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4.5 Bibliography

Course subject(s) 4. Reporting your findings

Bibliography

In Section 4.4  you have learned why you should use references and what you should use them for. In this section, you will learn how to format the reference list that all your in-text references point toward.

The goal of your reference list is to tell your readers where to find the sources you used. Your reader should be able to find them as quickly and easily as possible, even many years later. To facilitate this, you should be thorough in including identifying information on your sources.

The reference list should contain all the sources you refer to in your report, and only those. A bibliography is a reference list that can also list sources that were not explicitly mentioned. For your report, please stick to a reference list (even though it will be labeled Bibliography in Latex).

For a scientific articles, many journals ask for a specific style and order in presenting your references. Famous examples of such styles include APA style, or MLA style or Harvard referencing. For this report, however, you do not need to adhere to any fixed format as long as the necessary identifying information is presented in a consistent manner.

Information in references

The information that can be used to uniquely identify a source will vary, depending on the medium of this source. The list below will go over some of the more common options. When you are using a type of source not mentioned in the list, make up something similar.

  • Paper books:
    Authors (last names and initials), year of publication, title and subtitle, edition, location of publication, publisher.
  • Online books:
    Authors (last names and initials), year of publication, title and subtitle, edition, digital object identifier (DOI) or retrieval website.
  • Journal articles:
    Authors (last names and initials), date/month/year of publication, title and subtitle, title of journal, volume number, issue number, pages that contain the actual article.
    When the journal is online: digital object identifier (DOI) or retrieval website.
  • Newspaper articles:
    Authors (last names and initials), publication date, title and subtitle, title of newspaper, page.
    When retrieved online: retrieval website.
  • Online sources such as Wikipedia:
    If known: Author, publication date, title and subtitle, editor(s), name of online database or encyclopedia, retrieval website.
    For sources that are changed often and significantly, such as Wikipedia, add the retrieval date as well.

To find more complete lists of identifying information for the different types of sources you could use, you can look up a reference style such as APA.

Here is an example of how you could format your reference list. The use of punctuation and slanted text helps to separate the different elements.

[1] Last-name, A. B., Last-name2, C. (year of publication). Title: Subtitle (3rd ed.). Location of publication: Publisher.
[2] Last-name3, A. (year of publication). Title: Subtitle. Retrieved from http://website-here.
[3] Last-name3, E. (year of publication). Title of article. Title of Journal, volume number (issue number), page–page. http://dx.doi.org/numberhere.
[4] Last-name4, B. (year, date). Title of article. Title of Newspaper, p. pagenumber.
[5] Last-name5, A. (date of publication). Title of article. Title of online encyclopedia. Retrieved on date, year from http://website-here.

On the next page, you will learn to decide what elements can be put into an appendix of a report.

 

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