How to Write a Bibliography

A bibliography is nothing more than a written list of your sources, outlining everything you used in the creation of the work, even if you didn’t cite it directly. This is something that almost all students will be asked to compile and add to their works at some point. Bibliographies are generally used in academic documents and from a student’s point of view they are most commonly used within your undergraduate or master’s dissertation. But what does a bibliography actually look like? When is a bibliography used? And how do you create a bibliography for your essay or research paper? Here’s everything you need to know about how to write a bibliography:

What is a Bibliography?

For many students creating a bibliography can be a daunting prospect, and part of the reason for this is that many students aren’t sure what a bibliography is. The good news is that a bibliography is much simpler than it sounds. A bibliography is nothing more than a list of all of the sources that you have used to help you write an essay or other extensive document. This includes not only the sources that you have directly quoted or referred to in your essay but also any works that you have read throughout your research for the piece. Even if a work is not cited directly, if you have read it as part of your essay preparation, or if your essay has otherwise been influenced by the work then it should be included and cited in your bibliography.

Bibliographies are commonly used in academic documents, such as at the end of an undergraduate or master’s level dissertation. But brief and less formal versions of bibliographies can also be used at the end of a journalistic piece, presentation, or video to lend them legitimacy and to visibly demonstrate that they have been well-researched. But academia is the main focus of the bibliography. So, if you’re thinking of pursuing further education and studying at degree level then it’s important that you understand what a bibliography is and how to create one. If an undergraduate essay or dissertation doesn’t include a properly cited and formatted bibliography, then it isn’t completed. As the way students access information has changed, so too has the information that you can include in your bibliography. Traditionally these were lists of books, essays and articles, but now websites, videos, and other multimedia sources should be cited in your bibliography too if they are accessed as part of your research.

There are many benefits of using a bibliography. These include:

• Demonstrating to your tutor, instructor, or anyone else assessing your essay that you have conducted the necessary research for your assignment and that you know how to put together a robust and comprehensive bibliography.
• Crediting the authors of any source materials that you have based your piece on for the research that they have conducted, ensuring that your piece does not appear plagiarised because all source materials used in your piece have been fully cited.
• Finally, as well as benefitting the authors you have cited and your tutor, the primary reason a bibliography should be included in your work is to benefit your readers. It will make it much easier for them to find the sources you have cited, read those works themselves, and conduct their own research on the same topic too. Bibliographies play an essential role in sharing knowledge and advancing understanding of a subject.

When is a Bibliography Used?

We have established that bibliographic information is descriptive information about a piece of work. Now we need to assess when we will need this bibliographic information: when is a bibliography used? Bibliographies are generally used in a wide range of academic research projects and disciplines. Secondary school students, college students and distance learning students, university students and postgraduate students may all be required to create bibliographies in their academic works. The bibliography in a research paper or project is typically one of the last pages of the paper adding to the piece after your own content but before any appendices.

The terms bibliography, references and cited works are often used interchangeably, but these three are actually unique ways of referencing your work and your sources. A “Works Cited” list is an alphabetical list of works cited or sources you specifically called out while composing your paper. This differs from a bibliography because you don’t need to include any additional sources that you have read or that may have otherwise influenced your piece in a works cited list. As a general rule, this means that works cited lists are much shorter than bibliographies. Reference lists are very similar to works cited lists, but they are written in APA (American Psychological Association) format, whilst bibliographies often use the Harvard referencing system. Reference lists are arranged alphabetically by the author’s last name. Whilst cited works and reference lists are similar, bibliographies are very different. A bibliography should list all the material you have consulted in preparing your essay, whether you have actually referred to and cited the work or not. So even if you only read a page or two or a text, and don’t directly reference it in your work, it should still be included in your bibliography. For this reason, bibliographies include longer references and are significant blocks of text.

Primary and Secondary Sources

The sources that you will cite within your academic works fall into two main categories: primary sources and secondary sources. But students often have difficulty differentiating between the two. However, the differences between primary sources and secondary sources are easy to work out. If you are quoting a first-hand account of something, or an original work, then this is a primary source.

