How to write a bibliography
Firstly let us examine what a bibliography actually is before we look at how to write a bibliography. If you have written an article, book, paper or indeed any other type of research-based writing you will sometimes be required to write a bibliography to cite the sources of the information used within your writing.
The method of how to write a bibliography depends largely on whether you are asked to write an annotated bibliography or a standard bibliography without annotations.
How to write a bibliography in the standard way is fairly straightforward. You need to list the name of each individual author of the sources used in your writing, when compiling your list start with the author’s surname & ensure they are in alphabetical order.
There is a specific layout you will need to adopt when approaching how to write a bibliography. As mentioned you need to list the author’s surname first followed by a comma & then write the author’s first name & then a full stop.
If the citation is a book you need to include the book’s full title, this title then needs to be underlined & followed with a full stop. Next write the city that the book was actually published in & follow this with a colon. How to write a bibliography correctly can seem to be slightly daunting initially but it is really not that difficult. After the colon you need to put the publisher’s name then a comma, the entry can be concluded with the date of publication. So you see how to write a bibliography is not that complicated.
To make reference to an article in the bibliography again write the author’s name then the actual article’s title, follow this with a full-stop. When thinking about how to write a bibliography you must consider setting all your work out in the right format. After the full stop you need to write the magazine/journal’s name that the article came from. Ensure you include the date the particular issue was published followed by a colon, & make reference to the relevant page numbers that the article is on.
How to write a bibliography has changed over the years with the advent of the Internet because now you can cite any material that you have sourced from the World Wide Web too. You can do this by writing the author’s name first followed by the title of the document concerned, the name of the website & underline this. Then jot down the date that you accessed the source & the full URL address in brackets.
How to write a bibliography including annotations is really not that different to how to write a bibliography without them, it just involves more writing! You are providing the reader with a more detailed insight into the source of your work; an annotation should ideally be approximately 100 – 200 words long.
The annotation needs to still include all the standard bibliography information along with the in depth information regarding the source. This is how to write a bibliography containing the annotations.
