Universal Skills

Referencing & Bibliographies

 A reference list or bibliography is a list of resources (books, websites, articles, images etc) that you have used while gathering information for your assignment or class work. It is important to include a bibliography at the end of your document or presentation for the following reasons: 

• to acknowledge the work of others; this includes their ideas, data and images

• so that others reading your work can go back to the source of the information to check the context or to make sure you haven't copied the information directly.

There are many different styles of bibliographies. The style determines what information is included and what format it is presented in.  At Melrose, we use the APA 7th style.  You can create your bibliography yourself or you can use a number of online generators to help you create a bibliography.  It is important to collect the bibliographic information (author, publication date, title, publisher, place of publication, URL etc) at the same time you are doing your research as it is often difficult to remember where you got the information from days after.  The easiest bibliography generator to use is the one included with Google Docs.  Head up to the Tools tab at the top of the Doc and select "Citations".  Chose APA 7th from the drop down menu and add your citations as you go.  

Another generator you might like to use is MyBib. This is a great one to use if you are not using Google Docs but something else like Google Slides.

A warning about automated bibliography generators

There are many bibliographic tools that you can use to help generate a bibliography automatically.  While these are convenient and can speed up your bibliography creation they are only as good as the METADATA contained in the source material.  In some cases not all the required information can be automatically pulled from the source site and so you may still need to manually edit your your bibliography once it has been created.  

Searching for resources 

Note-Taking 

Proofreading & Editing