Like a standard bibliography, a retrospective bibliography includes the publication information of a book, document or film, such as the author's name, title, journal title and issue number, publisher and publishing date. Bibliographies also list any editors or translators. Entries follow alphabetical order, based on the author's last name.
Bibliographies compile lists of sources associated with a particular topic to save researchers the time of searching through libraries and databases themselves. Retrospective bibliographies, because they do not focus on the latest, cutting-edge research, function to provide researchers with the basic, fundamental texts on a subject. They can also show the development of research on a particular subject over the decades or even centuries.
Access to a compilation of basic documents covering a subject is helpful for a person new to a subject. Librarians can point students toward retrospective bibliographies to get them started on a research paper. Many libraries are likely to carry classic texts, whereas it may take longer for new books and articles to appear on library shelves and in electronic databases.
Experienced scholars are more likely to be seeking the latest research on a topic, and will therefore not find a retrospective bibliography as useful as a standard one. Experts on a particular topic will likely already have read a lot of the texts included in a retrospective bibliography; indeed, they are probably qualified to write such bibliographies themselves. Professors and other expert researchers seek the latest publications in their fields of study.