Bibliography is very important when writing academic papers. A bibliography is a list of all the source materials that you have consulted during your writing process. This list is being utilized by your audience for various reasons. One of these reasons is to make it easier for them to access a certain reference that they find interesting or useful for them. It could also be utilized to verify if the source you have listed in your bibliography is real or not and the most important purpose of writing bibliography is to give proper credit to the original authors of the ideas that you used thus avoiding plagiarism accusations.
When jotting down the name of the author, make sure that you only include his or her name plus any indication of their status such as Sr., Jr., I, II, III, and etc. Be reminded that titles that reference any job positions such as Rev., RN, MD, PhD, and any other are not necessary and should not be included.
When jotting down the title only utilize the title as it is listed on the source material. When your source material is a book, magazine, newspaper, periodical, journal or encyclopedia, it is mandated for you to underline the titles including its subtitle if there is any. In instances that your source is an article, instead of underlining the title of the article, it should be placed inside the quotation marks. In addition, first word of both the title and subtitle must be capitalize except for the articles (a, an, the), prepositions and conjunctions.
For the place of publication, use on the city or town names. The abbreviation n.p. should be provided when to place is given. When it comes to the publisher, ensure that you validate and utilize only the place of the publisher not the printer. In cases that more than one publisher is given; jot them down with the year of publication for each publisher.
It is as well very vital to write down the date of publication. However, if no publication’s date was listed, use the abbreviation n.d. (no date). Also, utilize the most recent publication’s date when several dates were given. Keep in mind that date of publication is different from reprinting or printing. For weekly publications utilize the format: date, month, and year. If you are not sure about the date of publication or unable to locate it, but you were able to find a reliable date from other sources similar to what you are citing, utilize square brackets to indicate that you are the one who supplied the date.
Though writing down your bibliography is not an easy task, this part should not be neglected for this is one of the most important parts of an academic paper or scholarly document. You should make sure that all rules and guidelines of writing your bibliography should be applied in order not to waste all your efforts and prevent failing grades. Though it is a hard task, there are many ways how to learn writing your bibliography, you just have to find what’s suited for you.
Dane Cauton is a Registered Nurse in the Philippines who have a passion in writing. He loves to write any topics under the sun especially educational ones. He is a steadily recognized as an achiever ever since. He joined lots of academic contest not only medical related contests but article writing as well.
During college days, he was the editor-in-chief of their school paper. He was sent by the school to attend a press conference held in Michigan related to proper citing of sources used when creating scholarly works.