The HNR Bibliography

The most comprehensive bibliography on the application of network analysis to the historical sciences
v2.0 (2026)

Access the bibliography with all its features

This page is merely a very imperfect interface for using the HNR Bibliography. The Zotero library lets you perform advanced searches, sort entries by a variety of criteria, use time- and location-based tags and combine them, create your own collections, and more. 

This entire initiative is based on a Zotero “group,” which anyone can join for free. This allows all these references to be automatically updated in your own Zotero client (and therefore accessible even when offline), so you can copy and paste them effortlessly and organize them however you like in your own library. Zotero is free software used by millions of people around the world.

Tags and advanced search

Temporal and geographical tags

All references have tags that fall into three categories:

Tagging each reference accurately is a lot of work and leaves room for errors: for example, an article titled “Trade Networks in the Iberian Peninsula in the 18th Century” will be tagged “18th century” and “Europe,” even if the text reveals that some of the data also covers the late 17th century and that certain trade activities also took place with North Africa or Latin America. On the other hand, if the title does not specify the century or region, the annotator will have to read the article and may therefore come across this more precise information and tag it accordingly.

Note that an article covering several centuries—or even millennia—will therefore be tagged with multiple temporal tags.

Combining tags in an advanced search

Zotero’s advanced search lets you combine tags.

Specific combination

You can search for all items that fall within the intersection of two tags—for example, the intersection of a century and a continent (use “matching all”):

A period spanning several centuries

You can search for all items that appear anywhere within a period spanning several centuries (use “matching any”), for example, from the 16th to the 18th century:

Note that these advanced search options also allow you to “Save Search” and thus create a collection in Zotero that automatically includes the combination of tags you’re interested in (and is constantly updated with new items that are added and tagged).

If you are interested in the statistical distribution of tags and the intersection between century and continent, we have included a very informative table in the 2026 report, available here (forthcoming).

Quick overview of the HNR Bibliography

This page automatically displays the entire bibliographic list. We recommend using Zotero (above) to access the full metadata and tags, and to export the references in the style of your choice. Alphabetical order by first author. The loading time may be a bit long; the page has to retrieve over 1,000 references from Zotero.