How To Write A Bibliography
- Tara Hodgson
- May 9, 2019
- 3 min read
Updated: Feb 26, 2021
So you’ve come to the end of your essay and you’ve now got to write your bibliography. I’m telling you now that it’s a bad way to do it, leaving everything until the last minute ensures that you’ll have a struggle ahead of you.
You want to start writing it as you’re going – make a note of every book, article, journal and website you’re visiting. You’ll want the author, date, title, place published and publisher at least.
I use Notion to keep track of all of these things as shown below:
The image above shows part of the bibliography for my Crime Fiction class
I personally don’t put it into alphabetical order straight away but group them by what content they have. The two comics I was using are first, then comes the general section, then below that (not shown in the image) is the section on Raymond Chandler in more detail
Above is the finished product (since I forgot to screencap while creating it), but while I’m working I will put quotes, page numbers, commentary and any other needed information underneath these citations. This comes in useful for writing the essay itself.
Instead of leaving it until after you’re finished writing your essay, building it up like this as you go allows you to see gaps of knowledge; I could see early on that I had little information on hard boiled detectives, but a wealth of information on the genre in general and on Chandler.
If you’re writing an essay with an argument as the focus (e.g – The characters Aziraphale and Crowley are not essential to the plot of Good Omens. Discuss.) then you’ll want to probably group these by “for” and “against” sources. If you’re writing a comparative essay (e.g- Compare three of Chaucer’s Tales, looking at how they represent the views and culture of the time in which they wre written) you would do better grouping sources by something along the lines of “general – worldviews”, “general – culture”, “Chaucer” and then having sections for each of the three tales you choose.
So you’ve written your bibliography as you go, have enough comments to turn it into a nice annotated bibliography if that’s required and it’s all nicely grouped into catagories. Now you just need to format it correctly for your examiner. I’m required to use Harvard referencing so I double check everything is correct according to that, put it all in alphabetical order and then it’s ready to add to the end of my essay and submit.
Tips For Writing Your Bibliography
If you’re using anything online put a link straight away to whatever it is, take a screenshot of the page or leave it open as another tab just in case the website gets updated, taken down or moved.
There are reference creators online, if you’re really stuck you can use them to help you format it.
Make sure you’ve got a reference for every quote you’re using. Don’t leave them floating without something to refer back to.
You can use footnotes in your essay and come back to adding in text citations later if you’re in the flow of things and don’t want to stop. Just make sure to replace these later!
If you’re stuck and you can’t find anything then ask for help. I asked my lecturer about using comic books without page numbers and was directed how to create better citations in text for that.
Try to have a balance between books, websites, articles and so on. Each type has it’s own pros and cons; books can be out of date, websites can be created by anyone etc.
Hey! Tara here and thanks for checking out my blog. I update every Tuesday with posts about studying tips, advice and talk about productivity and organisation too. If you want to keep up to date with my latest blog posts I’d love it if you subscribed to this blog.
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