The Royal Historical Society Bibliography

in association with Irish History Online and London's Past Online

A guide to writing about British and Irish history

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SCOPE AND AIMS

- General
- Contents
- Indexing
- Limitations

General

The Royal Historical Society's online bibliography provides bibliographic data on historical writing dealing with the British Isles, and with the British Empire and Commonwealth, during all periods for which written documentation is available - from 55BC to the present.

As well as providing details of publications, the bibliography provides links to online catalogues to help you find the items that it lists in research libraries in Britain, Ireland and the USA, and it provides links to online text where available (you or your institution may need an appropriate subscription to take advantage of some of these links).

The bibliography is a guide to the work of historians - it does not contain original sources, unless they have been edited and republished by historians (except for a selection of key sources published before 1901 derived from the printed bibliographies published for the Royal Historical Society and the American Historical Association by Oxford University Press).

The bibliography aims to be as comprehensive as is practical for publications since 1900. The database is being enriched by cooperation with other projects; data from the London's Past Online project were added to the database in January 2003 and the first batch of data from Irish History Online was added in August 2004, with further batches from both projects being added since. From the end of 2006 the bibliography has cooperated with teams working under the auspices of the Scottish Historical Review Trust which will henceforth edit the primarily Scottish titles in the database. The complete database now contains nearly 470,000 records.

The bibliography lists books, articles in books and articles in journals. You can consult a list of the 687 journals and series currently searched for material relevant to the bibliography. Electronic journals will be included if they meet at least three of the following criteria:

Editorial board includes well-known scholars in the field or demonstrates association with a university department;

Scholarly content;

Published regularly, or with reasonable frequency;

Submissions are refereed.

We welcome recommendations from users for journals that might be included.

Material is included irrespective of place or language of publication, although coverage is best for works published in Britain (and in Ireland during 1936-2006, the dates of publication so far comprehensively covered by Irish History Online).

Contents

All titles included in The Royal Historical Society Bibliography on CD-ROM (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) are included in the database (with the exception of unpublished theses), but the online version includes many additional titles. It contains:

material published since the cut-off date for the CD-ROM, which included publications up to and including 1992. All titles in the Royal Historical Society's Annual Bibliographies of British and Irish History for the years 1993-2002 are included in the online data. Although the RHS has decided to cease publication of the printed Annual Bibliography in order to concentrate resources on the online edition, the online database will continue to be updated with information about new publications as quickly as possible. See our news page for information on the most recent updates to the data.

all titles in the Royal Historical Society's Annual Bibliographies of British and Irish History for the years 1975-1992 (also included on the CD-ROM).

all titles in the Writings on British History, covering publications of 1901-74, compiled by the Royal Historical Society and the Institute of Historical Research (these volumes omitted the publications of English and Welsh historical societies from 1901 to 1933, and of similar Scottish societies from 1901 to 1927, but this has been compensated for by including selected material from A guide to the historical and archaeological publications of societies in England and Wales, 1901-1933, comp. E.L.C. Mullins (London: Athlone, 1968) [including all record society volumes], and by including Scottish record society volumes published between 1901 and 1927). This material was also included in the CD-ROM.

pre-1901 publications from the bibliographies published by Oxford University Press in association with the Royal Historical Society and the American Historical Association (again, also included in the CD-ROM), i.e.

-	Edgar B. Graves (ed.), A bibliography of English history to 1485 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975)
-	Conyers Read (ed.), Bibliography of British history: Tudor period, 1485-1603, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1959)
-	Godfrey Davies (ed.), Bibliography of British history: Stuart period, 1603-1714, 2nd edn., rev. Mary Frear Keeler (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970)
-	Stanley Pargellis; D.J. Medley (ed.), Bibliography of British history: The eighteenth century, 1714-1789 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1951)
-	Lucy M. Brown; I.R. Christie (ed.), Bibliography of British history: 1789-1851 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977)
-	H.J. Hanham (comp. and ed.), Bibliography of British history: 1851-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1976)

many additional titles published before 1993 which did not appear in the printed bibliographies, especially on Imperial and Commonwealth history, Irish history and women's history; a proportion of these appeared in the CD-ROM edition, but further such titles are included here, and we plan to include more in future releases.

The database also includes the contents - placed online by the London's Past Online project - of Heather Creaton's Bibliography of printed works on London history to 1939 (London: Library Association Publishing Ltd, 1994) and her Sources for the history of London, 1939-45 (London: British Records Association, 1998), plus supplementary material, previously unpublished, covering London's history since 1945 and also covering publications that have appeared since the completion of Heather Creaton's books. In 2005-6, titles from the Bibiography of the Archaeology of Greater London were added, providing an additional dimension to the coverage of the capital's past (however, very brief pieces contained in BAGL, including minutes of archaeological bodies, or reports of visits, have not been included in the online bibliography).

In addition, from the end of August 2004, the database has included the contents of the Irish History Online project. This project has placed online the contents of the Writings on Irish History (currently compiled by Máirín Cassidy and Ciaran Nicholson). Coverage now embraces the Writings for 1936-2005, together with most of the titles for 2006 and some later publications, and therefore includes all material previously published in print or microfiche, as well as much recent material not included in the printed and microfiche editions. A second Irish History Online project, which ran from 2006 to 2009, has extended coverage of the Irish diaspora (including foreign publications).

Indexing

The CD included much additional indexing information for post-1945 publications, and this is further enhanced in the online database, with hierarchical controlled languages being used to index post-1992 publications by subject and place, and an authority list of personal names also being used; we are mapping the indexing used for pre-1993 publications on to these lists, although this process is still under way and searches of 1946-92 publications using the authority lists will currently give useful but incomplete results.

Limitations

There are some limitations on content:

-	The coverage of Imperial and Commonwealth history is not intended to provide a complete bibliography for the history of countries within the Empire or Commonwealth, but to provide a guide to writing on their relations with Britain.
-	Although much was done during the compilation of the CD-ROM to extend the coverage of Irish history provided by the bibliographies on which the project was based, the coverage of the history of Ireland remained less complete than that for England, Scotland and Wales. However, coverage of Irish history has now been improved as a result of co-operation with Irish History Online. As a result, all titles from the Writings on Irish History for 1936-2005, together with most of the titles for 2006 and some later publications, are now included in the database.
-	The bibliography aims to list new editions, but not reprints or paperback editions when the content is unchanged; collections of reprinted essays are included but their contents are not generally listed separately. Reprints of older works are listed when new scholarly material has been included (for example, in the form of a new introduction).
-	Review articles are included, but not reviews of individual works unless they are presented as articles in their own right. However, we provide hyperlinks to online reviews published by the Institute of Historical Research's Reviews in History, by H-Albion and by CERCLES: Revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone.
-	Works aimed primarily at children and school pupils are excluded. (Prior to 2003, the policy was to exclude works aimed at those under 16: i.e., in an English context, those aimed at pupils up to and including Year 11.)
-	The bibliography does not aim to include items on technical topics if the aim of the work is primarily to appeal to enthusiasts in a particular area, and not to contribute to broader historical understanding: hence, for example, technical items on transport history, and items aimed primarily at collectors dealing with topics such as the decorative arts, stamps or coins, may be excluded.
-	The bibliography contains unpublished theses on London history, but unpublished theses are not otherwise included in the database.