The Institutional Repository Bibliography primarily includes published articles, books, and technical reports. Coverage of conference papers and unpublished e-prints is very selective. All included works are in English. The bibliography does not cover digital media works (such as MP3 files), editorials, e-mail messages, interviews, letters to the editor, news articles, presentation slides or transcripts, or weblog postings.

Most sources have been published from 2000 through the present; however, a limited number of key sources published prior to 2000 are also included.

The bibliography includes links to freely available versions of included works. Such links, even to publisher versions and versions in disciplinary archives and institutional repositories, are subject to change. URLs may alter without warning (or automatic forwarding) or they may disappear altogether. Inclusion of links to works on authors' personal websites is highly selective. Note that e-prints and published articles may not be identical.

Although institutional repositories intersect with a number of open access and scholarly communication topics, the Institutional Repository Bibliography only includes works that are primarily about institutional repositories. For example, an article dealing with the NIH open access policy would not be included, but one dealing with a university open access policy likely would be.

See the author's other bibliographies for more general coverage of digital copyright, digital curation and preservation, digital repository, ETD, open access, and scholarly communication issues.