This blog post was written by Jenny Lelkes-Rarugal, Editor for the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH).
Data derived from the Bibliography of British and Irish History.
About the Bibliography of British and Irish History (BBIH)
The Bibliography of British and Irish History is an essential tool for the study, research, and teaching of British and Irish history. It is the largest and most comprehensive guide available to published writing on the history of British and Irish relations with the rest of the world, including the British empire and the Commonwealth, as well as British and Irish domestic history from 55 BCE to the present day. BBIH can also be used to study, teach and research a wide range of interdisciplinary historical fields such as the histories of race and ethnicity, migration, gender, disability, the environment, and emotions.
The Bibliography is the essential resource for historical study, teaching and research and is a research project of the UK’s Institute of Historical Research (IHR) and the Royal Historical Society (RHS), and is published by Brepols. With new records added three times a year, BBIH provides up-to-date information on over 640,440:
- History books, articles, chapters, edited collections (published from the early 1900s to present)
- History theses (submitted late 1990s to 2022)
These records are searchable by a wide range of facets including: title, author, chronology, date and form of publication, historical topic, and geographical region.
BBIH and histories of disability
UK Disability History Month runs annually from mid-November to mid-December. BBIH editors and Brepols have produced a new online reading list of 459 recent publications focusing on the histories of disability, which is a subcategory of medical history and health in the BBIH subject tree. BBIH’s hierarchical subject tree offers a powerful way of searching by subject because it uses terminology systematically applied to records by BBIH’s editors: your results will not depend on the appearance of words in titles or in keywords provided by authors. You can learn more about the subject tree here.
The books, articles, book chapters and theses in this list were published between 2010 and 2022. Our coverage of recently published titles is ongoing, and further records will be added in future updates of the Bibliography.
Access the full text from BBIH
Records for journal articles may include a ‘Full text’ link.
This link will take you to the abstract of the article via the publisher’s website. If you have access to a library that subscribes to the journal, you will then be able to go straight to the full text (you may need to log on to your institutional library). Some books also have ‘Full text’ links: these connect to eBook or free Open Access versions of the work where they have been made available by the publisher.
BBIH online help pack
You can learn more about using BBIH by visiting our page of online tutorials, which include:
- The basics of searching, including how to use the subject tree
- How to use your results
- How to keep up-to-date with the latest published research in your field or manage your reference lists or bibliographies
- Behind-the-scenes guide to how BBIH is compiled.
Short video guides are designed for:
- New undergraduates and those planning and researching a final year dissertation
- MA and PhD students for whom BBIH is essential for writing a literature review and studying secondary fields of interest.
Lecturers, teachers, and librarians will find it helpful that the Bibliography’s online tutorials can all be embedded in a virtual learning environment (VLE). Presentations are also available here to promote the Bibliography to your students and staff.
Subscribe to BBIH
Full access to BBIH’s 640,440 records is via subscription: many UK and international university and research libraries subscribe and provide full access to members. Personal subscriptions are also available.