The Historical Network Research Bibliography has been completely revamped: following a year of work by a group of volunteers, it has been significantly expanded (+30% more references), cleaned up, and enhanced with a tagging system that enables more efficient searches!

The report produced by the HNR Bibliography “task force” summarizes their work for the 2025–2026 academic year. It outlines the changes made to the collaborative bibliography, particularly the in-depth work done on organizing the bibliography by temporal and geographic tags and the addition of several hundred references. Since the new bibliography involves overwriting certain metadata from the old list, this report presents some statistics for archival purposes:

Read the full report here

For users of the HNR bibliography, nothing has fundamentally changed. It’s still accessible through the HNR Zotero group – whose library can be viewed online with limited features – but also, and most importantly, through the standalone Zotero app on personal devices, once users have signed in with their Zotero accounts and subscribed to the HNR group. To give a brief overview and some instructions on how to use the bibliography, the HNR Bibliography page on the HNR website has also been updated.

Subscribe to the Zotero group!

What’s new?

New references

The HNR Bibliography v2.0 now contains 1,330 entries, up from 1,159 previously. However, many entries from v1.0 have been removed (see Fig. below). This was done for several reasons: they were duplicates, off-topic publications included by mistake, entries consisting of websites that are no longer available and have not been archived, etc. Attached to the report is a complete list of the items that have been added (>370).

The transition from v1.0 to v2.0 (from the report)

New tags!

To provide users with a useful classification while keeping it realistic for the team responsible for it, we limited the tags to three broad categories: the time period covered by the publication (by century), the geographic scope (by continent), and an “other” category that allows us to tag papers with a strong methodological or utilitarian dimension. One of the advantages of this tagging system (unlike the folder-based organization in v1.0) is that tags can be combined with the advanced search: You can therefore search for all publications that cover a certain period spanning several centuries, or, for example, search for publications that fall at the intersection of a century and a continent. We have included sample screenshots in the report and on the HNR Bibliography page.

Number of results per tag combination (from the report)

What can you do to help?

First of all, use the HNR Bibliography by subscribing to the HNR group on Zotero! It warms our hearts to see that it’s being used and that, over the years, it has already become a tool that members frequently praise.

The small group of volunteers working on the HNR Bibliography will be meeting soon to discuss next steps. If you’re interested in getting involved in this collaborative effort, please don’t hesitate to let us know (for example, by messaging Martin Grandjean on the HNR Slack channel or emailing info@historicalnetworkresearch.org).

But above all, you can send us your references or bibliographic lists via the Slack channel #bibliography-hnr. It hasn’t been very active lately, but it’s up to you to fill it up. And don’t be shy, you can also submit your own publications that might be missing! (Of course, they must involve network analysis applied to a historical subject.) If you’re not on Slack yet, you can join by clicking the invitation link here.