Bibliographies and reviews

Bibliographies and reviews are valuable sources when you need to start to research a topic, and can be helpful in keeping you up to date.

Bibliographies

A bibliography is a list of references to books or sometimes to articles in journals. Bibliographies can take a variety of forms:

bibliographies in books, at the end of each chapter or at the end of the book;
bibliographies in journal articles, the list of references sometimes at the end or, less often, on each page;
subject bibliographies, published separately as a one-off, or sometimes as a journal or a database;
general bibliographies, including the national bibliographies such as British National Bibliography and 'Books in Print' type listings. Some of these are available as databases or on the Internet (see our selected internet links on MetaLib to Libraries, archives and catalogues and Online bookshops).

Reviews

A review is a summary of what has been happening in a subject over a number of years (sometimes a single year), with a list of references to the original articles. There are a wide range of specialist journals which publish reviews of subjects, many of which have titles including phrases Annual Review of..., Annual Progress in..., Reviews in.... Review articles also appear in 'normal' journals. Some books, especially research monographs, also do the same in book form. These secondary sources can often provide a good starting point when beginning to look at a new subject. In many databases you can search for review articles, eg by refining search results in Web of Science by Document type.