects of the book such as paper, type, illustrations, or binding.

•    A library’s card catalog is an example of an enumerative bibliography, and so is the list at the back of a book of works consulted,

•    Its main function is recording, i.e., listing of works with bibliographical details.

•    The purpose is to disseminate information and guide the user in selecting and accessing information.

•    Arrangement of entries is alphabetical.

•    Most used reference tool and can also be called as reference bibliography.

E.g. Books in Print; Subject Guide to Books in Print.

4.2  Analytical or Critical

First started by Henry Bradshaw (1831-1886), it involves the study of books as physical objects; the details of their production, the effects of the method of manufacture on the text. These are concerned with the whole study of the physical book- its history, appearance, and the influence of the manner of production on its text. Analytical bibliography, the cornerstone of descriptive bibliography, investigates the printing and all physical features of a book that yield evidence establishing a book’s history and transmission. Analytical bibliography may deal with  the history of printers and booksellers, with the description of paper or bindings, or with textual matters arising during the progression from writer’s manuscript to published book.

•    Examines books as tangible objects. Life study of an extant book as physical object.

•    Studies the book from half title page to printer’s colophon.

•    More applicable in manuscripts and incunabula as it deals with standard and correctness of book.

E.g. Hain Luding F.T. Reportica bibliographian as annual. 2v. 1826 – 1838.

Early Indian Prints: an evaluation from William Carey. Historical Library of Serampore College, 1962.

Analytical bibliography (sometimes called critical bibliography) may be divided into several types, as follows:

So, by-products of analytical bibliography are descriptive, historical and textual .

Descriptive bibliography starts where analytical ends. It is concerned with the application of analytical bibliography to the external form of the book. It is concerned with the physical description of books. How is the book put together? What sort of typeset is used and what kind of paper? How are the illustrations incorporated into the book? How is it bound? Like the textual bibliographer, the descriptive bibliographer must have a good working knowledge of the state of the technology of the period in order to describe a book’s physical appearance both accurately and economically.

•    Descriptive bibliographies are books that give full physical descriptions of the books they list, enabling to distinguish one edition from another and to identify significant variations within a single edition.

•    Describes each rare item in hand and state to what extent it differs from the ideal copy, i.e., the perfect state of the book, aesthetic features, etc.

•    Good descriptive bibliographies are therefore indispensable to book collectors, whatever their fields of interest and whatever the time period their collections cover.

•    Descriptive bibliographies as a scholarly product usually include information on the following  aspect of a given book as a material object:

•   “Format and Collation/Pagination Statement – a conventional, symbolic formula that describes the book block in terms of sheets, folds, quires, signatures, and pages

•   The collation, which follows the format, is the statement of the order and size of the gatherings.

•   Binding – a description of the binding techniques (generally for books printed after 1800)

•   Title Page Transcription – a transcription of the title page, including rule lines and ornaments

•   Contents – a listing of the contents (by section) in the book

•   Paper – a description of the physical properties of the paper, including production process, an account of chain-line measurements, and a description of watermarks (if present)

•   Illustrations – a description of the illustrations found in the book, including printing process (e.g. woodblock, intaglio, etc.), measurements, and locations in the text

•   Presswork – miscellaneous details gleaned from the text about its production

•   Copies Examined – an enumeration of the copies examined, including those copies’ location (i.e. belonging to which library or collector)”

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography)

E.g. A Bibliography of English printed Drama to the Restoration up to1660.

Historical bibliography may range from technological history to the history of art of making books. It is concerned with the evidence the books provide about culture and society. It is the study f books as objects, i.e., concerned with history of making books, for example, history of writing, printing of materials, binding, etc.

•    History of making books – writing, printing, illustrations, binding, etc.

•    Shows the social and cultural developments.

•    Evolution of writing, printing, binding etc.

E.g. Longstreth, Richard, Compiler. Historical Bibliography of architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism in United States since World War II. Updated in 2010 (http://www.docstoc.com/docs/78051390/A-HISTORICAL-BIBLIOGRAPHY-OF)

This is applied to study the inner/literary content of documents. Handwriting is often difficult to decipher; compositors make occasional mistakes, and proofreaders sometimes fail to catch them; but (especially in the period before about 1800) we often have only the printed book to tell us what the author intended. Therefore, textual bibliography indicates the relationship between the printed text as we have it before us, and that text as conceived by its author.

•    Textual bibliography (sometimes called textual criticism) tries to provide with the most accurate text of a writer’s work.

•    The equipment of the textual bibliographer is both a profound knowledge of the work of the writer being edited (and of his or her period) and an equally profound knowledge of contemporary printing and publishing practices.

•    The purpose is to determine the effect of writing or printing process, its completeness, variations among editions, etc.

•    It requires a literary critic.

E.g. Henrey, Blanche. Botanical and Horticultural Literature before 1800: Comprising a history and bibliography of Botanical and Horticultural books printed in England, Scotland and Ireland from the earliest times to 1800. London, Oxford University Press, 1975.

“In addition to viewing bibliographic study as being composed of four interdependent approaches: enumerative, descriptive, analytical, and textual, Bowers notes two further sub- categories of research, namely, historical bibliography and aesthetic bibliography. Both historical bibliography, which involves the investigation of printing practices, tools, and related documents, and aesthetic bibliography, which examines the art of designing type and books, are often employed by analytical bibliographers.” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliography )

5.  Types of Bibliographies

Bibliographies can be categorized in different ways.

They can also be categorized, according to Pithambar Padhi, on the basis of the following characteristics:

Besides the above, bibliographies are of the following types:

a) An Annotated bibliography is usually a note added to an entry in author bibliography to elucidate, evaluate or describe the subject and contents of a document. It  has entries which  include ” … note[s] … intended to describe, explain, or evaluate the publication referred to” (ALA Glossary, p. 8). It requires skills for concise exposition and succinct analysis. It contains two distinct parts, namely, the bibliographical citation and a brief descriptive paragraph including the salient features of the article or subject of the text. This indicates to the reader the relevance and accuracy of the document as per the reader’s information needs.

E.g. Waite, L. J., Goldschneider, F. K., & Witsberger, C. (1986). Non-family living and the erosion of traditional family orientations  among  young  adults. American  Sociological Review, 51 (4), 541-554.

The authors, researchers at the Rand Corporation and Brown University, use data from the National Longitudinal Surveys of Young Women and Young Men to test their hypothesis that non-family living by young adults alters their attitudes, values, plans, and expectations, moving them away from their belief in traditional sex roles. They find their hypothesis strongly supported in young females, while the effects were fewer in studies of young males. Increasing the time away from parents before marrying increased individualism, self-sufficiency, and changes in attitudes about families. In contrast, an earlier study by Williams cited below shows no significant gender differences in sex role attitudes as a result of nonfamily living. (Example uses APA Citation style)

b) A Current bibliography records currently or recently published material, with the intent of reporting the recent literature as it appears. It is an index to new publications in print for a defined period. The lists may be compiled for a subject or for a form like books, periodicals, music, etc.

E.g . The Orion Center’s On-Line Dead Sea Scrolls Bibliography posts books, articles and reviews related to the Dead Sea Scrolls from 1995 to the present. The bibliography was initiated and maintained by Dr. Avital Pinnick from 1995–2000. David Emanuel compiled the Bibliography from 2000–2002; it is currently overseen by Dr. Ruth Clements, with the help of research assistants Shelly Zilberfarb Eshkoli (2003–2004), Nadav Sharon (2004–2009) and Hannah Wortzman (2009–present).

c) A National Bibliography is “A bibliography of documents published in a particular country and … documents … written in the language of the country” ( ALA Glossary , p.151). It tries to list as comprehensively as possible the county’s publication output. It is a window to the literature of and on a country. The national bibliographies have a long history and are more popular since 19th century. The national bibliographies underwent tremendous changes with the advent of electronic databases. Now national bibliography of a country is accessible online and is published on DVDs.

E.g. British National Bibliography : The national bibliography records the publishing activity of the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland and as such is a measure of their intellectual output. This has traditionally included printed publications and more recently has been extended to electronic publications following the extension of legal deposit to this class of material in 2003.

d) A Retrospective bibliography “… lists documents or parts of documents, such as articles, published in previous years, as distinct from a current bibliography …. Retrospective bibliographies are frequently divided into two types … [one of which is] research-oriented, [and] are intended as jumping-off points for those doing research in the topic covered …” (ALA Glossary, p.194). Therefore, a retrospective bibliography lists works that have a common element like subject, and published during a particular period in the past. The retrospective bibliographies have two themes, firstly, research oriented, where retrospective lists are prepared to open any missing publications. And secondly, Didactic, which aims to teach the reader what is already know (by others) in a specific subject area.

E.g . Charles Evans. American Bibliography. A Chronological Dictionary of All Books, Pamphlets and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 Down to and Including the Year [1800] (Chicago: The Blakely Press for the Author, 1943-1955). 13 vols.

e)  A Serial bibliography appears at fixed intervals of time, e.g., weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually, and has as its mission the reporting of titles, often both book titles and article titles (as well as dissertations, book reviews, pamphlets, and other types of material) as they appear.

There are many types of bibliographies and the leading bibliographies differ slightly in the names assigned to its various branches. These types of bibliographies are concerned with listing of books and other reading material in some systematic order. The various types are as follows:

5.1  Incunabula or Book rarities

This type of bibliography lists the early printed works up to 15th century. It was considered as a cradle period of printing and the systematic order in arranging various parts of a book was not followed.

E.g. Proctor, Robert. An index to the early printed books in the British Museum from the invention of printing to the year 1500, with notes of these in the Bodlein Library. 2 vols. London, Kegan Paul, 1898-99; reprinted with four supplements and Konrad Burger’s index, London, 1960.

5.2  Trade Bibliography

Large publishing houses engaged in book trade bring out such type of bibliographies. The list includes commercial publications available for sale. It helps in the selection and acquisition of recently published documents. Otherwise called as trade catalogues or publishers catalogues, these bibliographies are brought out by the publishers to market their products. These are also utilized as book selection tools for librarians. Besides they reveal the current publications along with the availability details that help the librarians and users to select and acquire documents. These are available in print as well as electronic databases.

E.g. Books In Print, R.R. Bowker, U.S.A.; Indian Books In Print,  etc.

5.3  Selected or Eclectic Bibliography

This kind of bibliography is concerned with the listing of only selected and the best books. The bibliography is prepared taking into criteria like the age of the readers or subject choice etc.

E.g. Dickinson. World’s Best Books: Homer to Hemingway. New York, Wilson, 1953.

Sonnenschein, W.S. The best books: A readers’ guide, 3rd ed. London, Routledge, 1910 – 35, 6 Vol.

5.4. Subject Bibliography

Subject bibliographies are the listings of publications on a subject or discipline. The list contains information about everything published on a subject. It is a comprehensive list of all books, periodical articles, pamphlets and other reading material in a particular subject. The books listed are supposed to be the best books available on the subject and thus help the researcher as a tool to get awareness and study all relevant documents on a subject. Subject bibliographies get outdated soon and the books listed have little value after some time due to rapid changes in the subject and emergence of new books embodying new subject components.

E.g. Bateson, F.W. Ed. The Cambridge bibliography of English literature. 4 vols. Supplement (v.5) edited by G.Watson. Cambridge University Press, 1940.

Kistler, J. (2000) Animal rights: A subject guide, bibliography, and internet companion. Westport, CT: Greenwood

Elizabeth S. Aversa. The Humanities: Selective Guide to Information Sources, 5th Ed. Libraries Unlimited, 2000

5.5  Author Bibliography or Bio-bibliography

The bibliography prepared combining an account of a person’s life with a discussion of works written by or about that person is called author or bio-bibliography. It records books, articles, etc. written by an author or attributed to him and the material written about the author by others.

E.g. Sharma, Jagdish. Mahatma Gandhi: a descriptive bibliography. 2nd ed. Delhi, S. Chand, 1968.

Fisher, James. Spencer Tracy: A Bio-Bibliography (Bio-Bibliographies in the Performing Arts). Greenwood, 1994

It is a list of bibliographies listed in a systematic and logical order. It includes all types of bibliographies published in different fields.

E.g. Besterman, Theodore. A world bibliography of bibliographies and of bibliographical catalogues, calendar, abstracts, digests, indexes and the like 4th ed. Geneva, Societas Bibliographica, 1965-67. 5 vols.

It is a list of books collected by book lovers for their rarity or first editions or special physical features or first editions of a celebrated author.

E.g. Johnson, Merie de Vore, “American first edition”, 4th ed. revised N. Y. R R Bowker, 1942.

A Universal bibliography is the survey of all records of civilization in all fields of knowledge and is not restricted to one place, time, language, subject or author. It lists documents belonging to all kinds of material, produced in all countries, in every language, at any time and on all themes. In fact there is no universal bibliography as such but compilation of published catalogues of great national libraries may be the nearest approach to the concept.

According to S. R. Ranganathan, a bibliography to be universal should include all published material, whether books or parts of them or periodicals or articles in them, or combination of them on all subjects in all languages in all counties, at all times.

Constraints in compiling a universal bibliography:

•    Growth of knowledge

•    Growth of literature

•    Unpublished literature

•    Out of print or rare books

•    Languages

•    Format – arrangement suitable to all minute subjects

•    Lack of adequate resources and manpower Attempts made for universal bibliography:

a) Konrad Gesner – Developed in 1543 Bibliotheca Universalis. T consists of 12000 books in learned languages, i.e., Greek, Latin, and Hebrew, etc. The arrangement was alphabetical by name of the author. In 1548, the bibliography was rearranged subject- wise and published as ‘Pendectarum Sie Partitionum Universalium’. In 1555, an appendix to Bibliotheca was published adding 3000 books. It did not include books in vernacular language, therefore, although there were about 50000 books at that time, it included only 15000 books.

b) Messkatalog – of Frankfurt and Leipzing book fairs were published in 1564 – 1749 and 1595 – 1860. It included books published in all European cities and European languages and few books from outside Europe.

c) 17th Century – French man Abbe Drouyn, Religious advisor to Paris Parliament, prepared Universal Bibliography based on available catalogues and compiled 321 manuscript volumes.

d) 18th century – Two Italian scholars, Abbot Marucelli and Father Savanarola, attempted to use Gesner’s plan. Their attempt came out as parts in printed form.

e)  19th Century – attempts made by Barnvell, Bannanges, Cole, Crestadaro, Panjoru, Dilke, Ermun et al. Middle of 19th century few attempts were made for universal bibliography but more attention was paid on developing catalogue of British Museum and plan for stereotyping library catalogue by Charles C. Jewett in U.S.A.

f)  End of 19th century was a landmark in the development of universal bibliographies. In 1895, Paul Otlet and Henry La Fontaine submitted their proposal for universal bibliography at the International Conference on Bibliography and got it approved. A card catalogue was set up at Brussel’s Institute of Bibliography (later FID). Repertoire Bibliographique Universal was to record every document published anywhere in the world. By 1914, 13,000,000 catalogue cards were developed. Entries were made under classified order using Universal Decimal Classification. After that, the bibliography was discontinued because of large filing areas.

