How To Write A Bibliography

How to Write A Bibliography

Whenever a research paper, article, or thesis is written, sources created by others are used to check facts, illustrate examples, or provide additional information about a topic. When these sources are used, it's important to cite them, giving them due credit as a resource that has been referred to while creating another work. A bibliography provides a list of these sources. However, many people do not know how to write a bibliography. Below, you'll learn some tips on how to create a bibliography that adds weight and authority to your written assignment.

What Does A Bibliography Include

Whenever you cite a source in your paper, you must include that source in your bibliography. Many of your readers will want to know where you found your information. Some will want to investigate your data by looking at the original source. Your bibliography must make it easy for them to do so.

A proper bibliography will include the author and title of your source along with the place and date of the source's publication. The name of the publisher should be included as well for easy reference. If your original source is an article or illustration from a magazine, newspaper, encyclopedia, journal or anthology, you should include the numbers of the pages to which you referred when writing your paper.

How Should A Bibliography Be Structured

To learn how to write a bibliography correctly according to MLA standards, you need to know the proper structure. A bibliography should begin with the name of the author (or authors) followed by the title or subtitle, place of publication, the source's publisher, date of publication and page numbers for written sources other than books.

Titles or degrees in an author's name (for example, Dr., Rev., Esq, or Ph.D) should be ignored. Titles of sources should be underlined. The place of a source's publication should include only a town or city. Ignore countries, counties and states. Shorten publisher's names for brevity. If more than one publisher exists, list them by year of publication.

Occasionally, sources will lack information that should be included in a bibliography. For example, source may lack an author, publisher, or page numbers. In these cases, include as much information as you can. If a source has no page numbers, simply include the notation "n.p."

Other Quick Tips For Writing A Bibliography

If you need more than one line to list a source, indent the second line. Also, list sources alphabetically by the author's last name. When there is no author listed by the source, list it alphabetically by the first word in the title (ignore "a," "an" and "the"). If you need to list multiple sources from the same author, use the author's name in the first listing. Then, list the other works by that author alphabetically by the sources' titles.

Summary

Learning how to write a bibliography is simple. The key is to diligently follow the structure outlined in the MLA Handbook. Most potential hurdles to creating a proper bibliography (a source missing an author's name, missing page numbers, etc.) has been accounted for in the MLA Handbook and the proper steps to take are clearly-defined and widely-accepted. Use the above tips to create a bibliography that will lend authority to your written work.

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