Biobibliography

personal bibliography, a kind of bibliography in which information about published works is combined with biographical information on their authors and on literature devoted to them. Biobibliography is usually found in biobibliographical dictionaries and indexes. There are both current and retrospective dictionaries. The former include yearly dictionaries of contemporaries (for example, the English-language Who’s Who, 1849—) and obituaries for a given year (for example, D. D. Iazykov’s dictionary, Survey of the Lives and Works of Deceased Russian Writers, vols. 1–13. St. Petersburg-Moscow, 1885–1916, which includes persons who died between 1881 and 1893, with each yearly issue from the 1881–93 period containing information about those dying in that year). Retrospective dictionaries embrace considerably longer periods: for example, The Critical-Biographical Dictionary of Russian Writers and Scholars . .. (S. A. Vengerov, vols. 1–6, St. Petersburg, 1889–1904) and The Reference Dictionary of Russian Writers and Scholars Who Died in the XVIII and XIX Centuries. . . (G. N. Gennadi, vols. 1–3, Berlin-Moscow, 1876–1908). In the last decades, biobibliographical indexes have become numerous in the various branches of scholarship; Materials for the Biobibliography of Scholars in the USSR has been published in the USSR since 1938 in separate series for each field, as have indexes devoted to outstanding individual public figures, scientists, writers, and others.