After the 1st World war, the emphasis on universal bibliography declined. After World War II, UNESCO initiated Universal Bibliographical Control and insisted on National bibliographies. It has also developed Universal Availability of Publications (UAP).

Problems: There are several problems in the compilation of a universal bibliography, which include:

•    Completeness not possible because – information on many books not available, or only title is known;

•    At times, only information is available but not the books;

•    Huge number of books;

•    Too many languages;

•    Requires too much space in print or card;

•    Arrangement   of entries is a problem because of different pronunciations of names in different languages;

•    Lots of manpower is required for the compilation of bibliography.

Alternatives: As an alternate, other methods were adopted such as:

•    A selective universal catalogue,

•    National bibliographies of all nations can be maintained, and

•    Collection of published catalogue of national libraries is a good alternative.

Finally it was felt that universal bibliography is not necessary because it is unusable due to bulk and large amount of information may not be necessary.

E.g. Library of Congress. A catalogue of books represented by Library of Congress printed cards. Issued up to July 31, 1942. 167 volumes.

Catalog Cards printed by the Library of Congress from August 1, 1942 to December 31, 1947. Supplement 42 volumes.

Although the national bibliographies have 400 years of history, the term ‘national bibliography’ was adopted only about of 100 years ago. A national bibliography should record all documents published or unpublished, irrespective of the agency issuing them, covering trade as well as non trade items, irrespective of the form of material, language, subject or time of publication.

Dr S.R. Ranganathan recognizes the following categories of national bibliography: “1. List of all books published in a country.

2.  List of all books on a country.

3.  Lit of all books published by all the citizens of the country.

4.  Lit of all books published on all the citizens of the country, and

5.  Any one combination of the above.”

Though it emphasizes on the total output of a nation taken together, in practice, it is restricted to material, time, space and origin. Hence, national bibliography can be defined as a source that attempts to list, as comprehensively as possible, the publications of a particular country during a specific period. “Publications” here, can refer to most any kind of intellectual output, regardless of its format. A national bibliography is considered as national heritage. It has more systematic approach to organization of material.

E.g. Indian National Bibliography. Calcutta, Central Reference library, 1957- Monthly. British National bibliography. London, British Library, 1950- Weekly.

The national bibliographies are compiled on the basis of material received by the national library under the copyright acts as promulgated in various countries. A depository law is legislation requiring publishers to provide a copy of each piece of published material for a designated repository. Such legislation varies from country to country from a voluntary deposit by publisher to a mandatory deposit often associated with countries with extreme censorship.

With the advent of electronic databases, national bibliography has been undergoing a tremendous amount of change. Difficulties related to access have been all but eliminated in many cases. In this regard, a variety of formats are appearing. In some countries, such as the Czech Republic, the national bibliography no longer is issued in paper form at all, but is published as a DVD. Others still have only their paper edition. Online catalogues of national libraries now serve the function  of  a  national  bibliography.  Many  countries  have  online  versions  of  their  national  bibliographies. All of these new formats are giving a new significance to the national bibliography as a resource for scholars.

5.9.1  Indian National Bibliography .

Quarterly, October 1957 – 1963; Monthly, January 1964 -. Calcutta, Central Reference Library, 1959 – . With annual cumulations.

Indian National Bibliography Committee appointed by Government of India, decided to have an authoritative bibliographical record of current Indian publications in all major Indian languages. It records material received in the National Library, Calcutta, under the Delivery of Books and Newspapers (Public Libraries) Act, 1956 to include newspapers. As per the Act, every publisher has to deliver a copy of their publications to National Library, Calcutta and three  other repository libraries within 30 days from the date of publication. It is mainly responsible for the implementation of two schemes, viz.

•    Compilation and Publication of the Indian National Bibliography (both Roman Script and in the respective language scripts). This is a monthly record of current Indian publications in 14 languages including English based on receipts in the National Library, Kolkata: and

•    Compilation and Publication of Index Indiana (in Roman Script), an Index to select articles appearing in current Indian periodicals presently in six languages.

On the basis of the recommendations of an Expert Group in the Ministry, the publication of the Indian National Bibliography and Index Indiana has been fully computerized. The monthly volumes of INB, since June 2000 appear regularly.

The INB records, since its inception in 1958 have been retro converted in to electronic data. The whole data along with recent records will be made available online very soon.

Periodicity : It started publication from October – December 1957 and was published as quarterly up to 1963; afterwards, it is published monthly.

Scope : It includes all publications produced in the following major Indian languages, viz. Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sanskrit, Sindhi, Tamil, Telugu, Urdu and English. The following categories of publications are excluded:

a. Musical scores

c. Periodicals  and  Newspapers  (except  the  first  issue  of  new  periodical  or  periodical published under new title)

d. Keys and guides to textbooks

e. Ephemeral items

Initially it was divided into two parts – Part I covering general publications and Part II covering Government publications and each part had two sections – alphabetical and classified. Since 1973, the two parts were combined into one with two sections – alphabetical and classified.

Arrangement : The arrangement in the classified section is in classified order according to  D.D.C.  Colon Class numbers are also given at the bottom corner of each entry.

Entry : Each entry consists of class number, author’s name, full title, place of publication, publisher’s name, year of publication, pages, nature of illustrations, size, nature of binding, price, series, and annotations where ever necessary. The second section is alphabetical index, giving author, title, subject in one alphabetical order. For subject headings, chain procedure has been followed.

Due to variety of scripts prevalent in India, it was decided to use Roman script (English) for the bibliography. Names of authors of books and titles of books in Indian languages are transliterated into Roman script with diacritical marks and then arranged in one alphabetical order under each class. The language of the book is denoted by symbols given at the left hand bottom corner of each entry.

Criticism :

•    There is a great time lag in the publication of INB. There was no publication of the bibliography from 1968-70, and these were later published as annuals. Even now the publication is too much delayed.

•    It is costly for any library to purchase. Hence INB is not serving its purpose.

•    INB records all publications in regional languages in Roman script. Many Indian readers do not recognize Roman script and cannot get benefit from it.

•    To overcome this problem, separate annual bibliographies for each of the Indian languages in their respective scripts are prepared and edited by Central Reference Library and published by respective State governments. However, these are not being published regularly.

5.9.2  National Union Catalog, USA

Although there is no official American national bibliography, the Library of Congress has been authorized to use the National Union Catalog (NUC) for that role. It began in 1876 and is very comprehensive, with listings from more than one thousand North American libraries. This catalogue contains many items not published in the United States, including foreign language titles. The NUC is very useful for finding the location of materials available in American libraries and what can be borrowed through interlibrary loans. UNESCO website provides information on National Library Catalogs.

6.  Compilation of Bibliographies

Compilation of bibliographies may be done in anticipation or on demand. In any case, the primary requirement for compilation is subject knowledge. Earlier times witnessed the subject experts as bibliographers as in the case of indexes, reviews, etc. However, presently trained LIS professionals are ready to accept the task and compile a bibliography with efficiency. Generally, the reference section of a library is bestowed with the preparation of bibliography service. Here  the basic steps of compilation of bibliography are presented briefly and the details have been covered in the Module on Information Services.

Krishan Kumar identified the following steps for the preparation of bibliographies:

1. Planning – involves definition of the subject and its scope; items of information to be included; kinds of entries and their arrangement.

2. Search  for  documents  –  from  catalogues,  books,  periodicals  and  other  micro documents.

3. Selection – of items to be included in the bibliography if it is selective/ elective and not   comprehensive.

4. Preparation of entries with bibliographical information in accordance to the standard catalogue code.

5. Arranging the entries in classified or alphabetical or both as per the requirement.

6. Preparation of bibliography in typed, mimeographed or print form.

7.  Webliographies

Librarians are familiar with the compilation of bibliographies for the bibliographical control of print documents. Now similar control mechanism is required for electronic documents named as webliography, a term coined by Dr. James Frankel in 2000. The webliography presents a wide range of electronic resources related to a specific subject that are freely available on the Internet. Webliography denotes an enumerative list of hypertext links surrounding a common subject or theme following standard citation guidelines.

According to dictionary.com, a webliography is defined as “a list of electronic documents, websites, or other resources available on the World Wide Web , especially those relating to a particular subject. For example, A student’s annotated webliography on Shakespeare”. Therefore, it is different from a bibliography in the sense that a bibliography lists books and other printed works and a webliography represents a list of websites used.

Webliography is needed to facilitate:

•    limited user time to access the internet

•    lack of search skills

•    difficult to find pertinent information from the huge reservior of knowledge, just like finding a needle from hay stack

•    need for bibliographical control

•    to identify and locate information

•    to save time

•    to have optimum access and use of information

Dariush Alimohammadi suggested following phases in compilation of webbliographies:

•    Selecting the topic

•    Search the web; navigation of web with one of the popular search tools like google, google scholar, subject gateways like Intute, etc.

•    Browsing and selecting the best among the retrieved hits following the criteria for web site evaluation

•    Creating a web page; some software like Microsoft FrontPage, Netscape Composer and Dream weaver can be manipulated.

•    Writing an introduction; preparing a table of content to help user to navigate the subject gateway easier.

8.  Evaluation of Bibliographies

Evaluation of bibliographies is essential to understand their worth in retrieval of information and to acquire a thourough understanding of these sources. Hence librarians are practicing evaluation of bibliographies with well laid down criteria used for the evaluation of reference sources. The checklist for the evaluation of a bibliography includes the following criteria:

•  Authority – The work should be authoritative, accurate and dependable. It can be judged on  the basis of reputation of author, publisher, sponsoring body or compiler. For e.g. authoritativeness of Cumulative Book Index, a trade bibliography can be determined by the publisher, H.W.Wilson.

•  Scope – It is to be assessed whether the bibliography is comprehensive or selective, curent or retrospective. The coverage, limitations, purpose, kind of material, language, place, period, etc. should be examined.

•    Arrangement – Arrangement of bibliography is important otherwise it has no utility value. Bibliographies can be arranged in various order, like classifeid, chronological, alphabetical or alphabetico- classed. However, a good bibliography has to be arranged by subject with alphabetical indexes to encourage its use.

•   Entries and items of information : A good bibliography ought to provide author and collaborator, subject, series, and title entries as well as cross references. Complete bibliographical details have to be provided in the main entry like author (s), collaborators, title, edition, imprint, series, number of volumes, illustrations, binding, price, bibliographic references etc. and each entry has to be enriched with annotation or abstract.

•   Revision – To keep the work updated periodical revision of biblographies is essntial. Hence whether the publication follows a revision policy or not has to be checked.

•   Special features – Distinctive fetures of the bibliography in comparison to other bibliographies in the subject have to be studied. Generally such special features will be stated in preface and introduction.

•   Drawbacks : There may be limitations in coverage, cumulations, time lag in publication, too expensive, etc. that have to be analyzed.

•   Format : The physical get up of the bibliography, the quality of printing, type faces, paper, binding and the presentation needs to be considered.

9.  Summary

Bibliographies play a pivotal role in scientific communication, more specifically the subject bibliographies. The changing trends in electronic publishing has brought in changes in traditional compilation of bibliographies. Inspite of the changes in form and format, the basic principle of serving the user with list of publications in a subject or selected fields remains the same. Hence LIS professionals have to learn the techniques of bibliographic compilation and apply them in print or electronic world.

10.  References

1. Bowers,  Fredson (1994) Principles of bibliographical description. Oak Knoll Press / St Paul,s Bibliographies

2. Frieds, Thelma. Retrospecive bibliographies. In Literature and Bibliography of Social Sciences. Los Angeles, Melville Publishing Co., 1973. http://www.ou.edu/ap/lis5703/freides/retrospectivebib.pdf

3. Katz, William (1982) Introduction to reference work. V.1, 4th ed. New York, McGraw Hill, 1982.

4. Krishan Kumar (1978) Reference Service 2nd rev.ed. New Delhi, Vikas Pub.

• Padhi, Pitambar (1994) Reference sources in modern Indian Languages. Bhubaneswar, Gayatrivedi Pub.
• Ranganathan, S.R. (1963) Documentation and its facets. Bombay, Asia Pub. House.
• Sharma, J.S. and Grover, D.R. (1987) Reference Service and sources of information. NewDelhi, Ess Ess Pub.
• Shores, Louis (1954). Basic reference sources. Chicago, ALA.
• UNESCO/Library of Congress (1950) Bibliographical urvey. Paris, UNESCO

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• Citing sources

Citation Styles Guide | Examples for All Major Styles

Published on June 24, 2022 by Jack Caulfield . Revised on November 7, 2022.

A citation style is a set of guidelines on how to cite sources in your academic writing . You always need a citation whenever you quote , paraphrase , or summarize a source to avoid plagiarism . How you present these citations depends on the style you follow. Scribbr’s citation generator can help!

Different styles are set by different universities, academic associations, and publishers, often published in an official handbook with in-depth instructions and examples.

There are many different citation styles, but they typically use one of three basic approaches: parenthetical citations , numerical citations, or note citations.

Parenthetical citations

• Chicago (Turabian) author-date

CSE name-year

Numerical citations

CSE citation-name or citation-sequence

Note citations

• Chicago (Turabian) notes and bibliography

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Table of contents

Types of citation: parenthetical, note, numerical, which citation style should i use, parenthetical citation styles, numerical citation styles, note citation styles, frequently asked questions about citation styles.

The clearest identifying characteristic of any citation style is how the citations in the text are presented. There are three main approaches:

• Parenthetical citations: You include identifying details of the source in parentheses in the text—usually the author’s last name and the publication date, plus a page number if relevant ( author-date ). Sometimes the publication date is omitted ( author-page ).
• Numerical citations: You include a number in brackets or in superscript, which corresponds to an entry in your numbered reference list.
• Note citations: You include a full citation in a footnote or endnote, which is indicated in the text with a superscript number or symbol.

Citation styles also differ in terms of how you format the reference list or bibliography entries themselves (e.g., capitalization, order of information, use of italics). And many style guides also provide guidance on more general issues like text formatting, punctuation, and numbers.

