—such as the transmitters found in al-Adab al-Mufrad, the tract on Recitation Behind the Imām, Khalq Afʿāl al-ʿIbād by al-Bukhārī, and similar works.

As for a book restricted to the transmitters of the Six Books alone, that is al-Kāshif by al-Dhahabī.

Al-Mizzī devoted meticulous care, in each biographical entry, to listing the narrator’s teachers and students alphabetically, then reporting the critical verdicts passed on him, and finally naming which of the six Imams cited his ḥadiths in their collections—having first placed distinctive symbols for them at the head of the entry.

Ibn Ḥajar later refined this compilation in his Tahdhīb al-Tahdhīb: at every entry he reproduces some of the narrator’s teachers and pupils, repeats what al-Mizzī recorded of the critical remarks, and then ends the biography with additional notes of his own introduced by the phrase, “I say.” And when the student of knowledge consults the narrator’s biography—