James Gairdner contributed biographies to the Dictionary of National Biography, and also published an edition of the Paston Letters.
He contributed some seventy-seven fifteenth- and sixteenth-century biographies to the Dictionary of National Biography, as well as articles for the Encyclopdia Britannica, the Cambridge Modern History, and the English Historical Review. He published an edition of the Paston Letters (London, 18721875, and again 1896); and he edited the Historical collections of a Citizen of London (London, 1876), and Three 15th-century Chronicles (London, 1880) for the Camden Society. 