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In most cases, your university, department, or instructor will tell you which citation style you need to follow in your writing. If you’re not sure, it’s best to consult your institution’s guidelines or ask someone. If you’re submitting to a journal, they will usually require a specific style.

Sometimes, the choice of citation style may be left up to you. In those cases, you can base your decision on which citation styles are commonly used in your field. Try reading other articles from your discipline to see how they cite their sources, or consult the table below.

The American Anthropological Association (AAA) recommends citing your sources using Chicago author-date style . AAA style doesn’t have its own separate rules. This style is used in the field of anthropology.

APA Style is defined by the 7th edition of the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association . It was designed for use in psychology, but today it’s widely used across various disciplines, especially in the social sciences.

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The citation style of the American Political Science Association (APSA) is used mainly in the field of political science.

The citation style of the American Sociological Association (ASA) is used primarily in the discipline of sociology.

Chicago author-date

Chicago author-date style is one of the two citation styles presented in the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition). It’s used mainly in the sciences and social sciences.

The citation style of the Council of Science Editors (CSE) is used in various scientific disciplines. It includes multiple options for citing your sources, including the name-year system.

Harvard style is often used in the field of economics. It is also very widely used across disciplines in UK universities. There are various versions of Harvard style defined by different universities—it’s not a style with one definitive style guide.

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MLA style is the official style of the Modern Language Association, defined in the MLA Handbook (9th edition). It’s widely used across various humanities disciplines. Unlike most parenthetical citation styles, it’s author-page rather than author-date.

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The American Chemical Society (ACS) provides guidelines for a citation style using numbers in superscript or italics in the text, corresponding to entries in a numbered reference list at the end. It is used in chemistry.

The American Medical Association ( AMA ) provides guidelines for a numerical citation style using superscript numbers in the text, which correspond to entries in a numbered reference list. It is used in the field of medicine.

CSE style includes multiple options for citing your sources, including the citation-name and citation-sequence systems. Your references are listed alphabetically in the citation-name system; in the citation-sequence system, they appear in the order in which you cited them.

The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers ( IEEE ) provides guidelines for citing your sources with IEEE in-text citations that consist of numbers enclosed in brackets, corresponding to entries in a numbered reference list. This style is used in various engineering and IT disciplines.

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) citation style is defined in Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and Publishers (2nd edition).

Vancouver style is also used in various medical disciplines. As with Harvard style, a lot of institutions and publications have their own versions of Vancouver—it doesn’t have one fixed style guide.

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The Bluebook: A Uniform System of Citation is the main style guide for legal citations in the US. It’s widely used in law, and also when legal materials need to be cited in other disciplines.

Chicago notes and bibliography

Chicago notes and bibliography is one of the two citation styles presented in the Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition). It’s used mainly in the humanities.

The Oxford University Standard for the Citation of Legal Authorities ( OSCOLA ) is the main legal citation style in the UK (similar to Bluebook for the US).

There are many different citation styles used across different academic disciplines, but they fall into three basic approaches to citation:

• Parenthetical citations : Including identifying details of the source in parentheses —usually the author’s last name and the publication date, plus a page number if available ( author-date ). The publication date is occasionally omitted ( author-page ).
• Numerical citations: Including a number in brackets or superscript, corresponding to an entry in your numbered reference list.
• Note citations: Including a full citation in a footnote or endnote , which is indicated in the text with a superscript number or symbol.

Check if your university or course guidelines specify which citation style to use. If the choice is left up to you, consider which style is most commonly used in your field.

• APA Style is the most popular citation style, widely used in the social and behavioral sciences.
• MLA style is the second most popular, used mainly in the humanities.
• Chicago notes and bibliography style is also popular in the humanities, especially history.
• Chicago author-date style tends to be used in the sciences.

Other more specialized styles exist for certain fields, such as Bluebook and OSCOLA for law.

The most important thing is to choose one style and use it consistently throughout your text.

A scientific citation style is a system of source citation that is used in scientific disciplines. Some commonly used scientific citation styles are:

• Chicago author-date , CSE , and Harvard , used across various sciences
• ACS , used in chemistry
• AMA , NLM , and Vancouver , used in medicine and related disciplines
• AAA , APA , and ASA , commonly used in the social sciences

APA format is widely used by professionals, researchers, and students in the social and behavioral sciences, including fields like education, psychology, and business.

Be sure to check the guidelines of your university or the journal you want to be published in to double-check which style you should be using.

MLA Style  is the second most used citation style (after APA ). It is mainly used by students and researchers in humanities fields such as literature, languages, and philosophy.

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Caulfield, J. (2022, November 07). Citation Styles Guide | Examples for All Major Styles. Scribbr. Retrieved June 28, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/citing-sources/citation-styles/

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Bibliographies

Types of bibliographies, works cited or reference page.

A list of works cited is attached on a separate sheet after the text of the document. In MLA form, that list is called a Works Cited Page. In some others it is known as a Reference Page. A Works Cited page includes only those sources cited in the document. As with the in-text citations, the format of this list varies by discipline. See our writing guides on APA Format , Chicago Format , and MLA Format for more information.

Bibliography

A bibliography is a list of books, articles and other sources of information that form the literature of a subject. A bibliography may include additional resources to those directly used in the paper.

Annotated Bibliography

An annotated bibliography (AB) is a bibliography which includes brief notes about each entry (to annotate means to add notes). The purpose of an annotated bibliography is to provide your reader with a fairly complete list of relevant scholarly sources on a given topic. Each entry of an annotated bibliography provides full bibliographical information as well as commentary, generally 2-10 sentences, about each source.

Annotated bibliographies help you obtain a focused and critical reading of your source(s). This fosters the development of a well-rounded understanding of the chosen topic, which guides the research and writing paths. And ABs provide you with a concise snippet of a much larger text, which then allows for a quick identification of what sources are key to the thesis, and which are not. (Not to mention the fact that ABs simplify the organization of your sources!) ABs also help your readers by allowing them to learn how your chosen sources fit in with your writing project. As their understanding of the topic is enhanced, they are able to connect with your ideas more.

Summarize. Assess. Reflect.

The AB must be able to  summarize  and explain what the chosen source is about. Who are the main scholars involved in this literature? What has been discovered because of this publication? What questions remain for future authors to answer?

It is then important to  assess  how this source helps or hinders your research. Was the author objective? Did you identify potential biases? Were you able to tell what the author’s goals were, and whether those goals were met?

And through  reflection , you may address how this source fits into your, and the discipline’s, grand conversation. What new ideas did it introduce into your work? How can you use it in your project? Where might it fit best within the essay? 

Types of Annotations

In a descriptive annotation the commentary summarizes the book or article and explains how the author addresses the topic. An evaluative annotation includes an evaluation of the quality of the information; in answering the question of how successfully the author achieved what he/she set out to do. Which type of annotation you use will depend on the instructor, course, and field of study. Check the assignment directions carefully. 

The key to a successful annotated bibliography is to be concise; since each entry's commentary is brief, you need to select the information carefully. Determine the source's central idea(s) and be concise in conveying that information. An entry to an annotated bibliography is not an appropriate time to go into great depth or detail. Primarily, you want to give the reader a general idea of what the source is about. This will require the ability both to determine what is central and to write about the ideas concisely and objectively.

Keep in mind that with either type of annotation, you usually still need a reflection explaining how the source is useful to your particular project. 

Annotated Bibliography Example

Here is an example of a  descriptive annotation :

Schechter, Harold. “Death and Resurrection of the King; Elements of Primitive Mythology and Ritual in 'Roger Malvin's Burial'.” English Language Notes 8, 1971, pp. 201–205.  

Working with Frazer's paradigm of the death and resurrection of the King motif in myth and ritual, Schechter sees Malvin as the dying king in Hawthorne's short story and Reuben as his successor. Reuben sacrifices Cyrus so that the curse of death-in-life can be removed. Thus, the tale becomes the imaginary fulfillment of the blessing of fertility (204). I can use this in the counterargument section of my essay to show an opposing viewpoint to my own.

Here is an example of an  evaluative annotation  of the same source:

Though Schechter reorganizes the material in an interesting format, basically his study is a reiteration of Cassier's seminal argument in  The Sacred and the Profane: Modern Myth Studies . Schechter's major contribution to the debate is his recognition that Reuben sacrifices Cyrus so that the curse of death-in-life can be removed. Schechter's attempt to put Cassier's argument in a Jungian context is intriguing but not quite successful, since he must ignore important elements in the story to do so. I can use this in the counterargument section of my essay to show an opposing viewpoint to my own.          

(Updated July 2022)

How to Write a Bibliography for a Research Paper

Do not try to “wow” your instructor with a long bibliography when your instructor requests only a works cited page. It is tempting, after doing a lot of work to research a paper, to try to include summaries on each source as you write your paper so that your instructor appreciates how much work you did. That is a trap you want to avoid. MLA style, the one that is most commonly followed in high schools and university writing courses, dictates that you include only the works you actually cited in your paper—not all those that you used.

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• If your assignment calls for a bibliography, list all the sources you consulted in your research.
• If your assignment calls for a works cited or references page, include only the sources you quote, summarize, paraphrase, or mention in your paper.
• If your works cited page includes a source that you did not cite in your paper, delete it.
• All in-text citations that you used at the end of quotations, summaries, and paraphrases to credit others for their ideas,words, and work must be accompanied by a cited reference in the bibliography or works cited. These references must include specific information about the source so that your readers can identify precisely where the information came from.The citation entries on a works cited page typically include the author’s name, the name of the article, the name of the publication, the name of the publisher (for books), where it was published (for books), and when it was published.

The good news is that you do not have to memorize all the many ways the works cited entries should be written. Numerous helpful style guides are available to show you the information that should be included, in what order it should appear, and how to format it. The format often differs according to the style guide you are using. The Modern Language Association (MLA) follows a particular style that is a bit different from APA (American Psychological Association) style, and both are somewhat different from the Chicago Manual of Style (CMS). Always ask your teacher which style you should use.

A bibliography usually appears at the end of a paper on its own separate page. All bibliography entries—books, periodicals, Web sites, and nontext sources such radio broadcasts—are listed together in alphabetical order. Books and articles are alphabetized by the author’s last name.

Most teachers suggest that you follow a standard style for listing different types of sources. If your teacher asks you to use a different form, however, follow his or her instructions. Take pride in your bibliography. It represents some of the most important work you’ve done for your research paper—and using proper form shows that you are a serious and careful researcher.

Bibliography Entry for a Book

A bibliography entry for a book begins with the author’s name, which is written in this order: last name, comma, first name, period. After the author’s name comes the title of the book. If you are handwriting your bibliography, underline each title. If you are working on a computer, put the book title in italicized type. Be sure to capitalize the words in the title correctly, exactly as they are written in the book itself. Following the title is the city where the book was published, followed by a colon, the name of the publisher, a comma, the date published, and a period. Here is an example:

Format : Author’s last name, first name. Book Title. Place of publication: publisher, date of publication.

• A book with one author : Hartz, Paula.  Abortion: A Doctor’s Perspective, a Woman’s Dilemma . New York: Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1992.
• A book with two or more authors : Landis, Jean M. and Rita J. Simon.  Intelligence: Nature or Nurture?  New York: HarperCollins, 1998.

Bibliography Entry for a Periodical

A bibliography entry for a periodical differs slightly in form from a bibliography entry for a book. For a magazine article, start with the author’s last name first, followed by a comma, then the first name and a period. Next, write the title of the article in quotation marks, and include a period (or other closing punctuation) inside the closing quotation mark. The title of the magazine is next, underlined or in italic type, depending on whether you are handwriting or using a computer, followed by a period. The date and year, followed by a colon and the pages on which the article appeared, come last. Here is an example:

Format:  Author’s last name, first name. “Title of the Article.” Magazine. Month and year of publication: page numbers.

• Article in a monthly magazine : Crowley, J.E.,T.E. Levitan and R.P. Quinn.“Seven Deadly Half-Truths About Women.”  Psychology Today  March 1978: 94–106.
• Article in a weekly magazine : Schwartz, Felice N.“Management,Women, and the New Facts of Life.”  Newsweek  20 July 2006: 21–22.
• Signed newspaper article : Ferraro, Susan. “In-law and Order: Finding Relative Calm.”  The Daily News  30 June 1998: 73.
• Unsigned newspaper article : “Beanie Babies May Be a Rotten Nest Egg.”  Chicago Tribune  21 June 2004: 12.

Bibliography Entry for a Web Site

For sources such as Web sites include the information a reader needs to find the source or to know where and when you found it. Always begin with the last name of the author, broadcaster, person you interviewed, and so on. Here is an example of a bibliography for a Web site:

Format : Author.“Document Title.” Publication or Web site title. Date of publication. Date of access.

Example : Dodman, Dr. Nicholas. “Dog-Human Communication.”  Pet Place . 10 November 2006.  23 January 2014 < http://www.petplace.com/dogs/dog-human-communication-2/page1.aspx >

After completing the bibliography you can breathe a huge sigh of relief and pat yourself on the back. You probably plan to turn in your work in printed or handwritten form, but you also may be making an oral presentation. However you plan to present your paper, do your best to show it in its best light. You’ve put a great deal of work and thought into this assignment, so you want your paper to look and sound its best. You’ve completed your research paper!

Back to  How To Write A Research Paper .

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Bibliography Research

Introduction.

• National Bibliography
• Personal Bibliography
• Corporate Bibliography
• Subject Bibliography
• Catalog & Bibliographies
• Other Tools for Finding Bibliographies

A bibliography is a list of documents, usually published documents like books and articles. This type of bibliography is more accurately called "enumerative bibliography". An enumerative bibliography will attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, within whatever parameters established by the bibliographer.

Bibliographies will list both secondary and primary sources. They are perhaps most valuable to historians for identifying primary sources. (They are still useful for finding secondary sources, but increasingly historians rely on electronic resources, like article databases, to locate secondary sources.)

Think of a bibliography as a guide to the source base for a specific field of inquiry. A high quality bibliography will help you understand what kinds of sources are available, but also what kinds of sources are not available (either because they were never preserved, or because they were never created in the first place).

