Bibliographies

Bibliographies

Bibliographies

A bibliography is a list of all the sources you used in your research. It goes at the end of your paper, on a separate page. Today you will learn a simpler way to write a bibliography, though there is a more informative way to do so that you will learn when you are older.

Bibliographies

Step 1: Put the word Bibliography at the top of the page in the center.

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​Step 2: All the sources you used for your paper need to be listed on the bibliography, even if you didn't quote the source in your paper. Even if you got just one fact from a source, it still needs to go in your bibliography. If you read a book or looked at a website but did not use anything from it, you don't have to put it in your bibliography.​

Bibliographies

Start with all the sources where you remember the author's name. This will probably be all books and magazine articles and maybe some websites. It's possible you used a book or article that doesn't have an author's name, and that's fine. Just put it aside for now.

To list all the sources where you know the author's name, you write the author's name, last name first, then first name, then middle initial (if you know it). After that you put a period. If there are two authors, put them both. If the source is a book, put the book name and a period.

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Here's an example for the book How Children Learn to Read by Samuel Jones:

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Jones, Samuel. How Children Learn to Read.​

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last name, first name, period. book's name, period.

Notice in the previous example that the book's title was italicized. This is easy to do when typing on a computer but difficult when writing by hand. If writing a bibliography by hand, underline the title instead;

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Jones, Samuel. How Children Learn to Read.​

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If two people had written the book, it would look like this (start with whatever author is listed first on the book);

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Jones, Samuel and Smith, Robert. How Children Learn to Read.

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last name, first name and last name, first name period. book's name, period.

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If instead of a book this were a website, it would look exactly the same, including the italics, but would have the word website at the end;

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​Jones, Samuel. How Children Learn to Read.com website.

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Another way ​to do a website is to give the actual web address;

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​​Jones, Samuel. HowChildrenLearntoRead.com

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Notice that it is no longer italicized. ​

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A magazine article is a little different. A magazine article has three parts you need to include: the author, the title of the article, the title of the magazine. Include them in that order, with the title of the article in quotes and the title of the magazine in italics or underlined;

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Shapiro, Eugene. "Best Foods, Worst Foods." Good Nutrition.​

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Again, notice you put a period after each section: one after the name, one after the article title (but inside the quotation marks), and one after the magazine title.

When writing titles for anything, remember the rules for capitalizing titles.

​If an author is a doctor, do not include Dr. in the source. Just their name.

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Once you have all your sources with authors written out like this, you can turn to the sources where you don't know the author of the information. For these, you just include the title, in italics or underlined and with a period;

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​National Geographic website.

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name of website (in italics), website​, period.

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Now that each entry is correctly written, you need to list them in the bibliography in alphabetical order. Here's what mine would look like;

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Bibliography

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Jones, ​Samuel. How Children Learn to Read.

National Geographic website.

Shapiro, Eugene. ​"Best Foods, Worst Foods." Good Nutrition.

This is a simpler form than the bibliographies you'll be writing later, but that's ok for now. What I want you to focus on is doing these bibliographies exactly as you have learned today. Practice getting them exactly right. Making it a habit to remember every comma, every period, every proper capitalization now will make adding more information down the road much easier.

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Open Ended

Put the following sources into a correctly formatted bibliography.

Pretend this is an actual bibliography page you are creating for a paper.

A book titled All About Horses by Anita Jarrett and Christabel Li.

A book titled You and Your Horse by Jeffery M. Everard.

An article by Dr. Celia Rohan titled "The Ten Most Common Horse Diseases" in the magazine Neigh.

A website called For the Love of Horses.