Some examples of primary sources include: news articles, photographs, autobiographies, novels and short stories, letters and diary entries, and original works of art. From a multimedia point of view, documentaries, radio broadcasts and podcasts, and recordings of music or speeches are also considered to be primary sources. Working with a primary source means that you examine the source material, analyse it, and then reach your own conclusions. If you read a novel and then write an essay about its themes, for example, then you are using the novel as your primary source and you draw your own conclusions from it. In science-based subjects, any research or data you gather for yourself, by conducting your own studies or research, is considered to be a primary source. But if you are analysing data that has been gathered by someone else then this is then considered to be a secondary source. This example is important because it demonstrates that primary sources don’t always have to be documents you have created yourself: if you’re taking raw data that has been produced by someone else then this is still considered a primary source.

Secondary sources differ from primary sources because they are further removed from them. If a piece of art is the primary source, for example, then an essay analysing that piece of art would be considered to be a secondary source. Other examples of secondary sources include: textbooks that discuss other concepts, theories, or source material, biographies written about other famous figures, works written by critics or other academics and key political commentary. In short, a primary source provides direct access to material which you can then discuss and analyse, whilst a secondary source requires you to look at the material through the lens of another person or another point of view. If you are reading another critic’s analysis of a work, then their perspective is likely to have some influence on your critical approach or opinion. For this reason, many academics believe primary sources to be more reliable than secondary sources. But that is a one-dimensional approach: working with secondary sources can be beneficial because it allows you to understand how others perceive the work you are discussing. It also provides a clear insight into the cultural perspective that surrounds the work.

Types of Bibliography

There is no singular type of bibliography: different kinds of academic work require different kinds of bibliography, and they are each laid out and formatted slightly differently. Some of the main types of bibliography that you need to be aware of include:

• Analytical bibliography. This is a bibliography that analyses the route that a work makes from its initial manuscript stage to publication. When creating an analytical bibliography you should not only detail the high-level information about a cited source, such as the title and the name of the author, but also more specific details about the work, such as its number of pages, any illustrations it includes, and even the type of binding it is held together with.
• Annotated bibliography. As the name suggests, this type of bibliography includes annotations. An annotation is a short note that concisely and clearly explains why you chose each of your sources. Each annotation included within an annotated bibliography is usually just a few sentences long but will provide your readers with valuable insight into your view of the source. Although they are similar to literature review bibliographies, annotated bibliographies do not discuss how the research is conducted in the same level of depth.
• Enumerative bibliography. Despite its eloquent name, this is actually the simplest type of bibliography you can choose to use, as well as the most common within undergraduate fields. To create an enumerative bibliography you will simply list all of the sources you have used to research your piece, or cited within your piece and list them clearly. There are many different ways to list your sources within an enumerative bibliography: some will list their sources alphabetically by the author’s name, whilst others will organise their sources into groups, such as by topic or another category specific to the subject matter. Depending on how they are categorised, enumerative bibliographies are known by different names. There are
  • National bibliography. Source material is categorised into groups depending on where they were published, or the time period in which they were published. Often texts in a national bibliography are organised by region or nation.
  • Personal bibliography. If you have included a range of pieces in your essay that are unpublished works, or hard-to-find works, then a personal bibliography is the best way to list these. This type of bibliography is best used for academic pieces that focus on multiple works by the same author: biographically focused pieces, for example.
  • Corporate bibliography. As the name implies, a corporate bibliography will group sources in relation to specific organisations or corporations.
  • Subject bibliography. Finally, sources within subject bibliographies are grouped depending on which subjects they cover. Generally, these bibliographies list primary and secondary sources, which makes them more in-depth. Other bibliographies on this list may not always outline both primary and secondary sources in this way.

Information Required from Print Sources

All of the bibliographic material that you will need from print sources can be found on their title page. The information that you will need to include in your citation will depend on the type of bibliography that you are compiling, but regardless of what citation style is being used, there are key pieces of information that you will always need to collect in order to create the citation in a bibliography. This information is:

• The name of the author you are citing.
• The title of the publication you are citing.
• Article title (if using a journal or magazine article).
• The volume number of the journal, magazine or encyclopaedia you are citing, or the edition you are citing in the case of a printed publication.
• Date of publication.
• Place of publication.
• Publisher.
• Page number(s) relevant to your research, and that you are citing within your work.

Information Required from Web Sources

The way in which you will cite a website or other web sources differs from the way in which you would cite a traditional printed text. The way in which you will cite a web source will depend on whether you are citing an online article or a web page. In the case of a web article, you will need to share:

• The author and/or editor name of the web piece that you are citing.
• The title of the website that you are citing.
• Company or organisation that owns or posts to the website.
• URL (website address).
• The date that you accessed the information you are citing and, where possible, the date that the information you are citing was originally published.