Take for example the following bibliography:  

British autobiographies; an annotated bibliography of British autobiographies published or written before 1951 by William Matthews

Call number:  Z2027 .A9 M3 1955

Publication date: 1955

Like many bibliographies, this one includes an introduction or prefatory essay that gives a bibliographic overview of the topic. If you were hoping to use autobiographies for a paper on medieval history, the following information from the preface would save you from wasting your time in a fruitless search:

The essay explains that autobiography does not become an important historical source until the early modern period:

Finally, the essay informs us that these early modern autobiographies are predominantly religious in nature--a useful piece of information if we were hoping to use them as evidence of, for example, the early modern textile trade:

All bibliographies are organized differently, but the best include indexes that help you pinpoint the most relevant entries.

A smart researcher will also use the index to obtain an overview of the entire source base: the index as a whole presents a broad outline of the available sources--the extent of available sources, as well as the the strengths and weaknesses of the source base. Browsing the subject index, if there is one, is often an excellent method of choosing a research topic because it enables you quickly to rule out topics that cannot be researched due to lack of primary sources.

The index to  British Autobiographies , for example, tells me that I can find many autobiographies that document British social clubs (like White's and Boodle's), especially from the 19th century:

Unlike indexes you might be familiar with from non-fiction books, the indexes in bibliographies usually reference specific entries, not page numbers.

A bibliography's index will often help guide you systematically through the available sources, as in this entry which prompts you to look under related index entries for even more sources:

Types of Bibliographies

There are four main types of enumerative bibliographies used for historical research:

enumerative bibliography: 

1. Enumerative bibliography: the listing of books according to some system or reference plan, for example, by author, by subject, or by date. The implication is that the listings will be short, usually providing only the author's name, the book's title, and date and place of publication. Enumerative bibliography (sometimes called systematic bibliography) attempts to record and list, rather than to describe minutely. Little or no information is likely to be provided about physical aspects of the book such as paper, type, illustrations, or binding. A library's card catalog is an example of an enumerative bibliography, and so is the list at the back of a book of works consulted, or a book like the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, which catalogues briefly the works of English writers and the important secondary material about them. ...  (from McGill Library) 

Read more from their lecture on bibliographies from this linked Word Doc: Lecture I Discussion

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Generate formatted bibliographies, citations, and works cited automatically

What is mybib.

MyBib is a free bibliography and citation generator that makes accurate citations for you to copy straight into your academic assignments and papers.

If you're a student, academic, or teacher, and you're tired of the other bibliography and citation tools out there, then you're going to love MyBib. MyBib creates accurate citations automatically for books, journals, websites, and videos just by searching for a title or identifier (such as a URL or ISBN).

Plus, we're using the same citation formatting engine as professional-grade reference managers such as Zotero and Mendeley, so you can be sure our bibliographies are perfectly accurate in over 9,000 styles -- including APA 6 & 7, Chicago, Harvard, and MLA 7 & 8.

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How to Write a Bibliography

Last Updated: June 12, 2024 Fact Checked

This article was co-authored by Diane Stubbs . Diane Stubbs is a Secondary English Teacher with over 22 years of experience teaching all high school grade levels and AP courses. She specializes in secondary education, classroom management, and educational technology. Diane earned a Bachelor of Arts in English from the University of Delaware and a Master of Education from Wesley College. There are 13 references cited in this article, which can be found at the bottom of the page. This article has been fact-checked, ensuring the accuracy of any cited facts and confirming the authority of its sources. This article has been viewed 667,655 times.

When you write a paper or a book, it's important to include a bibliography. A bibliography tells your reader what sources you've used. It lists all the books, articles, and other references you cited in or used to inform your work. Bibliographies are typically formatted according to one of three styles: American Psychological Association (APA) for scientific papers, Modern Language Association (MLA) for humanities papers, and Chicago Manual of Style (CMS) for the social sciences. Make sure you always check with your superior - whether a professor or boss - about which style they prefer.

Sample Bibliographies

Writing an APA Bibliography

• For example, if the author's name for a source is "John Adams Smith," you would list him as "Smith, J.A.," before listing the title of his piece.

• For example, if one source has twelve authors, and the seventh author is "Smith, J.A." and the twelfth is "Timothy, S.J.," you would list the first six authors, then write "Smith, J.A. ...Timothy, S.J."

• For example, if you have a World Health Organization Report without an author as one of your sources, you would write, "World Health Organization, "Report on Development Strategies in Developing Nations," July 1996."

• For example, an article citation might look like this: Jensen, O. E. (2012). "African Elephants." Savannah Quarterly , 2(1), 88.
• If the periodical the article comes from always begins with page number 1 (these types of periodicals are called “paginated by issue” periodicals, you should include the full page range of the article.
• If the article was retrieved online, end the citation with the words "Retrieved from" followed by the web address.

• Example: Worden, B. L. (1999). Echoing Eden. New York, New York: One Two Press.
• If the title is more than one word long and doesn’t contain any proper nouns, only the first word should be capitalized. Only the first letter of any subtitle should be capitalized as well.

• For example, a cited website might look like this: Quarry, R. R. (May 23, 2010). Wild Skies. Retrieved from https://wildskies.com.
• If no author is available, just start with the title. If no date is available, write "n.d."

Writing a MLA Bibliography

• You shouldn’t use an author’s title or degrees when listing their names in your bibliography. This is true even if they are listed that way on the source.

• For example, a book citation might look like this: Butler, Olivia. Parable of the Flower. Sacramento: Seed Press, 1996.

• For example, an article published in a scholarly journal might look like this: Green, Marsha. "Life in Costa Rica." Science Magazine vol. 1, no. 4, Mar 2013: 1-2.
• If you’re citing an article in a newspaper, you only need the name of the newspaper, followed by the date it was published, and the page number. A citation for that might look like this: Smith, Jennifer. “Tiny Tim Wins Award.” New York Times, 24 Dec 2017, p. A7.

• For example, a website citation might look like this: Jong, June. "How to Write an Essay." Writing Portal. 2 Aug. 2012. University of California. 23 Feb. 2013. <https://writingportal.com>
• Some websites, particularly academic ones, will have what’s called a DOI (digital object identifier). Write “doi:” in front of this number in place of the website’s url if a DOI is available.

Writing a CMS Bibliography

• Example: Skylar Marsh. "Walking on Water." Earth Magazine 4(2001): 23.

• For example, a book entry might look like this: Walter White. Space and Time . New York: London Press, 1982

• Example: University of California. "History of University of California." Last modified April 3, 2013. https://universityofcalifornia.com.
• Unless there is a publication date for the website you’re citing, you don’t need to include an access date. If you do have an access date, it goes at the end of the citation.

Expert Q&A

• Ask your teacher or professor which style they prefer you to use in your paper. Thanks Helpful 6 Not Helpful 2
• Be sure to include each and every source you reference in your work. Thanks Helpful 7 Not Helpful 5
• When writing a bibliography or a reference page, it really comes down to looking at an example and applying it to your own information. Thanks Helpful 0 Not Helpful 0

You Might Also Like

• ↑ https://libguides.reading.ac.uk/citing-references/compilingbibliography
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/03/
• ↑ Cite articles
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/08/
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/10/
• ↑ https://www.scribbr.com/mla/works-cited/
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/05/
• ↑ https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/mla_formatting_and_style_guide/mla_works_cited_page_basic_format.html
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/06/
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/07/
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/02/
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/03/
• ↑ https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/717/05/

About This Article

To create an APA bibliography, title a separate page at the end of your paper "References." Then, use the authors' last names to organize your list alphabetically, for example by writing the author John Adam Smith as "Smith, J. A." If a source has more than 7 authors, list the first 7 before adding an ellipses. To cite an article, include the author's name, year of publication, article title, publication title, and page numbers. When citing a book, begin with the author's name, then the date of publication, title in Italics, location of the publisher, and publisher's name. For tips on how to write an MLA or CMS bibliography, keep reading! Did this summary help you? Yes No

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1. Introduction

The present article intends to clarify the concept of bibliographical control, to illuminate its main functions, to briefly describe its history in practice, and to survey the criticism, debate and different theoretical views associated with this practice. An underlying perspective throughout the article is to illuminate two conflicting philosophical approaches: positivism and pragmatism and their implicit influence on theory as well as practice.

1.1 The concept and idea of bibliographical control

[B]ibliographical control. The concept of having a comprehensive and searchable listing of the entire published output in a particular field [or in a particular country or by a particular author or other formal demarcations].

What we see as problems of control, others have seen as problems of organization […]. But not all the problems of bibliographical organization are equally important in a discussion of bibliographical control, and many discussions in the enormous literature of bibliographical organization will go unnoticed here.

Therefore, this article focusses on the aims of providing control over documents, which has much to do with coverage of bibliographic databases. It will not go deeply into the issues of → cataloging rules , document description standards, → metadata , and the like, although this use of the term bibliographic control deviates somewhat from how the term is mostly used today. The two issues are related, and as we shall see later, a database like Google Scholar may have a better coverage than MEDLINE , but may still be less useful, because documents are less well described and represented in Google Scholar .

Bibliographical control is a form of power, and if knowledge itself is a form of power, as the familiar slogan claims [4] , bibliographical control is in a certain sense power over power, power to obtain the knowledge recorded in written form.

When academic students, professionals or researchers write papers, they are expected to build their papers on information in other papers, and to provide references to them. To do so, they need to know about the relevant sources, and ideally, they need to identify what Wilson ( 1968 , 22) called “the best textual means to one's end”, i.e., the most important sources. In academia, this is almost a matter of course, but also for non-academic tasks available knowledge should be utilized, and thus also often depend on bibliographic control. The need is, however, most directly and explicit related to academic writing tasks.

Because relevant documents need not be textual, we rephrase Wilson's goal to “the best documents or the best information resources to one's end”. As discussed further in this article, no library or information system can guarantee such an ideal performance, but they can serve users approaching this goal, and this is what bibliographical control is about: to help users approach the goal of finding the documents most relevant for solving their task.

Bibliographical control is often understood as control over what has been published, a control that makes it possible in principle to overview what has been published. It may also be about unpublished documents, for example unpublished theses and other so-called “gray literature”. A new tendency is to include "data" (i.e., → data documents ), see Schöpfel et al. ( 2021 ). Higgins and Green ( 2009 and later editions) explicitly recommend including “gray literature” and unpublished clinical trials in searches for systematic reviews. In information science the term → document includes museum objects and archival records, but these kinds of documents are in practice seldom (if ever) included in the literature about bibliographic control, although theoretically they might be. Taylor and Winstanley ( 1990 ) from the British Library thus suggested a project for bibliographical control of computer files. Bibliographic control is to make it possible to identify the documents of relevance for a given query. KO, cataloging, and document descriptions are tools for providing bibliographical control, but not in themselves bibliographical control. For some domains, it is of utmost importance to ensure bibliographical control, and especially in medicine this is taken very seriously, with much research about the coverage and quality of different databases, as we shall see later in this article. But such control should in principle be equally relevant for all domains.

If one library in the world — whether a physical or a digital library — could have a copy of all documents ever produced, the catalog of that library could be said to provide a kind of universal bibliographical control [5] . The Library of Alexandria, for example, seems to have had this ambition (see Section 2.1 below). There are alternative ways in which universal bibliographical control have been approached. They include attempts making comprehensive universal bibliographies, such as Bibliotheca Universalis (see Section 2.2 ), the Universal Bibliographical Repertory (see Section 2.4 ), union catalogs with WorldCat ( Section 2.5 ) and the World Wide Web (WWW) with Google ( Section 2.7 ). A bibliography/bibliographical database makes it possible to identify relevant documents, but often leaves the task of locating those documents to libraries, digital archives or publishers to library catalogs or related tools. An alternative to one comprehensive bibliography is represented by IFLA's and UNESCO's program on universal bibliographical control with the goal to establish a system of national bibliographies which together could provide universal control ( Section 2.6 ). In practice, however, the most useful has been the system of abstract journal and subject bibliographical databases ( Section 2.3 ) although this system is dependent on and varies in coverage and quality from discipline to discipline.

Section 2 describes these projects in chronological order based on their first appearance, but first we consider a suggestion to distinguish between two kinds of bibliographical control.

1.2 Two kinds of bibliographical control

→ Wilson ( 1968 ) made a distinction between two kinds of bibliographical control: (1) “exploitative control”, (2) “descriptive control”.

• If one is reading for a purpose (and is a rational person) then one would like the best textual means to one's end. Therefore, (ibid., 22) “the more important sort of bibliographical control is this: to have the power to produce the best textual means to one's ends”.
• The second sort of power and bibliographic control is to be able to provide a list of documents (or bibliographic records) fitting a certain description, that is evaluatively neutral. Wilson's examples (ibid, 22) are: all writings authored by Hobbes, all writings discussing the doctrine of eternal recurrence, all writings containing the word 'fatuity'”.

Wilson ( 1968 , 69) considers that “The Bibliographic Encyclopedia” resembles 1, while “The catalog” resembles 2. Ibid. (150) he considers the exhaustive national or subject bibliography as the typical instruments of descriptive control, whereas the typical means of exploitative control would be “the 'special' library serving a group of scholars accustomed to talk to each other, and staffed by persons approaching the type of bibliographical consultants rather than the bibliographical aid”.

You can never get away from theories of the nature of description whenever, wherever you have descriptions. All descriptions are based on theories of how to make descriptions. You cannot claim to have no epistemology. Those who so claim have nothing but a bad epistemology. And every description is based upon, and contains implicitly, a theory of how to describe. The Cartesian coordinates contain a theory of how to describe, and for many purposes, I believe, it is an inappropriate and dangerous theory.

In evidence-based medicine (EBM) the goal is to identify the part of the literature, that best provides evidence for whether a given treatment is better than another (or better than no treatment). This corresponds to Wilson's first kind of bibliographic power: to identify the best textual means to an end — the end here being choosing the optimal medical treatments. The tradition known as EBM has developed criteria to distinguish between degrees of evidence in the medical literature. For example, evidence from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) is assigned greater weight than evidence from case studies, which again are given greater weight than clinical experience of respected authorities. Therefore, norms of medical writings demands that the kind of evidence claimed in a medical study is described in the published record of the study (e.g., journal article). At the bibliographical level, the kind of evidence is described by the assignment of subject headings to the journal article by the staff of the National Library of Medicine in the MEDLINE database. The description of the study as it appears in MEDLINE therefore reflects Wilson's second kind of bibliographical control. Because these descriptions are not, and cannot be, neutral (see further in Hjørland 2011) Wilson's distinction between two kinds of bibliographical control collapses.

The collapse of Wilson's distinction can also be observed in best match techniques , the ranking of research results used in modern search engines. Here the documents which are predicted of highest relevance to the user are ranked highest and presented first. This ranking is, however, based on what must be characterized as descriptive elements as opposed to appraisals of the documents.

