Compiled following the reunification of China under the Jin dynasty (266–420), the work chronicles the political, social, and military events within rival states Cao Wei, Shu Han and Eastern Wu into a single text organized by individual biography.

The Book of Han and Records of the Three Kingdoms join the original Han-era universal history Records of the Grand Historian to constitute the first three entries in the Twenty-Four Histories canon, with each work cementing the new genre's literary and historiographical qualities as established by Sima Qian.

After the Conquest of Shu by Wei in 263, he became an official historian under the government of the Jin dynasty, and created a history of the Three Kingdoms period.

Due to the biographical rather than primarily annalistic arrangement of the work, assigning dates to the historical content is both imprecise and non-trivial.

One abstract regarding the chronology is translated as follows: In the 24th year (of Jian'an), the Former Lord became the King of Hanzhong, and he appointed (Guan) Yu as the General of the Vanguard.

[8]During the fifth century, the Liu Song dynasty historian Pei Songzhi (372–451) extensively annotated Chen Shou's Records of the Three Kingdoms using a variety of other sources, augmenting the text to twice the length of the original.

Bibliographical records indicate that up until Pei's own Liu Song dynasty, Chen Shou's three books had circulated individually rather than as a single work.

[11] The Records are important to the research of early Korean (삼국지 Samguk ji) and Japanese history (三国志 Sangokushi).

The passages in Fascicle 30 about the Wa, where the Yamatai-koku and its ruler Queen Himiko are recorded, are referred to as the Wajinden in Japanese studies.

In addition, Chen Shou's literary style and vivid portrayal of characters have been a source of influence for the novel.

William Gordon Crowell alludes to a project to translate Chen Shou's work with Pei Songzhi's commentary in full, but it was apparently discontinued.

[13] Parts of that project are published by Robert Joe Cutter and William Gordon Crowell under the title Empresses and Consorts: Selections from Chen Shou's Records of the Three States With Pei Songzhi's Commentary (University of Hawaii Press, 1999), which includes the translations for fascicles 5, 34, and 50.