What is a bibliography? It is a list of writings with the time and place of publication. This write-up gives you some tips on creating a bibliography.
A list of the resources and references you have used during your research work for a project, book, or research paper is known as a bibliography. It enlists all the resources you have used for research and cites all the references and sources of information that helped you in your project.
Making a Bibliography
Let us look at some of the important points you must bear in mind while creating a bibliography.
✦ Firstly, you must remember that a bibliography is a list of entries, each describing an information source, wherein each entry includes the name of the author, the title, the publisher of the work, and the date of publication.
✦ Each citation should include the author and the title. If you are citing an article in the bibliography, remember to include the name of the magazine or newspaper in which the article was published along with the volume as the date of publication. The citation of a book must contain the book's name, the author name, and the date and place of publication.
✦ It is important for the bibliographic entries to be arranged in an alphabetical order. You can either arrange the author names in an alphabetical order or enlist the titles alphabetically.
✦ Start making a list of the information sources you use during the course of research. While taking notes, remember to also enlist the source. This will greatly help you when writing the bibliography.
✦ When there is more than one author for a particular entry in the bibliography, you can enlist the authors in the order they are mentioned on the title page of their work. If there is a long list of authors, you can choose to use the term 'et al.' after the name of the first author or editor of the literary work. The term is used to indicate 'and others'.
✦ If you plan to enlist a source from the Internet in the bibliography, you must not forget to mention the title of the web page, the website URL, and the date of access along with the name of the author and year of publication. While citing an author name for content from the Internet, make sure to check whether the author is a person or an organization.
✦ In case you have referred to certain audiovisual sources during your research, their titles are worth a mention in the bibliography of your work. Mention the name of the production company, the title of the audiovisual source, and its date of production.
✦ Format the text in the bibliography. Remember, it is also a part of your research paper or project and needs to be neatly presented. Affix the bibliography page to the end of your research paper or book. The bibliography should be an alphabetically arranged list of the references used.
✦ Make sure you include all the sources of reference that helped you complete your work. Sources of commonly known information need not be cited. However, the information that did not come from you, the details of a particular subject, surveys and statistical data that you borrowed from certain organizations or books, should be enlisted in the bibliography.
A bibliography is an opportunity to credit the creators of that information, which proved to be a valuable contribution to your work.