Reference Services Review

Purpose – This paper aims to provide a guide to significant primary and secondary resources relevant to the study of Emily Dickinson and her poetry.

Design/methodology/approach – Online catalogs, bibliographies, and the worldwide web were searched to identify relevant items. In some cases, citation analysis and other bibliometric measures were used to determine the highest-impact sources. Items were annotated after personal examination by the author. The paper is divided into two main sections: primary sources (anthologies, databases and web resources) and secondary sources (bibliographies, databases, biographical resources, reference resources, monographs, journals and web resources).

Findings – The paper introduces each resource, indicating its scope and contribution to the study of Dickinson. It acknowledges in particular the developments in recent Dickinson scholarship.

Originality/value – Dickinson remains popular among both scholars and laypeople, but the most recent bibliographies of Dickinson scholarship date to the late 1980s. This guide provides a late twentieth- to early twenty-first-century update to those earlier works.