Every book or writing material has its own bibliography page. What is a bibliography? It is the systematic list of books, articles and other sources that a researcher or a student uses in his or her research paper. In the bibliography format, this page appears at the end of the manuscript. In the creation of a bibliography, there is also a need to create citations which involves formatting notes that would give acknowledgement to the researcher’s references.

Bibliography formats available

There are two commonly used bibliography format and they are the APA and MLA formats. These two formats usually include the following details: author’s name, book or article titles, publishers, publishing date and place, styles or type, book size and others. There is a need for a bibliography for it assists readers in finding the original sources of your references. You also need to remember that in the Chicago format and in any other formats, the bibliographies are alphabetically arranged.

 

Annotations

Furthermore, a bibliography is composed of annotations. Annotations are lists of concise notes that direct the research paper or give comments regarding the usefulness of an appended work. Now, it is very important that bibliographies are formatted properly. Scholars, literary writers and professional researchers need to consider the bibliography part as crucial to the paper for they are useful sources for many readers especially the serious ones.

 

Types of Bibliography

There are many bibliography examples available from various sources for everyone to check out. In fact, it is best to check the two types of bibliography. One is the analytic bibliographies and the other is the critical bibliography. Analytic bibliography is concerned with resources as material objects. This means that physical features such as the type of paper, printing features and more in order to establish that the sources are reliable and with a establish authorship. On the other hand, descriptive bibliography format pertains to the organized listing of sources, references and publications. This bibliography format is what APA and MLA formats use. It even has 4 categories: universal and general, bibliography and selective bibliography.

 

Listing according to subjects

In addition, bibliographies can also be listed according to several subjects, different countries of publication and different date of publication. There are times wherein researchers or students are instructed to limit their bibliographies based on any of the following: subject, country of origin, works of one author or on books for particular purpose or audience.

 

Listing according to type of source

It is a great strategy to list down each book, article and other sources that you utilize when doing a research for this will make the creation of bibliographies easier may it be under the APA or the MLA bibliography formats. What to take down? List the full title of your reference, author’s name, place and date of publication and the publisher.

 

Listing alphabetically

All in all, it is best to arrange your entries in alphabetical order when formatting your bibliography or works cited page. If you encounter materials without an author, you can list them on your bibliography based on the title. You can also utilize a citation maker to help you in formatting your sources.