A bibliographic index is a
bibliography
Bibliography (from and ), as a discipline, is traditionally the academic study of books as physical, cultural objects; in this sense, it is also known as bibliology (from ). English author and bibliographer John Carter describes ''bibliography ...
intended to help find a publication. Citations are usually listed by author and subject in separate sections, or in a single alphabetical sequence under a system of authorized headings collectively known as
controlled vocabulary
Control may refer to:
Basic meanings Economics and business
* Control (management), an element of management
* Control, an element of management accounting
* Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization
* Controll ...
, developed over time by the indexing service. Indexes of this kind are issued in print
periodical
A periodical literature (also called a periodical publication or simply a periodical) is a published work that appears in a new edition on a regular schedule. The most familiar example is a newspaper, but a magazine or a journal are also exampl ...
form (issued in monthly or quarterly paperback supplements, cumulated annually), online, or both. Since the 1970s they are typically generated as output from
bibliographic database
A bibliographic database is a database of bibliographic records, an organized digital collection of references to published literature, including journal and newspaper articles, conference proceedings, reports, government and legal publications ...
s (whereas earlier they were manually compiled using
index card
An index card (or record card in British English and system cards in Australian English) consists of card stock (heavy paper) cut to a standard size, used for recording and storing small amounts of discrete data. A collection of such cards ...
s).
"From many points of view an index is synonymous with a catalogue, the principles of analysis used being identical, but whereas an index entry merely locates a subject, a catalogue entry includes descriptive specification of a document concerned with the subject".
The index may help search the literature of, for example, an academic field or discipline (example: ''
Philosopher's Index''), to works of a specific literary form (''
Biography Index'') or published in a specific format (''
Newspaper Abstracts''), or to the analyzed contents of a serial publication (''
New York Times Index'').
See also
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Citation index
A citation index is a kind of bibliographic index, an index of citations between publications, allowing the user to easily establish which later documents cite which earlier documents. A form of citation index is first found in 12th-century Hebr ...
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Guide to information sources
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Indexing and abstracting service
*
Library catalog
A library catalog (or library catalogue in British English) is a register of all bibliographic items found in a library or group of libraries, such as a network of libraries at several locations. A catalog for a group of libraries is also ...
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List of academic databases and search engines
This article contains a representative list of notable databases and search engines useful in an academic setting for finding and accessing articles in academic journals, institutional repositories, archives, or other collections of scientific an ...
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Metabibliography
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Metadata registry
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Subject index
Subject indexing is the act of describing or classifying a document by index terms, keywords, or other symbols in order to indicate what different documents are ''about'', to summarize their contents or to increase findability. In other words, it ...
References
Bibliographic databases and indexes
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