BIC Subject Categories and Qualifiers
This is BIC’s Subject Categories and Qualifiers Scheme, version 2.1 released November 2010, the standard classification scheme for the UK book trade and some other English language markets, available from www.bic.org.uk.
Note that BIC has announced that there will be no further development of the BIC scheme, and that Thema is its preferred subject scheme for current and future use. Browse the latest version of the Thema international, multilingual subject category scheme here.
- An ellipsis indicates a category has more detailed subcategories
- Click on a category description to reveal these ‘descendant’ subcategories
- Indentation indicates the ancestors and descendants of a category
- Click the ✽ to see or hide the usage notes
- Search for categories (eg ‘celebrity’) using the search field at the top
- Searches are not case-sensitive
- You don’t need to use complete words (eg ‘celeb’)
- Multi-word searches return categories matching any of the individual words
- To search for all the individual words, use + instead of space (eg ‘art+history’)
- To search for an exact phrase, use underline instead of space (eg ‘women’s_health’)
- Click on a search result category to see it ‘in context’ with its ancestor and descendant categories
- A blank search returns you to the top level of the hierarchy
- Read the latest BIC Subject Categories and Qualifiers Usage Guidelines (pdf, revised December 2010)
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