• Subject attribution [7] (subject cataloging, traditionally understood as classification and indexing) is the kind of bibliographical control that support users' identification of unknown documents of potential interest to their queries (e.g., find documents about the doctrine of eternal recurrence or find studies about the relevance of psychotherapy for the treatment of ADHD). Subject assignment requires adequate subject knowledge.
• So-called descriptive cataloging [8] is the kind of bibliographical control that enables users to identify known items of which some characteristics such as author, title, or publisher are known [9] . Such characteristics can be searched in databases and help the user find a record that allows them to get a copy of the document, e.g., from a library or a publisher. Descriptive cataloging is less dependent on subject knowledge, and more dependent of knowledge associated with descriptive bibliography and traditions of document description.

We have now discussed the meaning and the functions of the term bibliographical control and will now turn to prominent historical and contemporary projects for establishing this.

2. Important historical examples of bibliographical control

This section presents a range of projects from the Library of Alexandria to the Internet, which have in different ways provided comprehensive bibliographical control of books and other kinds of documents. The examples have been chosen from what is by this author considered the most prominent and theoretically important ones in the history of bibliographical control. Each project has fulfilled important goals, and most of them also seems to reveal a dream of an unobtainable goal: to provide complete control of → “ information ”. This presentation of former projects, the assumptions on which they were based, and the criticism and debate related to them, may hopefully provide a basis for considering future projects. They are described very briefly, and with only a few references and many of them deserve an independent article in this encyclopedia.

2.1 Library of Alexandria (c. 285- BC)

It is clear from our evidence, scrappy as it is, that the Ptolemies made a determined effort to obtain as many books as possible for their library. Buying up books in the book markets of Athens and Rhodes was one way of increasing the collection[7] [10] but the Ptolemies also turned to more extreme methods. According to Galen all books found on board ships that docked in Alexandria were seized, taken away, and copied. Then the copies, not the originals, were returned to the owners. The books acquired in this way were marked 'from the ships'. The Athenians, perhaps, should have known better than to lend one of the Ptolemies their precious official edition of the tragedies of Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Euripides, even if he did give them 15 talents as a security. The king kept the originals and returned the copies with the small consolation that they were produced on the very best papyrus available[8]. Whatever the truth of these stories the view prevailed that the Library's appetite for books was voracious. Some even suggested that the Ptolemies wished to acquire copies of all books ever written, though translated into Greek first[9].

To have all written books within the library is an important step towards bibliographical control, but the next step: to make them retrievable, is also important. We have not much knowledge about the degree to which retrievability was obtained. It is obvious, however, that this library deserves a prominent place in the history of bibliographic control. How the books were organized and retrieved in this library has been discussed by Olesen-Bagneux ( 2014 ). About the Library of Alexandria see further in El-Abbadi ( 1990 ).

2.2 Gessner's Bibliotheca Universalis (1545)

The Swiss naturalist and bibliographer Conrad Gessner published in 1545 Bibliotheca Universalis , the first bibliography of all known books in Hebrew, Greek and Latin after the invention of printing, in alphabetical order. Followed in 1548 by Pandectae , which was a systematic arrangement of the same bibliographical references. Although incomplete [11] , these works made Gessner a pioneer in the field of bibliography (he is sometimes called “the father of bibliography”), and Bibliotheca Universalis one of the main examples in the history of bibliographical control and an inspiration for many later attempts to produce comprehensive bibliographies. See further in Crippa and Araujo ( 2020 ) and Fischer ( 1966 ).

2.3 The abstract journal and subject bibliographical databases (1790-)

In the LIS literature about bibliographical control, scholarly bibliographical databases are seldom considered. This is here considered a shortcoming as they probably represent the most important element. The abstract journal understood as a journal providing abstracts of articles in other journals became influential from the 19th century (see Manzer 1977 and Fyfe 2021 ), and abstract journals soon became a dominant element in scientific communication to establish bibliographical control over the scientific literature in their respective disciplines. In the beginning they were published as printed journals, in a period also as microfilm publications, but from the 1960s also as electronic databases (paper editions typically ceased to be published about 2000).

The electronic databases made a huge difference for scholarly communication and gave rise to the field of information retrieval. The many innovations are described by Bourne and Hahn ( 2003 ). Another dimension of this revolution was the emergence of → citation indexes (see Araújo, Castanha and Hjørland 2021 ).

The development of the citation indexes provides an important new, if not revolutionary perspective on bibliographic control: the idea that documents are linked in networks by their citations, and that the authors of these documents — prominent subject specialists — produce a kind on self-organizing system, which provides a kind of bibliographic control (as all scientific papers are supposed to be based on the most important knowledge/documents, this must be reflected in their bibliographical references). Seen in this perspective we have two competing systems of bibliographical control: one made by bibliographic databases, and one made by the primary literature itself. These two systems supplement each other (with surprisingly little overlap), and their relative effectiveness is an important topic for research (see Pao and Worthen 1989 ; Pao 1993a ; Pao 1993b ; Hjørland and Kyllesbech Nielsen 2001 , 272-77; Hjørland 2013 and Hirt et al. 2022 ).

The system of separate subject bibliographies as an approach to bibliographic control may, in contrast to some alternatives, be considered what Taube ( 1951 , 67) described as “separate, overlapping, duplicating bibliographical services — a chaos of conflicting organizations and purposes from which current national bibliography and current complete universal bibliography […] were to rescue us?”. But after a careful analysis of the issues involved, he found that systems for special disciplines after all is the best alternative because “the categories of any discipline will reflect the basic interests and the purposes of those concerned with that discipline” (p. 71). It should be added that Taube's analysis was explicitly based on a “functional approach”.

The revolution that started with scientific bibliographic databases continues today with Internet technologies (see Section 2.7 ) but databases focusing on scholarly communication should still be considered an extremely important element of bibliographic control over the information ecosystem (and not just something that is made obsolete by the WWW).

2.4. Universal Bibliographical Repertory (RBU) (1895-)

The Universal Bibliographical Repertory (Répertoire bibliographique universel, RBU) or “the universal bibliography” was described by Paul Otlet [ 1897 ] as “an inventory of all that has been written at all times, in all languages, and on all subjects” (here cited in translation after Wright 2014 , 76). It is the best known among other attempts to provide bibliographical control about the fin de siècle. A rival to RUB was the London-based International Catalog of Scientific Literature (see Csiszar 2013 ).

RUB was produced by the International Institute of Bibliography (Institut international de bibliographie, IIB). By 1934 nearly 16 million cataloging cards had been collected and classified in the RBU. In the beginning it was classified according to the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC), but the very large extent of the bibliography made it necessary to develop a new system: the Universal Decimal Classification (UDC).

The Repertory received requests from all over the world and answers send by mail in the form of copied cards relevant to the query, and Otlet was very much interested in applying new technologies. Unfortunately, the project lost its financial basis and much of the repertory was lost. It is a question, however, if the project could and should have continued, or if a system of subject bibliographies (see Section 2.3 ) or of national bibliographies (see Section 2.6 ) would be better strategies. Wright ( 2014 , 72) referred some contemporary objections and criticism of it: “Some objected to the project on its most basic premise, arguing that true universality across disciplines was an unachievable dream; better to have subject-specific schemes tailored to the nuances of each discipline rather than one shallow classification that tried to cover every subject under the sun”.

[I]t is not obvious that the best way to deal with the literature problem should have been grandiose subject classification projects. Other more traditional — some might say more sensible — options existed: better specialized disciplinary bibliographies, expanded alphabetical subject indexes, or even relying more on the accumulated knowledge of recognized experts. (Indeed, given the ultimate failure of many of these projects, it might plausibly be argued that in hindsight universal and detailed classification was a misguided approach.)

See further in Otlet ( 1990 ), Heuvel ( 2009 ) and Wright ( 2014 ).

2.5 Union catalogs (1930s-)

Union catalogs are catalogs which list the holdings in more than one library or collection. They may be book catalogs, journal catalogs, incunabula catalogs etc., they may be national or international, universal or subject-specific etc. Although the earliest union catalogs go back to the 12th and 13th century, they have reached a much larger size in the 20th century, in both print and electronic forms. The electronic WorldCat database is described below. Here we shall only mention one example of printed union catalogs: the National Union Catalog, Pre-1956 Imprints , which is a 754-volume set containing books catalogued by the Library of Congress and other American and Canadian libraries in alphabetical order. This printed mammoth represents the apogee of printed catalogs and bibliographies which lost their relevance in the online era. See further in Creider ( 2010 ) and Lass and Quandt ( 2004 ).

2.5.1 WorldCat (1971)

WorldCat lists the holdings of more than 16,000 members; public, academic, and research libraries are major types. These libraries are mainly in North America, but they extend around the globe. Books in English dominate their collections, but many also have sizable holdings in other languages.

Compared to the subject bibliographical databases (see Section 2.3 ), union catalogs, including WorldCat , do not provide the same degree of bibliographic control, especially on article indexing. They serve, however, other functions, in particular (1) known-item verification of monographs and (2) locating of monographs in libraries. See further in Fowler ( 2010 , 1269).

2.6 IFLA's and UNESCO's program on universal bibliographic control (1970s-)

A National bibliographic agency (NBA) has the responsibility for providing the authoritative bibliographic data for publications of its own country and for making that data available to other NBAs, libraries, and other communities (for instance archives and museums) through appropriate and timely services with the goal of increasing open access to the bibliographic data.

National bibliographies themselves are much older than IFLA's program (although the present meaning of “national bibliography” only goes back to the 1950s) [13] . For example, Dansk bogfortegnelse (Danish national bibliography: Books) has been published since 1851. Their preparation is often made by (and dependent of) national libraries and the concept of legal deposit of publications. The first law on legal deposit is from France in 1537 under which a copy of any published book had to be delivered to the king's library, for conservation purposes, and sometimes to facilitate censorship. Similar laws were passed in many other European countries. By contrast, in the U.S.A. the delivery of copies of printed books to the Library of Congress serve copyright purposes. This makes a difference of what books come under bibliographic control and exemplify how different interests influences the contents of national bibliographies.

Viewing the question of bibliographical control in the perspective of history, there seems little doubt that effective national bibliographic organization must precede international or universal coverage. Starry-eyed bibliographers, who for generations have advocated a worldwide approach to bibliography, present an almost unbroken record of futility, frustration, and failure, except, perhaps, when they limit themselves to special aspects. If universal bibliography is ever to be achieved, it must be grounded upon the work of individual countries. [14]

Providers of specialized information naturally rely largely on specialized sources: abstracting services, journals and bibliographies relating to the disciplines in which their own major interests lie. But these sources must themselves select their material from wider, less-specialized sources.

But when the Library of Congress rejects a heading supplied by a special library, it prints the rejected heading along with its own heading because the Library of Congress officially recognizes that the purpose of a special library may require a degree of specificity in indexing not necessary or desirable for its own general purposes. In short, the distinction we discerned between general and special classification systems also exists between general and special collections of subject headings. And we conclude that there cannot be one subject key to bibliographic organization which would serve the librarian, the general reader, and all specialists.

AACR2 [Anglo American Cataloging Rules 2nd ed.] is one of the most remarkable examples of trying to solve a problem by committee, with predictable results. The committee did not even tackle the right problem — what users surely want is not comprehensive or perfectly accurate bibliographic records, but far better subject access to books, comparable with that provided for scientific journal articles by the large international databases. No data on users' needs, whether for bibliographic information or subject access, were collected; instead, cataloguers discussed how to change the rules, rather as if hens were to gather together to discuss the design of eggs. I am however doing the committee an injustice in accusing them of not involving consumers in their discussions, because much of the use made of catalogues is in fact by cataloguers for the purpose of adding to them. Cataloguers would lose their status if it were shown that most cataloguing is a trivial job easily done by clerical staff or that the length of a catalogue entry was not a sign of virility.

Dunsire, Hillmann and Phipps ( 2012 ) suggested that bibliographic control in general, including the IFLA program, should consider the technologies of semantic Web and linked data to provide better utilization of the metadata produced by many different groups and organizations. The discussion of these technologies cannot be done in the present article and is more an issue about document representation than about genuine bibliographic control. However, the article's argument (p. 164) to replace attempts based on “one-size-fits-all schema, rules and other international/global standards with what might be termed an all-sizes fit-one approach [… which] can support a much richer ecology of bibliographic communities and their standards” seems to be an important idea.

The IFLA program is further described in Anderson ( 1974; 1984 ).

2.7 The World Wide Web (1989-) and Google

WWW is a → hypertext information network proposed in 1989 by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), in 1990 termed “World Wide Web”, and launched by CERN on May 17, 1991. That system quickly revolutionized almost everything in the world. Its strength is the broad possibility of cooperating, that anybody with a computer can both draw from and contribute to the network of information resources, which set free a huge amount of labor. For example, Wikipedia was launched in 2001, stunned the world, and made times hard for established encyclopedias such as Encyclopaedia Britannica .

Google Search (also known as Google ) was originally developed in 1996 by Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Scott Hassan. It is a search engine designed to retrieve documents offered by web servers (WWW). It can find text, images and other media and provide access to free documents or to paywalls, where documents can be retrieved by payment. Of course, not all the information in the world is on the WWW, and there is information on the WWW that Google and other search engines do not reach (the so-called deep Web , see Zheng et al. 2013 and dark Web , see Sobhan et al. 2022 ).

• To make the search engine with most comprehensive coverage of webpages (often including published full-text documents).
• Google Scholar , a database with a citation index and an impressive coverage of scientific literature. (According to Gehanno, Rollin, and Darmoni ( 2013 ) it contains more relevant medical studies than MEDLINE (of 738 original studies included in a gold standard database all were found in Google Scholar , which is extraordinary). As stated later, even if this should be the case, MEDLINE may still provide better retrieval in subject searches.)
• Google Books has made many million books available on the Internet, full-text searchable. Many as free books, but many only with limited reading possibilities. In many cases, it provides facilities to locate, for example, quotations, much better than the printed index in the books themselves.

In one way, Google represents the closest the world has ever come to universal bibliographic control. On the other hand, it could be said that Google does not really represent bibliographic control because links and documents often disappear (and the control thereby disappears). This is a problem that → web archives such as the Internet Archive try to tackle. Apart from coverage, the issue is retrievability in subject searches. At this point classical bibliographical databases seem to perform better compared to Google 's full-text search possibilities, due to better indexing and metadata. This problem is probably the most important one in information science today.

