Writing Your Bibliography

All your essays will need a bibliography at the end to show where you have done your research. Follow this advice from BBC Bitesize. You can also log on to the BBC Bitesize section on copyright for more information.

Writing a bibliography

A bibliography is a list of all the sources that you used to make your eportfolio. This includes all books, magazines, newspapers, websites, interviews and TV programmes.
There is a standard way of laying them out that you MUST follow. This is:

1. Author - put the last name first.
2. Title - this should be underlined and in quotation marks.
3. Publisher - in a book this is usually located on one of the first few pages.
4. Date - the date/year the book/article was published.

Put each source on a single line, with a comma between each and a full stop at the end. You should arrange them in alphabetical order of the author's surname. You should also make sure that the list is double-spaced.
Use the example below as a guide:
Books Fleming, Ian, 'Diamonds are Forever', Penguin Books, 1957.
Jon Spencer, Architect, interviewed on 3/3/2005.
Website http://www.bbc.co.uk/dida, 'Dangers of the Internet', June 2005.

Bibliography advice

• It is best to keep your bibliography up to date as you go through each project.
• Keep a word processor file called Bibliography open whenever you are working on your project. Add to it whenever you do some research.
• Remember to list authors and sources in alphabetical order.
• Remember it is fine to use secondary sources to gather information for your project, but you cannot just reproduce them. It would be plagiarism and could infringe copyright.
• You don't need to have several pages of references, just put in the things you used. Don't add things just for the sake of it.
• You will probably need between 10 and 20 references for most projects.
• Don't put search engines down in your bibliography. It is the information that you found that is the important thing to include.