What Is a Story Bible
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A story bible is the reference document for what a novel has established and what its writer has settled off the page. It holds character names and ages, dates, geography, family relationships, backstory, which details have already been given to the reader and which haven't.
It exists so a writer doesn't have to hold every fixed fact in memory across a long manuscript, and so a later chapter doesn't quietly contradict an earlier one about something as simple as a character's eye color or how many siblings they have.
Where the confusion comes from
A story bible gets mixed up with research notes, and the two look similar on the page: both are collections of facts sitting outside the manuscript. The difference is what kind of fact each one holds. Research notes describe the world before the writing starts, sources and background a writer might or might not use.
A story bible describes the novel's own world: what the text has already committed to as true within its story, and the backstory, main plots, subplots and future scene ideas the writer has settled on but not yet written. One is raw material. The other is a record of promises made to the reader, and of the ones still to come.
How this shows up in a real novel
Jane Austen's Persuasion (1817) depends on a set of established facts holding steady across the whole book: Anne Elliot's exact age, the eight years since she broke her engagement to Captain Wentworth, the precise social rank of every family that enters a room.
Austen's novels have had their timelines traced closely, and Ellen Moody's calendar of Persuasion finds "a number of inconsistencies or contradictions". The novel tells Mr Elliot's earlier stop in Bath twice without agreeing, once as "only twenty-four hours in the place" in November, later as "a day or two, as he happened to do a little before Christmas". Keeping ages and timelines straight from one chapter to the next is exactly the job a story bible exists to do once a manuscript gets too long to hold in memory alone.
While you're drafting
A story bible earns its keep less at the start of a project than in the second half, once there are enough established facts that keeping them straight from memory stops being realistic.
Questions
Is a story bible the same as research notes? No. Research notes are background material gathered from outside, before or during writing. A story bible records the novel's own world: what it has already stated, and what the writer has settled for it but not yet written.
Do short novels need a story bible? Not always. It becomes useful once there are enough characters, dates, or locations that a writer can no longer be certain of every detail from memory alone.
When should a story bible get started? Whenever the risk of contradiction starts to feel real, which is often earlier than expected: a single named minor character can be enough to justify starting one.