See further about the history of the Web and the Web in general in Gillies and Cailliau ( 2000 ); Gardiner and Musto ( 2010 ); Tomer ( 2017 ). About coverage and retrieval effectiveness of Google see Lewandowski ( 2008 ); Gehanno, Rollin and Darmoni ( 2013 ); Bramer, Giustini and Kramer ( 2016 ); Gusenbauer and Haddaway ( 2020 ); Hjørland ( 2021 ).

3. Theoretical problems in obtaining bibliographical control

It is obvious that the goal of obtaining comprehensive coverage in bibliographical databases meets many practical and financial problems. The cost of labor (and/or computer resources) to carry out the identification and describing of documents has always been an obstacle. The idea to make a bibliography is relatively simple but requires much work to fulfill. However, such practical issues cannot be addressed in information science and knowledge organization where the focus must be on the theoretical problems, including how to evaluate the effectiveness of different solutions. Two main theoretical issues concerns (1) coverage and (2) retrievability from the contents of a given database.

It is, therefore, necessary to examine the extent to which articles on a given subject actually occur in periodicals devoted to quite other subjects: as, for instance, a paper on the mechanism of the heart, contributed to the Proceedings of Physical Society , or one on genetics, occurring in an agricultural magazine. Investigation shows that this distribution follows a certain law, which can be deduced both theoretically from the principle of the unity of science and practically from examination of the references. According to this principle every scientific subject is related, more or less remotely, to every other scientific subject. It follows that from time to time, a periodical devoted to a special subject may contain an article of interest from the point of view of another subject. In other words, the articles of interest to a specialist must occur not only in the periodicals specializing on his subject, but also, from time to time, in other periodicals, which grow in number as the relation of their fields to that of his subject lessens and the number of articles on his subject in each periodical diminishes.

This means, according to Bradford, that no subject database can ever be expected to have full bibliographical control. This problem is not relevant for universal databases such as Google Scholar (and less important in Web of Science , which is more selective), but still, complete coverage is an unobtainable dream. Following this principle, journals may be classified into “zones”, where zone 1 represents the journals that have most articles on the subject, zone 2 includes the journals that have had an average amount of articles, and zone 3 comprises the long tail of journals that occasionally or seldom contain articles about that subject. Such classifications have been used as selection criteria for special libraries and databases, but this implicitly acknowledges the impossibility of full theoretical coverage. There is, however, a perspective, that was neglected by Bradford, and has only been understood recently: Bradford realized that all documents are related to all others (due to the doctrine of unity of science). But how should we decide which are most closely related — and therefore important to include in a subject bibliography? The answer to this question is theory-dependent and may shift with “paradigm-shifts” in a field, and thus on interpretations rather than simple statistical figures about word frequencies or related data. This is again an example of the difference between “positivist” and “pragmatist” philosophy.

Although Google has an extremely comprehensive index of the Internet, not all pages are updated with the same frequency, and there are still problems like the dark Web, although, as said in Section 2.7 , Gehanno, Rollin, and Darmoni ( 2013 ) found that Google Scholar has a better coverage than MEDLINE . More studies are needed to determine the relative coverage of the relevant literature, because other studies have indicated otherwise [16] , because the databases seem to be competing and due to constant development. It is important to realize, that it is studies of this kind that really provide important information about whether bibliographical control is satisfactory or not.

The search process, like a scientific theory, can be criticized and improved, but can never be verified as capable of retrieving all information relevant to a problem or theory. This essential incompleteness of search and retrieval therefore makes possible, and plausible, the existence of undiscovered public knowledge.

This type of project will require a considerable investment of funds. The total cost cannot be precisely forecast here. Several hundred million euros will likely be needed, however, when one considers the anecdotal reports provided by search engine operators. The losses Bing has reported on its search activities are one example. This may appear prohibitively expensive until one considers, for instance, that the German government invested roughly 100 million euros in the semantic technology developed as part of the Theseus program. Nevertheless, it is still clear that any one country alone cannot support this type of project. The only feasible option is a pan-European initiative.

Because of these issues, as stated in Section 1 , bibliographical control in an absolute meaning is an unobtainable goal, even in principle. As pointed out by Wright ( 2014 ) all such ambitions throughout history represent a problematic positivist view — not the least Google 's aim “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful”. (For a criticism of the principles on which Google is based, see Hjørland 2021 .) Wright's theoretical analysis and critiques of approaches to bibliographical control are valuable, although one misses an analysis of what the opposite to positivism is, and how such an alternative would approach the issue of bibliographical control. The opinion of the present author is that this question holds the key to solving the fundamental problems of information science. In the present article the approach represented by scientific bibliographical databases comes closer to non-positivism (by avoiding universalist ideas), although also at this next level, these opposite philosophies are at play in the way they select and represent documents.

But that does not mean that these efforts (including Google 's) have not been extremely useful. What it means is that research needs to be based on a better theoretical and philosophical basis, and that further progress should be based on developing information systems optimal for specific purposes, interests, and disciplines rather than on mistaken philosophies [17] .

4. Conclusion

There is less of conceptual innovations [in relation to bibliographical control] in most remedial proposals than enthusiasts and promoters think, but the impressive technology is undeniable. But technology tells us neither what is worth aiming at (or away from), nor what is satisfactory degree of progress toward our elected goals. That we must discover or decide for ourselves; and that is best done with the greatest possible clarity about alternative goals and the intrinsic difficulties in their pursuit.

Among the suggestions found in the literature on bibliographical control are some important ideas, including (1) to consider the network of citing papers a kind of self-organizing system for bibliographic control competing with bibliographies established by others, (2) the establishing of a public index of the Internet ( Lewandowski 2014 ) on which competing search engines can be built to better meet different goals and interests and (3) an idea, that is not new but now suggested for the new Internet technologies, is the claim by Dunsire, Hillmann and Phipps ( 2012 ) that bibliographical control must be adjusted to the needs of different purposes, groups, and subject. The present author finds that this last view also was the main message in Wilson (1968).

At the most general level, the conclusion in relation to bibliographical control is the same as for all other issues in information science and KO: there are no pure technological, neutral, solutions, and ambitions to make all information in the world available for all purposes and interest is ill-conceived. At the philosophical level, the field should turn from (implicit) positivist assumptions to explicit functional/pragmatic research strategies.

The problem of bibliographical control is important, but seems to be neglected, or redefined to be about document descriptions. This article has used some examples from the medical domain to illustrate how the goal to establish bibliographical control is important and addressed by research about the coverage of databases and the retrievability of documents in the various databases. Hopefully, similar attention will develop in other domains, and come more in focus in information science with KO.

Acknowledgments

I thank Maja Žumer , who has served as editor and three anonymous peer-reviewers for valuable suggestions, which have contributed to improve the article.

1 . Library of Congress ( 2008 , 6) defined: “Bibliographic control is the organization of library materials to facilitate discovery, management, identification, and access. It is as old as libraries themselves, and our current approaches to it are direct descendants of the librarianship of the 19th century”.

2 . Maxwell ( 2017 , 447): “Bibliographic control is the process of creation, exchange, preservation, and use of data about information resources. Formal bibliographic control has been practiced for millennia, but modern techniques began to be developed and implemented in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A series of cataloging codes characterized this period. These codes governed the creation of library catalogs, first in book form, then on cards, and finally in electronic formats, including MAchine-Readable Cataloging (MARC)”.

3 . Another striking example is that Wikipedia redirects queries for “bibliographic control” to “Cataloging (library science)” and writes: “Bibliographic control provides the philosophical basis of cataloging, defining the rules that sufficiently describes information resources, to enable users find and select the most appropriate resource. A cataloger is an individual responsible for the processes of description, subject analysis, classification, and authority control of library materials”. See https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bibliographic_control&redirect=no and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cataloging_(library_science) (Visited January 4., 2023).

4 . Wilson has a footnote 5: “Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book 1, Aphorism 3: 'Human knowledge and human power meets in one, for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced'”.

5 . The opposite of universal bibliographic control is partial bibliographic control. That part must be defined by formal criteria, it cannot just be, for example, the holdings of a single library, unless that library attempts to and have the means to survey the total output of publications within its field. If not formally defined, the word control probably loses its meaning.

6 . Sevelsted and Tortzen ( 2010 ), unfortunately only available in Danish, is about this problem and may be considered an important humanistic background for a part of what in information science is called authorship attribution and author name disambiguation .

7 . “Subjects” are often considered to be inherent qualities of documents, and subject cataloging (classification and indexing) is often considered a part of the description of documents. This is, however, a problematic understanding according to the “request-oriented view” (or “policy-oriented view”) of classification and indexing. According to this view, documents do not “have” subjects, but subjects are attributed or ascribed to documents to improve retrievability according to the purposes of the organization doing the indexing (see → Subject (of documents) , Hjørland 2017 ).

8 . One can sense a certain questioning of the term descriptive cataloging when Wilson ( 1989 , 15) wrote about a needed reconceptualization “of the task of what hitherto has been called descriptive cataloging”.

9 . For a detailed examination of the term known item search see Lee, Renear and Smith ( 2006 ).

10 . Notes 7, 8 and 9 from Erskine ( 1995 , 39) are here omitted.

11 . Downs ( 1954 , 499) wrote: “ 'The first bibliographer of the modern world', Conrad Gesner of Zurich, in 1545, about a century after printing began, published his Bibliotheca Universalis , one of the monuments of early bibliography. His work fell far short of completeness, though, and, as Henry Bartlett Van Hoesen [ 1937 ] commented, '… if Gesner's bibliography was 'partial' and incomplete at a time when there were probably not more than 40,000 or 50,000 books in print, we may well despair of universality now' ”.

12 . Mundaneum is the overall center for RUB and other initiatives. Today it is a museum. Homepage: http://archives.mundaneum.org/en/ .

13 . Madsen ( 2000 , 46) wrote: “The national bibliography defined as a system or as a national bibliographic service is fairly recent. The term 'national bibliography' appears in the literature about the middle of the previous century- primarily as a designation of the national book list. It is not until the first half of the 20th century that the present broad definition was recognized. Important foundations for this 'new' perception are the international conferences arranged by UNESCO in 1950 and by IFLA and UNESCO in 1977”.

14 . Another example is Madsen ( 2000 , 45), who wrote: “The primary sources for all types of bibliography are the national bibliographies, i.e. each country's records of the literature that is published or has been published within the borders of that country. Only when this material has been obtained, can we say that it is possible to find the part of the whole world's production that is needed in the individual cases” ( Larsen 1959 , 299, from Danish)”. The same quote (and misunderstanding) is also given in Kungliga Biblioteket ( 2003 , 150).

15 . Hjørland ( 2015 , 1568) wrote: “So far, all guidelines have considered MEDLINE the most important bibliographical medical database and expert searching based on Boolean retrieval the most important retrieval model. Higgins and Green ( 2009 ), for example, wrote: “It is recommended that for all Cochrane reviews, CENTRAL [The Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, which is partly based on MEDLINE] and MEDLINE should be searched, as a minimum, together with EMBASE if it is available to either the CRG [Cochrane Review Group] or the review author” (electronic source, no page). Crumley et al. ( 2005 ) provide a systematic review examining the evidence concerning which sources should be used for the production of systematic reviews. They found that multiple source comprehensive searches are necessary to identify all randomized control trials for a systematic review and that indexing needs to be improved”.

17 . Kröber and Segeth ( 1976 , 214, translated from German, italics in original) criticized the ideal that descriptions should be complete: “The mere description of facts, declared by positivism to be the sole task of science, defines the concern of science too narrowly in the sense of what has been said above. In addition, the complete description of a phenomenon that positivism demands is not only impossible, but it is also unnecessary. It is impossible because the phenomenon with its infinite variety of properties and relations to other phenomena would require an infinite number of descriptions; and it is unnecessary because scientific knowledge and the practical activity of people do not depend on an equally detailed description of the essential and inessential, the necessary and contingent, the general and individual properties and relations of the phenomenon. On the contrary, it depends on the knowledge of the essence, of the general in the individual, of the necessary and lawful in the contingent. The description can therefore only do justice to its function if it is not made absolute and detached from the other scientific knowledge processes and means, such as explanation, hypothesis, prognosis, etc., but is seen and practiced in unity with them”.

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Lewandowski, Dirk. 2008. “The Retrieval Effectiveness of Web Search Engines: Considering Results Descriptions”. Journal of Documentation 64, no. 6: 915-37. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220410810912451 .

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Version 1.0 published 2023-03-28 Version 1.1 published 2023-04-03: reference to Boyle et al. 2022 added Version 1.2 published 2023-04-12: reference to Taylor and Winstanley 1990 added Version 1.3 published 2023-11-20: reference to Chaplin 1975 added

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This article (version 1.0) is also published in Knowledge Organization . How to cite it: Hjørland, Birger. 2023. “Bibliographical control”. Knowledge Organization 50, no. 4: 301-315. Also available in ISKO Encyclopedia of Knowledge Organization , eds. Birger Hjørland and Claudio Gnoli , https://www.isko.org/cyclo/control

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Universal Bibliographic Repertory

The first work of Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine in the late nineteenth century in the International Institute of Bibliography was to design a new form of bibliographic directory as a new tool to access information. The use of mobile forms, classified according to the universal language of the Universal Decimal Classification, allowed a faster and more efficient update of this tool and its use worldwide. The first example of dematerialization of knowledge, the Universal Bibliographical Index is now considered the first model of a search engine.

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Biography and genealogy master index. --Essential first stop in biographical research. Indexes nearly 1600 publications, largely biographical dictionaries and subject encyclopedias, and includes references on over 13.6 million people.  Both current and retrospective works included. Indexes H. W. Wilson’s Biography Index: Past and Present 284724 which extends Biography and genealogy master index’s coverage to periodical articles.  Birth/death dates given. Searches can be limited to articles with portraits. Covers: Who’s Who [Great Britain] (1974- ), Who’s Who in America (1973-  ) , Who was Who in America, and American men and women of Science (1973- ; for earlier coverage see American men & women of science: cumulative index 375482). Also available in print http://www.gale.com/servlet/BrowseSeriesServlet?region=9&imprint=000&titleCode=BDMI&edition.  This is the electronic version of the discontinued microform Bio-base.

Additional indexing for the early 20th century available in Hefling & Richards' Index to contemporary biography and criticism.

