Bibliography is the study of books as conceptual content and as physical objects. The books in question, once limited to hardbound objects available in bookstores, are today generally defined more broadly. The term "book" is now generally applied to all texts (be they published or in manuscript) that are meant to be permanent, including periodicals, maps, music, pictures, and ephemera, as well as materials preserved in the audiovisual and electronic media. The conceptual and physical aspects of these objects involve the two specialties of reference bibliography and analytical bibliography.

Reference Bibliography

Lists, inventories, footnotes, and prose essays are all ways in which readers and books can be brought together. To make these tools more useful to the reader, standard citations have been formulated for each situation. These citations emphasize content, even though the physical embodiment is inseparable.

A bibliographical citation typically consists of an entry that names

1. the...