Why you should write your bibliography as you go
- Tara Hodgson
- Jan 7, 2020
- 2 min read
Updated: Feb 27, 2021
Since it’s the start of the new year I wanted to give some advice to students who are either about to be doing more essays or who have just started the new semester’s work.
Write your bibliography as you’re going.
What you’re going to want to do is for every article, book, journal, video or whatever it is you’re using as a source, write the AUTHOR’S NAME, (YEAR), TITLE, PUBLISHER, WHERE PUBLISHED, LINK TO TEXT, DATE ACCESSED. This gives you most of the information you need to create your bibliography at a later date. Any relevant information put down on a sheet of paper dedicated to listing this information (or do what I do and keep it in a spreadsheet for ease).
As you use sources in your writing and start to build up this list of citations you’re automatically making your bibliography which takes a massive task away from you at the end of the work when you can’t get that book back out of the library or you can’t find that webpage you used for that information.
Writing your bibliography as you go also means that you can see if you’re trying to do too much with your work (for a 2’500 word essay shouldn’t normally have more than 15 sources) or not including enough (for a 5’000 word essay if you’re just getting 10 sources including the material you’re looking at then you’ve not got enough). This is something that kept me on track with my essays, especially during my third year when I wanted to talk about so much and wrote 2’500 words out of a 3’000 word essay and had only looked at 1 of the 3 texts I was meant to. I realised all of my sources so far were for that first text and I was lacking in the others, so, I went back to the drawing board.
It’s also a good habit to get into. If anyone is reading over your work (or a section of it) you have the research to hand to say “ah I’ve looked at these things already” and they don’t then spend time going over what you already know.
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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