Bibliographic index

Bibliographic Index was a metabibliography and bibliographic database published by the H. W. Wilson Company. It contained in-depth indexing of more than 530,000 bibliographies published in English, German, Dutch, and the Scandinavian, Slavic, and Romance languages, including over 185,000 full-text bibliographies.

A bibliographic index is a bibliography, an aid to 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). Indexes of this kind are issued in print periodical form (issued in monthly or quarterly paperback supplements, cumulated annually), online, or both. Since the 1970s they are typically generated as output from bibliographic databases (whereas earlier they were manually compiled using index cards). 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, developed over time by the indexing service.