Rose received his doctorate from the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin in 1854. In 1855, he took a post at the Royal Library at Berlin, where he remained until his retirement in 1905. Under his leadership, the library's Manuscript Department (which he headed from 1886), gained a leading international reputation. He published catalogs of the collection between 1893 and 1905, and among the important discoveries made were texts in the history of medicine and in horticulture.
Rose's first edition of the fragments of Aristotle was Aristoteles Pseudepigraphus (1863). As the title suggests, Rose considered these all to be spurious. The third revised edition was published at Leipzig in 1886 with the title Aristotelis Qui Ferebantur Librorum Fragmenta. The engagement of Friedrich Nietzsche with this work has been described in the first chapter of James I. Porter, Nietzsche and the Philology of the Future, Stanford, 2000.
De Aristotelis librorum ordine et auctoritate, inaugural dissertation, 1854 (online)
Anecdota graeca et graecolatina: Mitteilungen aus Handschriften zur Geschichte der griechischen Wissenschaft, 2 vols., 1864-1870 (vols. 1–2, vol. 1, vol. 2)
