Structuring a Bibliography

What to include

You should include any work that you quote or refer to in your research and any work that has contributed to your research. A bibliography should also include any type of material that you have used, including visual records, films, interviews, etc.

Dictionaries and encyclopaedias are usually not included in the bibliography; an exception is made when they are key tools for research, for instance when the research discusses some entries of an encyclopaedia, or employs a dictionary of the nineteenth century to study how some terms were used in that time.

A bibliography is used to list all the sourced cited, and only sources which have been cited. The bibliography should be listed alphabetically by the author's surname. Multiple works by the same author should be arranged alphabetically by title. (For further guidance, see SBLHS §§6.4.2–3 and §6.5.)

There are subtle, but important differences between the formatting of the information in the bibliography compared with that in the footnotes, e.g.

 

  • The author’s surname precedes the forename
  • Full stops are used after the author name and title of the source
  • No page numbers are given in the case of a book, but in the case of a journal article the page numbers of the entire article are given
  • Parentheses are not used
  • The first line of the bibliography should be left-justified, with hanging indents for subsequent lines.
  • In contrast to the situation with footnotes, referred to earlier, where abbreviations are used for significant reference works, in the case of the bibliography references should be complete and unabbreviated

 

For Example:-

 

AUTHOR                        TITLE                                                          PUBLICATION INFORMATION      

Davey, Andrew. Urban Christianity and the Global Order. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrikson, 2002.

 

NOTE: KINDLE

The availability of books on Kindle raises problems for its use in referencing as it is not a publically accessible source. As a result, you should not use Kindle as source, unless you are able to supply page numbers which correspond to the hard copy. You may be able to do so by making use of Google Books and the „Search Inside‟ facility for books displayed on Amazon‟s website. (Note that it is best to use the US site, rather than the UK site, as the facility is better on the former).