Writing a research paper or a thesis, you may encounter some references or some links below or at the very end of the page. You may also encounter this in academic books, where different articles, authors, pages of their book and the title can be seen. Even some have numbers or links to them. You may have used this before or have been told about it through your professors. You are also taught this in school when you are going to be writing your research paper. To make it more simple, we call these bibliographies. Now you might begin to ask yourself, what is a bibliography? What makes it special? Why do you need it when you are doing your research or thesis? To find out more about bibliography, take a look at the examples in PDF below.
Often seen at the bottom of a page that acts like a footnote, or even at the very end of a book, we know by now what a bibliography would look like. This is often like a table of contents except it is a list of resources made in order to help readers know where the information was based on. So a bibliography is a list of information that is usually found below the pages or at the end of the pages of a book, a research paper, a thesis paper, or even a report.
The bibliography as the term itself is another word for listing your sources. The purpose of a bibliography is to be used as a guide for the person who may be reading or who would want to find out more about the sources or the resources of what they may have been studying. To be able to get that, they would be sifting through the list of authors, titles and dates of the articles that were published. The format of a bibliography can also differ, as it can be through a Chicago format, an APA format or an MLA format.
When you are making a bibliography, there are some elements that you have to know and take into consideration. To make a bibliography, it would also depend on the kind of format you are going to be using. But for the most part, it is always the most generic format that is often used. With that being said, here are some steps to making a bibliography.
For the first part you will see that the author’s last name is first followed by the first name. You must add an open and close parenthesis when you write the year of when the book or the article was published. Followed by the title of the book. All following the correct capitalizing of proper nouns in the title.
Following the author’s name, year, and the title of the book, comes the date as to when it was published. The place of the publication and of course the publishing company. These information are quite important as they are useful when you want to track down the publishing company or the place of publication of the book, the article or even the link.
The volume number and the page number or numbers are another thing to put. This is all in one continuous sentence. The volume number’s purpose is to check whether the citation for your research paper or thesis paper is updated and not outdated.
Lastly, repeat the entire list until you have successfully written all your bibliography or your citations. Just remember to follow the steps diligently. Everything should be written in chronological order, which will mean the latest year to the oldest one.
A bibliography is a list of citations that you use in order to support your research or your thesis.
The purpose of a bibliography is like that of a table of contents. The bibliography tells you where this was being taken, what article or book or source was this from. It gives you an idea to search more about it.
The most common formats of a bibliography are Chicago, APA and MLA.
There we have it. The important things to know about a bibliography. In a way it acts like a table of contents, only in a way it cites more than it gives you the page number. The bibliography is an important way to list down the citations of other articles, books and resources you have that help your research.