Creating a bibliography

A 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 that you have used; 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 to present it in. At Melrose, we use the Harvard style. You can create your bibliography yourself or you can use a number of online resources 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. Make a personal copy of the TRACK MY RESEARCH document to help you with this.

Follow these guidelines to make your own bibliography. Pay close attention to the punctuation of each element and between the elements.

Book:

Author surname, Author first name initial Date, Title, Edition (if needed), Place of Publication: Publisher.

EXAMPLE:

Rosen, M 1988, The travels of Marco Polo, East Sussex: Wayland.

Websites:

Author surname, first name intial Date of upload or last update, Title of page (in italics), Publisher of website, Date you visited the site from URL

EXAMPLE:

Picard, L n.d. Clothing in Elizabethan England, The British Library, Accessed 16 May 2017 from https://www.bl.uk/shakespeare/articles/clothing-in-elizabethan-england

Important note:

Sometimes it is hard to find an actual author of a webpage. If this is the case then use the organisation who publishes the website (eg. The British Library) but don't repeat it after the title.

Video:

Video, as it is hosted on a website cited the same way as a webpage.

EXAMPLE:

timelines TV 2013, Shakespeare's World - Timelines.tv History of Britain A08, YouTube.com viewed 22 May 2017 from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9P1IJqNDYjQ

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.

In Google Docs:

You can use the add on 'Easybib' to create a bibliography for you if you are using Google Docs. See the information sheet below to learn how to do this.

Online:

Here are some free online bibliography creators which you can use to create a bibliography for you:

• Cite this for me http://www.citethisforme.com/
• Harvard Referencing Generator http://www.harvardgenerator.com/
  • Note: This site requires that you put in a date of publication which sometimes is not clear on the resource.
• Neil's Toolbox http://www.neilstoolbox.com/bibliography-creator/
• Zotero https://www.zotero.org/
  • This is an absolutely fantastic program and is recommended for College and University students. You will need to download the application onto your computer and add the Add-ons into MS Word (it doesn't work with Google Docs). You can sync your account to any device and to have access to your stored citations.

Troubleshooting:

Q: I can't find a date on the resource.

A: Use n.d. (n.d. = no date) in the date field.