Internationale Personalbibliographie / bearb. von Max Arnim. 2., verb. und stark verm. Aufl. Stuttgart, Anton Hiersemann, 1952-1987. |LOCATION: Widener: RR 1501.7 Library has: 5 Bd. --Indexed in IBN   

Ireland, Norma Olin. Index to women of the world from ancient to modern times; biographies and portraits. Westwood, Mass., F. W. Faxon Co., 1970. LOCATION: Widener: RR 1501. 24 --Companion to the compiler's Index to scientists of the world. Provides references to biographical sketches of about 13,000 women which appear in 945 collective biographies and a few series, such as Current biography 284996. Indicates location of portraits. Index to women of the world from ancient to modern times:a supplement 243159 analyzes some 380 collective biographies published from 1971 to about 1985.  --Index and Suppl. Indexed in BGMI

Subject guide to women of the world provides topical and geographical indexes to Ireland's Index to Women of the World and its Supplement.

Lobies, Jean-Pierre. IBN: Index bio-bibliographicus notorum hominum. Osnabruck: Biblio Verlag, 1973- LOCATION: Widener: RR 1501.15  --Very important index of biographical information in biographical dictionaries and other reference works, although cumbersome to use. Indexes about 4000 collective biographies, published largely before 1970, covering all periods and countries.  Bulk of the works indexed are non-English.  Issued in bound volumes.  Currently indexes names only up to Lavrovskij (vol. 137, 2007).  Volume 99 (currently in 12 separate volumes) is an ongoing supplement.  For pre-1970, especially European, biographies can be a richer source than the World biographical information system, 164631 but much more laborious to use.  Volumes 48-145 (2007) available on CD-ROM.  The CD-ROM, unlike the World biographical information system, allows searching by place (city) name.

To be in five parts: (A) General introduction; (B) List of the evaluated biobibliographical works; (C) Corpus alphabeticum; (D) Supplement; (E) General index of references. Pts. A, D, and E not yet published.  Pt. B serves as a bibliography of collective biographies.  Universal biographical works are listed first (section I), followed by listings according to geographical, historical, or linguistic principles(section II), and by vocations and activities (section III). Additional lists of sources (supplements to pt. B) are found in v. 23-25, 40 and 47 of pt. C.  Each source listed in pt. B is assigned an identifying number.  These numbers are listed under each name in the alphabetical list of biographees in pt. C, and one must then look up the number in Pt. B.  Supplementary additions to the primary alphabetical sequence of pt. C are found in v. 10-12, 27, 29, 30, 44-47 of pt. C.  Pt. C also includes separately numbered volumes, titled Sectio Sinica cum Supplementa Coreano (2 v.), for Chinese (A-Bo Zong only) and Korean (A only) and Armenian, titled Sectio Armeniaca (4 v.), entries (A-U). 

The IBN indexes Armin’s Internationale Personalbibliographie.  300856

Index bio-bibliographicus notorum hominum IBN. Vols. 48-106 (Mar. 2000)- Osnabruck: F. Dietrich Verlag, 2000- LOCATION: Widener: Harvard Depository XVTS 241 Library has: Latest disc only

People on people : the Oxford dictionary of biographical quotations / edited by Susan Ratcliffe. Oxford ; New York : Oxford University Press, 2001, 481 p. Widener  |  WID-LC    |  PN6084.C44 P46 2001 --Quotations with sources (sometimes inexact) about well-known persons.  Serves as an index to more irreverent views of the subjects than are offered by the biographical dictionaries. A Biographical dictionary of quotations is a similar work. 437452   SUBMITTED

Riches, Phyllis M. An analytical bibliography of universal collected biography: comprising books published in the English tongue in Great Britain and Ireland, America and the British dominions. London: Library Association, 1934. LOCATION: Widener: RR 1501. 12 --An index to biographies of persons of various periods and nationalities in over 3000 English-language collective biographies.  In five sections: (1) analytical index, arranged alphabetically by biographee; (2) a bibliography of the works analyzed; (3) a chronological list of the biographees (by century); (4) a list of biographees arranged by profession or trade; (5) subject and title lists of major biographical dictionaries NOT indexed. 

Bibliography

Adamson, Lynda G. Notable women in world history : a guide to recommended biographies and autobiographies. Westport, Conn. : Greenwood Press, 1998. xiv, 401 p.  Widener | WID-LC | CT3230.Z99 A33 1998x  --Includes  500  women, all born outside the U. S.  Each entry has a short biography with annotated references to biographies, autobiographies, diaries, and published letters, all in English.  Appendices list the women by date of birth, occupation or reason for prominence, and by country of birth. 

ARBA guide to biographical dictionaries. Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1986. LOCATION: Widener: WID-LC CT103.Z99 A73 x, 1986 --Generous critical annotations for some 700 English language works selected from more than 2,500 reviews in American reference books annual (ARBA) which started in 1970. In two parts: Universal and national biographies; Professional fields. Whenever possible, dictionaries in print at the time of publication were selected. Continued by ARBA guide to biographical resources, 1986-1997.  Z5301.A82    SUBMITTED

Biographical sources for foreign countries Washington, 1944.   I. General.--II. Germany and Austria, compiled by N.R.  Burr.--III. The Philippines, compiled by Helen Dudenbostel Jones.--IV. The Japanese empire, compiled  by N.R. Burr.      Widener | H 1139.44.10  --Annotated list of biographical dictionaries, directories, and periodicals containing biographical information on living persons of the World War II era.   Largely organized by profession.  Many of the serial publications listed extend into pre- and post-War era.   Vol. I. General, vol. II. Germany and Austria, vol. III. The Philippines, vol. IV. The Japanese empire.  

Burt, Daniel S. The biography book: a reader's guide to nonfiction, fictional, and film biographies of more than 500 of the most fascinating individuals of all time. Westport, CT: Oryx Press, 2001. LOCATION: Widener: RR 1501.10 --Selective, annotated list of biographical sources on 500 much written about persons, all deceased. For each figure there are sections (when material is available) on Autobiography and Primary Sources (i.e., personal writings), Recommended Biographies, Other Biographical Studies (memoirs by family/friends, etc.), Biographical Novels, Fictional Portraits, Recommended Juvenile Biographies, Biographical Films and Theatrical Adaptations. Indexes of: Books and other Works by Title; Figures by Nationality; Figures by Occupation; Figures by Time, Period, and Place; Subject (e.g., astronomy, Fauvism).  --See also the St. James guide to biography which offers substantial signed articles reviewing English-language biographies of over 700 figures of all fields and time periods who are the subject of more than one significant biography.  With Anglo-American  emphasis but with reasonable coverage of Europeans.

Cimbala, Diane J., Jennifer Cargill, and Brian Alley. Biographical sources : a guide to dictionaries and reference works. Phoenix, AZ : Oryx Press, 1986, 146 p. LOCATION: Widener | WID-LC | CT104.Z99 C55 x, 1986 HOLLIS entry under Graves, Diane J.

Farrell, Mary A. Who's whos: an international guide to sources of current biographical information. METRO miscellaneous publication; no. 21. New York, N.Y.: New York Metropolitan Reference and Research Library Agency, 1979. LOCATION: Widener: B 8277. 47 no.21

Jarboe, Betty. Obituaries: a guide to sources. 2nd ed. Boston, Mass.: G.K. Hall, 1989. LOCATION: Widener: RR 683.21 --A bibliography of books, periodical articles, scrapbooks, clipping files, and some manuscript sources which include obituary notices or provide indexing to such notices. In three sections: (l) International sources; (2) United States sources (subdivided by state); (3) Foreign sources. Appendix of obituary card files. Many annotations; detailed subject index. The 2nd ed. more than doubles the number of sources listed in the 1st ed. (1982).

Lejeune, P. Inventaire des inventaires de textes autobiographiques.  http://www.autopacte.org/ --The Autopacte site includes Philippe Lejeune’s “Inventaire des inventaires de textes autobiographiques” which lists about 90 bibliographies of autobiographies by country. This website also includes extensive bibliographies of writings about autobiography as a genre.  SUBMITTED

Long, Jeffrey E. Remembered childhoods: a guide to autobiography and memoirs of childhood and youth. Westport, Conn. : Libraries Unlimited, 2007. --Lists of autobiographies and memoirs arranged in chapters on regions, experience (travel, nature, disease/disability, abuse, ethnic heritage), and adult occupation.  Covers English-language works, including translations into English. Each citation has a few subject terms. Indexes of subjects, settings (geographical), authors/titles. 

Schreiber, Klaus. Biographische Informationsmittel: Typologie mit Beispielen: Rezensionen von 836 allgemeinen und fachlichen Sammelbiographien von Anfang der neunziger Jahre bis Ende 1998;[OMITTED Samt einem Verzeichnis mit Schlagwortregister aller von 1974-1993 in der Rubrik Ausgewahlte Bibliographien und andere Nachschlagewerke der Zeitschrift fur Bibliothekswesen und Bibliographie sowie in IFB 1 (1993)-6 (1998) besprochenen biographischen Informationsmittel. Informationsmittel fur Bibliotheken. Beiheft; 9. Berlin: Deutsches Bibliotheksinstitut,] 1999.  LOCATION: Widener: WID-LC CT154.S38 1999x Library has: 2 v.  --Annotated bibliography arranged by subject of 836 works of collective biography appearing in the 1990s together with an index of over 360 works, dating back to 1974, reviewed elsewhere.  Many other works are mentioned in the footnotes.  Worldwide coverage but strong emphasis on German-speaking countries.  Includes microform and electronic sources as well as books. 

Handbuch der bibliographischen Nachschlagewerke includes list of national biographies, v. 1, pp. 370-417.

Slocum, Robert B. Biographical dictionaries and related works: an international bibliography of more than 16,000 collective biographies ... 2nd ed. Detroit, Mich.: Gale Research Co., 1986. LOCATION: Widener: RR 1501. 13.2  2 v. --Subtitle: An international bibliography of more than 16,000 collective biographies, bio-bibliographies, collections of epitaphs, selected genealogical works, dictionaries of anonyms and pseudonyms, historical and specialized dictionaries, biographical materials in government manuals, bibliographies of biography, biographical indexes, and selected portrait catalogs. Devoted principally to biographical dictionaries. Entries are grouped as universal, national, and vocational biography, with appropriate subdivisions. Author, title, and subject indexes. Aims to represent all languages and cultures. An essential work. 1st ed., 1967; supplements, 1972, 1978. 

Ungherini, Aglauro. Manuel de bibliographie biographique et d'iconographie des femmes celebres. Turin: L. Roux, 1892-1905. Main work + 1st & 2nd suppl. LOCATION: Houghton: Reading Room HRR 711 8 

Collective Biography

A to Z of women in world history, by Erika A. Kuhlman. New York: Facts on File, 2002 Focuses on women who have made significant contributions in human history, examined within their cultural and historical context. Entries are arranged alphabetically within chapters. Chapters represent roles of achievement, such as science and health, politics, athletics, religion, art, etc. A list of further reading concludes each entry. Cross-references.  Two-page bibliography. General index.

Biographical Dictionary http://www.s9.com --Very brief information over 33,000 person of all periods.  Searchable by birth/death dates, positions held, professions, literary and artistic works, and other keywords. 

Biographie universelle, ancienne et moderne, ou, Histoire, par ordre alphabétique, de la vie publique et privée de tous les hommes qui se sont fait remarquer par leurs écrits, leurs actions, leurs talents, leurs vertus ou leurs crimes : ouvrage entièrement neuf, rédigé par une Société de gens de lettres et de savants. Paris : Michaud frères, 1811-1862. 85 v. HOLLIS Record

Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne : ou, Histoire, par ordre alphabétique, de la vie publique et privée de tous les hommes qui sont fait remarquer par leurs écrits, leurs actions, leurs talents, leurs vertues ou leurs crimes, ouvrage rédigé par une société de gens de lettres et de savants. Nouv. éd., rev., corr. et considérablement augm. d'articles omis ou nouveaux. Paris: Delagrave, [1870-1873] 45 v. HathiTrust full text (1843- ed.) HathiTrust full text HathiTrust full text [1880 2nd ed.] Also available in Gallica

Nouvelle biographie générale depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours : avec les renseignements bibliographiques et l'indication des sources à consulter... sous la direction de Hoefer. Paris : Firmin Didot, 1862-1870. 46 v. HOLLIS Record HathiTrust full text

Nouvelle biographie générale depuis les temps les plus reculés jusqu'à nos jours, avec les renseignements bibliographiques et l'indication des sources à consulter, publiée par mm. Firmin Didot frères sous la direction de m. le dr. Hoefer...Paris, Firmin Didot frères, fils et cie, 1853-66 [v. 1, 1857] 46 v. HOLLIS Record Internet Archive full text HathiTrust full  text

Biographie universelle ancienne et moderne (widely known as Michaud) and the Nouvelle biographie generale (widely known as Hoefer) are both enormous mid-19th century dictionaries of universal biography, especially good for French persons. They contain much not available elsewhere.  There are differences between Michaud and Hoefer. In spite of some inaccuracies, Michaud is more carefully edited; its articles, signed with initials, are longer and often better than those in Hoefer; its bibliographies (except in one respect, as noted below) are better; and it contains more names in the second half of the alphabet, N-Z.  Hoefer contains more names, especially minor ones, from A-M; has some articles which are better than the corresponding articles in Michaud; and in the source lists gives titles in the original language, whereas Michaud translates into French.  Hoefer was planned to be more concise and more comprehensive than Michaud, to include names of people then living, and to list many minor names omitted from Michaud.

Publication histories of Michaud and Hoefer in Guide to reference books, by Isadore Gilbert Mudge, 6th ed. p. 282.  HathiTrust full text

Boynton and Malin. Encyclopedia of Women’s Autobiography 

Cambridge biographical encyclopedia. 2nd ed. Cambridge [England]; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998. ARBA 99 LOCATION: Widener: RR 1701.28 --Includes about 16,000 persons, living and deceased. Mostly short paragraphs with about 40 more detailed "panel" entries. Good coverage of popular culture. Coverage is worldwide with European/US and 20th century emphasis. Ready Reference section at end gives lists of world leaders, religious leaders and saints, US Supreme Court justices, Nobel Prize winners, prominent names in competitive sports and games, etc. Pronunciation help for difficult names. Other pronounciation dictionaries are listed in Section AC. 1st. ed., 1994.  Indexed in Biography and genealogy master index.  The Crystal Reference Biographical Database http://www.crystalreference.com/Reference/biographies.htm, the basis of the Cambridge biographical encyclopedia, is the source of the Biography.com database http://www.biography.com. Where a fuller Biography.com biography is available, it replaces the Crystal Reference article.

