At School > Library > Making a Bibliography

page tools :

Yokohama International School

HOW TO CITE AND CONSTRUCT A BIBLIOGRAPHY

For Grade 11 & 12 IBDP Needs (Extended Essay, TOK Essay, Coursework)

As part of your IBDP studies, you are required to complete various pieces of written work, including an Extended Essay, TOK essay and coursework for various subject options. It is an accepted academic convention that, when quoting someone or paraphrasing ideas or facts that appeared elsewhere, brief details of publication should be included in the text, placing full details in a bibliography (which should appear at the end of your written document).

In the Extended Essay in particular, it is important to show the extent of your research. Reading around the subject is one important early aspect of your work on your Extended Essay.

The following information will help you with citation and making a bibliography. Whilst there are a number of citation styles, the Harvard style is a very straightforward system to use. Whatever system you use, please remember to be consistent with the style. The basic order in the Harvard style is: author, date of publication, title, place of publication, publisher. Some slight variation occurs for different formats, and these are identified below.

Further information may be found in the IBO style guide (Wallace 2003). Full details of this publication may be found in the bibliography at the end of this document. Several copies are available in the YIS Library. A copy is also available in each high school academic department. A good website is also maintained by Swinburne University, Australia. See the bibliography listing for full details, including url. Look under S for Swinburne University, the author of the document.

CITING REFERENCES

When you refer to someone’s ideas or factors in the text of your work, or quote someone, you must indicate your source. The easiest way is to use parenthesis with the author’s last name only and date of publication within the parenthesis, e.g. (Gates 1996). If you quoted from the source then you include the page number, e.g. (Gates 1996: 155). This shows that you quoted from page 155 of the author’s book. There is no need to use the word page(s), so long as a colon is used after the date of publication. For a quote, you need to use quotation marks (“ ”) when using someone else’s actual words. This brief citation is all that is required, because all the details are in the bibliography. The reader can go to the entry for Gates in the bibliography and see all relevant details.

If you use a source twice in succession, you can use the term ‘ibid’, also in parenthesis. However, you might prefer to always repeat the author’s name and date (and page number, for a quote), at least in your draft and so you can minimize the possibility of making a mistake.

Place the citation details at the end of the sentence in which the reference to the source occurs.

When citing websites, please do not use a web address (or url) in the text of your writing. There should be other details in your bibliography for an Internet site. (Please see below for details.)

The Harvard system does not advocate use of footnotes for citation purposes. It is much easier (e.g. for drafting and editing purposes) to use citation in text, as explained here. Try to keep use of footnotes to a minimum, and use them only for brief pieces of relevant information that you cannot place in the text. Always think before you use footnotes: do I really need to include this information?

CONSTRUCTING A BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books. The following example shows how to make a bibliography entry for a book:

Gates, Bill. 1996. The road ahead. London, Penguin Books.

Note that the last or family name of the author is given first, followed by the first name. The title is given in italics. You should find the information you need on the front and back of the title-page of the book. Please remember that an author could be an individual or an organization or institution – for example, Yokohama International School may be an author.

Sometimes a book does not have a stated author. In such a case, use the title to start the entry. An example is:

Facts on File physics handbook. 2006. 2^nd ed. New York, Facts on File Inc.

Articles in books. Sometimes books contain essays by a group of people, each author contributing one chapter or essay. You should cite the information as in these examples:

Atwater, Brian F. 2001. “Averting earthquake surprises in the Pacific Northwest”. In Edmond A Mathez. Earth: inside and out. New York, New Press. Pp 90-93.

Howells, Christina. 1996. “French thought since 1940”. In Valerie Worth-Stylianouis Cassell guide to literature in French. London, Cassell. Pp 227-251.

You should present the title of the chapter/essay in sentence format within quotation marks. Include the page numbers of the essay at the end of the entry.

Articles in journals (also known as magazines, periodicals or serials). Cite the author, date, title of the article, name of the publication, volume number, first and last pages of the article, as in the following example:

Burch, James L. April 2001. “The fury of space storms”. Scientific American, vol. 284, no.4. Pp72-80.

You should find most of the information you need on the inside cover or the contents page of the publication. The title of the publication is given in italics. The volume and issue numbers are important (though some magazines do not have them), as are the pages.

Information from the Internet. A vast amount of information is available from the Internet, much of it excellent. However, some dubious information is available, so please use discretion in using Internet sources. It may be a good idea – when assessing the value of Internet sources – to find out whether the site you are looking at has an author, title and date when the site was last updated. Where there is not an author (either individual or organization), then lead the entry with the title on the webpage. Please remember that a url by itself is not sufficient citation information. (Don’t forget that the YIS Library subscribes to various databases, such as EBSCO and Questia, which offer quality digitized information.) The following examples show the entries for Internet sites with and without authors.

American Chemical Society. Polyvinyl alcohol. 30 April 2007. URL: http://www.cas.org/motw/polyvinylalcohol.html

Otto Dix. Artcyclopedia. 30 April 2007. URL: http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/dix_otto.html

Note that the title of the web-page should be italicized. The date given should be the date you consulted the site.

Audio visual sources. These can include DVD, videocassettes, CD-ROM and television programmes. For a television programme, information required includes network or channel, country, series, individual title of programme, director of producer’s name and date. An example of a DVD is:

Bergman, Ingmar. 1957. Wild strawberries. The Criterion Collection.

An example of how to list a video is:

Ecotourism, a case study. 2002. Bendigo, Victoria: Video Education Australia.

Note that in the example of the DVD the director, as the person in overall charge, counts as an author. For the video, no author was given, so start the entry by title. It can be difficult to find all the details on a DVD or video packaging, but you should be able to find sufficient information in the credits on the recording itself. At any event, include what information you can find.

Unpublished interviews and personal research. The format is author (last name, followed by the first name), type of source, any identifying information, date and availability, e.g.

Austen, Jane. Personal interview with a grade nine student at the school. Thirty minute tape, first in a series of five interviews with grade nine students. September 2006. Available on tape from the author.

Mars, Stephen. Interviews with 35 students from three international schools in Japan. Interviews based on four-page questionnaire about reading tastes. September 2006. 40 pages in print, available for downloading on the University of Yamate web site: www.uya.org

If you conducted the interview or interviews, you are the author. Please take care about using names of students as a title, and thus in citations. If you feel you need to name a student, please liaise with your teacher (or supervisor, in the case of an extended essay) or with the IBDP Coordinator.

Putting all the citation entries in order. How do you put all the individual entries together? This should be in one sequence; there is no need to separate items just because of their format. One aim of a bibliography is to help a reader see, quickly and easily, what resources you have used. Therefore, one list in alphabetical order, according to author’s last name, is preferred. All the items mentioned above have been put into an order at the end of this document, so use it as an example. One other point – the list order in the bibliography must match the brief citation you make in the text.

Bibliography

American Chemical Society. Polyvinyl alcohol. 30 April 2007. URL: http://www.cas.org/motw/polyvinylalcohol.html

Atwater, Brian F. 2001. “Averting earthquake surprises in the Pacific Northwest”. In Edmond A Mathez. Earth: inside and out. New York, New Press, pp.90-93.

Austen, Jane. Personal interview with grade nine student A at the school. Thirty minute tape, first in a series of five interviews with grade nine students. September 2006. Available on tape from the author.