Although Doctor Who fans had been spoilt for choice when it came to novels and comic strips based on their favourite television series, it wasn't until 1994 that the first anthology of short stories actually arrived on shelves.

Edited by Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker, Decalog contained nine stories linked together by a tenth which was written by Walker himself. A follow-up was published in 1995, with Andy Lane and Justin Richards taking over for the third and final volume in 1996. Although Virgin had lost their licence to publish Doctor Who novels, two further volumes in the Decalog series were to appear in 1997. Re: Generations followed the exploits of former Doctor Who book companion Roz Forrester's family, while the largely standalone Wonders had only one connection to the world of Doctor Who in the form of Lawrence Miles' The Judgement of Solomon, which featured Bernice Summerfield.

The next Doctor Who release would come from BBC Books in 1999 with the release of Short Trips. Edited by Stephen Cole, the volume proved successful enough for a further two titles in the series to be released over the following two years. However, the time and cost involved in compiling an anthology led to the range being dropped after Short Trips and Side Steps.

Fans of short fiction weren't to be left hanging for too long, however, as Big Finish Productions acquired a licence to publish a series of hardback anthologies, beginning with Short Trips: Zodiac in December 2002.

With the runaway success of both the new television series and their New Series Adventures range of novels featuring the Ninth Doctor, the BBC's regular ranges of Doctor Who books were cancelled in 2005, leaving Big Finish as the sole publisher of stories based on the original television series. Their Short Trips anthologies finally came to an end in May 2009 with Re: Collections, a best-of release containing one story from each of their previous twenty-eight collections.

More recently, a volume collecting together a series of stories which had previously been published in the Files series of books has been announced for release by BBC Children's Books.