The Houghton Mifflin dictionary of biography 284831 (7th ed. 2003; published in England as Chambers biographical dictionary) is another dictionary covering both living and deceased persons and with similar emphases. Available online through Xrefer (http://www.xrefer.com/) as Chambers biographical dictionary.  Earlier Chambers eds: 1897-1997.  7th and 6th eds. indexed in Biography and genealogy master index.

The Palgrave Macmillan dictionary of women's biography / compiler and editor, Jennifer S. Uglow. 4th ed.  NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. WID-LC CT3202 .P26 2005  --Includes over 2100 women, living and deceased, from Antiquity to the present.  Often includes interesting bits of information omitted in other sources. Many subjects chosen for idiosyncratic interest.  Introductory nine-page survey of other biographical sources.  A few entries are dropped with each new edition. Subject index by occupation or reason for prominence.

Earlier eds. published as: 

The Northeastern dictionary of women's biography. 3rd ed. 1999. Available online through Xrefer http://www.xrefer.com/ as Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.

The Continuum Dictionary of Women's Biography 2nd. Ed  1989. Indexed in Biography and genealogy master index 160047

The International dictionary of women's biography 1st ed. 1982.

Other one volume dictionaries of women’s biography include Chambers biographical dictionary of women which covers 3000 women, living and deceased, and Penguin biographical dictionary of women which includes over 1600 subjects with strong Anglo-American and twentieth century emphasis. 

Chambers biographical dictionary of women, ed. by M. Perry. Edinburgh: Chambers, 1996, 741 p. LOCATION: Widener: WID-LC CT3202.C48 1996x 

The Penguin biographical dictionary of women. Penguin ; NY: Penguin Putnam, 1998, 737 p.  Widener | Harvard Depository | CT3202 .P36 1998 

Dictionary of women worldwide : 25,000 women through the ages / Anne Commire; Deborah Klezmer 2007 3 v. Farmington Hills, MI : Thomson Gale,  --Includes about 25,000 brief (30-500 words) entries on living and deceased women. Worldwide coverage from ancient Egypt to present but with Anglo-American and 20th century emphasis. Mant entries have sources listed. Abundant cross-referencing of variant names and titles. Occupation, ethnicity/nationality and chronological indexes. Introductory genealogical charts of ruling families. Partially based on the same editors' Women in world history: a biographical encyclopedia which includes about 10,000 longer biographies.

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Universal Bibliography/History

See also History and Geography .

This part of the Universal Bibliography is a bibliography of history.

See w:Bibliography of encyclopedias: history , w:List of archaeology and history books and w:Category:Works about history .

• 1 Metabibliography
• 2 General Series
• 5 Millennia and centuries
• 9 Buildings and sites

Metabibliography

See w:Category:Bibliographies of history

• D'Aniello (ed). Teaching Bibliographic Skills in History. 1993
• Besterman. History and Geography: A Bibliography of Bibliographies. 1972 [1]
• Guide to Periodicals and Bibliographies Dealing with Geography, Archaeology, and History [2]
• A Consumer's Guide to Research Guides for Historical Literature. American Library Association. 1990 [3]
• The American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature. 1995 [4]
• George Matthew Dutcher. A Guide to Historical Literature. P Smith. 1949. Google Books
• Adams. A Manual of Historical Literature. 1882 [5] , 3rd Ed: 1889 [6] [7]
• Historical Abstracts: Bibliography of the World's Historical Literature. [8]
• International Bibliography of Historical Sciences. De Gruyter
• Sonnenschein. A Bibliography of History and Historical Biography. 1897 [9]
• Andrews, Gambill and Tall. Bibliography of History for Schools and Libraries. 1910 [10] [11] [12]
• A Bibliography of History: Being a Collection of Reading Lists from Courses in History and Allied Fields. Harvard Graduate History Club. 1953 [13]
• Grose (ed). A Select Bibliography of History. 1970 [14]
• Fritze, Coutts and Vyhnanek. Reference Sources in History: An Introductory Guide. 1990 [15] . 2nd Ed: 2004 [16]
• A Consumer's Guide to Ready Reference Sources in History. American Library Association. 1990 [17]
• Boehm and Birkos. Reference Works: History and Related Fields. 1967 [18]
• Bibiographies and Indexes in World History. ISSN 0742-6852. Issue 12
• Roach (ed). A Bibliography of Modern History. CUP. 1968 [19]
• Medlicott. Modern European History, 1789-1945: A Select Bibliography. 1960. Revised: 1973. [20]
• Rouse, Claxton and Metzger. Serial Biblographies for Medieval Studies. University of California Press. 1969 [21]
• International Medieval Bibliography. University of Leeds
• Davis. Medieval European History 395-1500: A Select Bibliography. Historical Association. 2nd Ed: 1968 [22]
• Iliff. A Guide to the Literature in English on the Teaching of History. University of California. 1914. [23]

Historiography:

• Moyer. Historiography: Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide. OUP. 2010. [24]

Military and Naval:

• Bibliographies of Battles and Leaders. Issue 17
• DeVries. A Cumulative Bibliography of Medieval Military History and Technology. 2002. Update 2003-2006, published 2008. [25]
• Horward. Napoleonic Military History: A Bibliography. Garland. 1986. [26]
• Schneid. Napoleonic Wars. The Essential Bibliography Series. 2012 [27]
• Whaley. The Impact of Napoleon, 1800-1815: An Annotated Bibliography. 1997. [28]
• Bruce, Anthony. A Bibliography of British Military History: From the Roman Invasions to the Restoration, 1660. K G Saur. 1981. [29]
• Rasor. English/British Naval History to 1815. Praeger. 2004. The Seaforth Bibliography. Pen and Sword. 2008. [30]
• Rasor. The Spanish Armada of 1588: Historiography and Annotated Bibliography. 1993. [31]
• Lynch. The War at Sea: France and the American Revolution: A Bibliography. [32]
• Whitrow. ISIS Cumulative Bibliography: A Bibliography of the History of Science Formed from ISIS Critical Bibliographies 1-90, 1913-65. [33]
• Wehefritz. Bibliography on the History of Chemistry and Chemical Technology 17th to the 19th Century. 1994. [34]
• Bibliography of the History of Medicine. (National Library of Medicine). [35]

Philosophy:

• Jasenas. A History of the Bibliography of Philosophy. 1973. [36]
• International Bibliography of the History of Religions. 1964 volume , 1969. 1973 volume , 1979.
• Chaniotis. Greek Religion. (Oxford Bibliographies Online Research Guide). 2010. [37]
• Taneti. History of the Telugu Christians: A Bibliography. (ATLA Bibliography Series, number 60). 2011. [38]
• Norton. Religious Newspapers in the Old Northwest to 1861: A History, Bibliography, and Record of Opinion. 1977. [39]
• Calder and Kramer. An Introductory Bibliography to the History of Classical Scholarship: Chiefly in the XIXth and XXth Centuries. 1992.
• Calder and Smith. A Supplementary Bibliography to the History of Classical Scholarship: Chiefly in the XIXth and XXth Centuries. 2000. [40]
• Hansen. A Bibliography of Danish Contributions to Classical Scholarship from the Sixteenth Century to 1970. 1977. [41]
• Andersen. Danish Contributions to Classical Scholarship, 1971-1991: A Bibliography. 2004. [42]

North America:

• Bibliographic Guide to North American History. G K Hall. 1979. 1980. 1982. 1985. 1986. [43]
• Bibliographies and Indexes in American History [44]
• Brasseaux and Conrad. A Bibliography of Scholarly Literature on Colonial Louisiana and New France. 1992. [45]

British Isles

• Bibliography of British and Irish History
• Annual Bibliography of British and Irish History. Royal Historical Society.
• Ireland, Stanley. Roman Britain: A Sourcebook. Croom Helm. 1986. [46]

British Empire, Colonies and Commonwealth

• Porter, Andrew. Bibliography of Imperial, Colonial, and Commonwealth History Since 1600. Oxford University Press. 2002. [47]
• McCrank. Bibliographical Foundations of French Historical Studies. Haworth. 1992. Routledge 1996. [48] [49]
• Bowditch, Grew, Geiger. A Selected Bibliography on Modern French History, 1600 to the Present. 1974. [50]
• Echard. Foreign policy of the French Second Empire: A Bibliography. 1988. (Bibiographies and Indexes in World History, issue 12)
• Young. French Foreign Policy 1918-1945: A Guide to Research and Research Materials. 1981. Revised: 1991. [51]

Scandinavia:

• Munch-Petersen (ed). Guide to Nordic Bibliography. 1984. (016:9 History, 016:902 Archaeology, 016:908 Local history). Pages 194 to 206.
• Bibliografi Til Norges Historie
• Hill: Norwegian Local History: A Bibliography of Material in the Collections of the Memorial Library, University of Wisconsin-Madison. 1989. [52]
• Dansk Historisk Bibliografi
• Jansen and Riis. A Select Bibliography of Danish Works on the History of Towns Published 1960-1972. 1973. [53]
• Tamm. The History of Danish Law: Selected Articles and Bibliography. 2011. [54]
• Snorrason. The History of Medicine in and about Denmark: Sources and Bibliography. 1968.
• Ferreiro. The Visigoths in Gaul and Spain: A.D. 418-711: A Bibliography. 1988. [55]

United States:

• Bibliographies of States of the United States. No 8
• Flagg and Jennings. Bibliography of New York Colonial History. (New York State Library, Bulletin 56, Bibliography 24, February 1901)
• Dickinson and Hitchcock. A Bibliography of Tennessee History, 1973-1996. 1999. [56]
• Schlinkert. Subject Bibliography of Wisconsin History. 1947. [57]
• Bradley. A Bibliography of Wisconsin's Participation in the War between the States. 1911. [58]
• Wilkinson. Chinese History: A New Manual

General Series

• Oxford Histories
• Oxford Historical Monographs. (Oxford Monographs Series)
• Cambridge Histories
• Exeter Studies in History
• Access to A Level History. Edward Arnold.
• Seminar Studies in History. Longman.
• Flagship History
• Sutton Pocket Histories
• Studies in Economic History. Macmillan.
• Langer (ed). The Rise of Modern Europe. Harper.
• New Oxford History of England
• Commager and Morris (eds). New American Nation. Harper.
• Brookeman and Issel (eds). The Contemporary United States. Macmillan.
• Perrot and Chipiez's Works on Ancient Art. Wikisource
• Columbia Histories of Modern American Life.
• Shotwell (ed). Records of Civilazation: Sources and Studies. Columbia University Press. (wikisource)
• Gardiner, Juliet (ed). What is History Today? Macmillan Education. 1988
• Cambridge Ancient History
• Cambridge Medieval History
• Cambridge Modern History
• Durant, Will and Ariel. The Story of Civilization.

General television series

• Timewatch . 1982 onwards. BBC2. [Television series]
• Secret History . 1991 onwards. Channel 4. [Television series]
• Wetterau, Bruce (compiler). Concise Dictionary of World History. Macmillan. 1983. Robert Hale. 1984.
• Roberts, J M. Shorter Illustrated History of the World. Helicon Publishing. 1993. BCA. 1994.

Millennia and centuries

For chronologies of particular millennia and centuries, see Chronology

2nd millennium AD

• CNN Millennium . 1999. [Television series] [About the 2nd millennium AD]

20th century

• People's Century . 1995 to 1997. [Television series]
• Thomson, David. Europe since Napoleon. Longmans. 1957. 2nd Ed: 1962.

"Roman Britain", The Times, series of articles in 1996

• Alan Hamilton, "Invaders who left a cultural revolution in their wake", The Times, 3 August 1996, p 8
• Emma Wilkins, "Keeping up appearances was time well spent for garrison town women", The Times, 5 August 1996, p 6
• "How to see the best of the sites", The Times, 5 August 1996, p 6
• "Cives Romani Sumus", The Times, 5 August 1996, p 17
• The Times, 6 August 1996
• "Where all roads lead to Romans", The Times, 7 August 1996, p 7
• "Bath-house lies buried under Spud-U-Like", The Times, 8 August 1996, p 9
• John Young, "Invasion troops took over native spa for rest and recreation", The Times, 9 August 1996, p 9
• Alan Hamilton, "Londinium's treasures lie beneath every City street", The Times, 10 August 1996, p 8
• Bill Frost, "Families buried their riches before they fled", The Times, 10 August 1996, p 8
• Alan Hamilton, "Tracing footsteps of the legions", The Times, 12 August 1996, p 6
• Bill Frost, "Latin ghosts haunt town preserved by centuries of neglect", The Times, 13 August 1996, p 7
• Emma Wilkins, "Fourth largest city grew from border fort built to quell 'little Britons'", The Times, 13 August 1996, p 7
• Bill Frost, "The Battle of Britain, Roman style", The Times, 14 August 1996, p 6
• Emma Wilkins, "Sumptuous reward for a co-operative chieftan", The Times, 15 August 1996, p 10
• "Archway survives ravages of time", The Times, 16 August 1996, p 8
• "Beaten Iceni were herded into Norfolk new town", The Times, 16 August 1996, p 8
• Alan Hamilton, "Gourmet invader added spice to Celtic life", The Times, 17 August 1996, p 8
• John Young, "Frontier town that embraced civilisation", The Times, 17 August 1996, p 8
• "Roman Britain's secrets explored", The Times, 19 August 1996, p 19

Inns of court

• The Records of the Honorable Society of Lincoln's Inn . Google Books: editions:44paS1hFG1MC

Buildings and sites

• One Foot in the Past . BBC2. 1993 to 2000. [Television series]
• Branigan. "China loses thousands of historic sites" . The Guardian. 14 December 2009.
• "Historical buildings in India photographed and their stories preserved before they succumb to decay and neglect" . South China Morning Post.
• Vijay. "ASI and NMA need a new avatar to conserve and protect India's monuments" . The Economic Times. 5 May 2023.
• International Register of Historic Ships
• Purnell's History of the First World War
• Barrie Pitt (ed). Purnell's History of the Second World War . Purnell's Illustrated History of the Second World War.
• The Pan/Ballantine Illustrated History of World War II. Ballantine's Illustrated History of World War II
• Beekman History of the Wars Library
• Barrie Pitt (Consultant ed). The Military History of World War II. Temple Press. London. The Military Press. New York. 1986.

• Bibliographies

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• June 19 2024

Credited in a bibliography

Here is the answer for the: Credited in a bibliography Universal Crossword Clue.  This crossword clue was last seen on June 19 2024 Universal Crossword puzzle . The solution we have for Credited in a bibliography has a total of 5 letters.

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• Repeat oneself while touring The Hague?
• Far from innovative
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• Share a border with

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