The Temporal Organization of Bibliographies

Abstract

Bibliographic reference lists are important constitutive features of academic papers. The nature of academic research involves the production and generation of bibliographic references, and the consequent books and articles contain bibliographic references of works used and/or cited. Bibliographies and reference lists have been used as data for methodological techniques such as citation analysis and network analysis but are rarely treated as socially organized textual artifacts, that is, as topics in their own right. This article looks at some properties of bibliographies and focuses on a known‐in‐common feature of research literature: the temporal organization of bibliographies. This involves the reading and comparison of texts and their accompanying bibliographies. This article concentrates on the emergence of the study of texts in the sociological fields of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis as a demonstration of the contingent and temporally organized nature of academic publishing.