The BGS Publications Database contains metadata relating to documents created by the British Geological Survey (BGS). These documents include published works (commercially published, formally printed, listed for sale and available for general distribution to the public), as well as informally published technical reports and current report RR, OR, CR and IR series. The database contains documents which are released for general distribution, as well as confidential documents and documents which are available only to BGS staff. The database contains series of publications which have been used throughout the existence of the Geological Survey, including sheet memoirs, district memoirs, summaries of work and regional geological guides which date from the beginning of Geological Survey activity in the early 19th century to the present day. The database also contains RR (research), OR (open), CR (commissioned) and IR (internal) reports from the current BGS report series, as well as a large (over 25 000) number of technical reports created by various units within BGS from the 1940s through to the year 2000. Basic metadata about a publication are held, including its unique ID, reference number, year of publication, full title, author(s), series and publisher. Many publications are held in digital formats, either as scans of hard-copy documents or as born-digital files. Publications stored within the database are available to view, but are not available for download. Non-confidential technical reports are available to download in PDF format. The database can be browsed and reports accessed through the BGS Publications Viewer: https://webapps.bgs.ac.uk/data/publications/. The current series of open reports from BGS are available on the NERC Open Research Archive (NORA): https://nora.nerc.ac.uk/.