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Things To Remember About Dissertation Bibliography Citation



Writing a dissertation in and of itself is a difficult task, but once you add in all of the details and various technical aspects that need to be taken care of, it can truly become overwhelming. One of the steps that you need to complete in order to finish your paper is a bibliography, and this also includes citation. Within this article, we will be examining different formatting styles, tips, and details to be aware of when working on this important part of your project.

Writing Bibliography Citations

When writing your bibliography, you need to be aware of the style that you are to follow. As there are a lot of technical details depending on the kind of source you are working with, it’s very difficult to cite them all here. However, here is some helpful information to get you started within each of the main writing styles:

  1. MLA
    • Use periods instead of commas between Publisher, Publication Date, and Pagination.

    • Containers: these reference the overall larger material that you are referencing. For example, if you are using an article within a larger magazine, the magazine is the container. You then need to reference the container in your bibliography for that source. It is to be placed in italics and followed by a comma.

    • For a basic book reference, you simply need to list the author’s last name, author’s first name, the title of the book, the publisher, and the publication date.
  2. APA
    • When writing a new entry, be sure to use hanging indentation. In other words, after the first line, all other lines need to be indented by a half an inch from the margin.

    • Write author’s name inverted, with their last names appearing first. Organize your list alphabetically according to the first author’s last name for each source.

    • It is important to keep in mind that when referencing books, web pages, articles, or chapters, you are only to capitalize the first letter of the first word of that title. This also applies to any proper nouns that appear.
  3. Chicago
    • List all of the sources alphabetically by the author’s last name.

    • As in the APA style, author’s names are inverted with a comma between the last name and first name of each author.

    • You may include sources here that were not necessarily cited within your project. These provide further information for your readers.

    • Titles of books and journals are to be italicized.

    • Titles of articles, poems, chapters, and other material are to be placed in quotation marks.

    • All major elements are to be separated by periods.

In conclusion, while writing a bibliography for your dissertation can be frustrating at times, once you have the right guidelines to follow and you see what is involved with citing each source, you should have no difficulty with getting your full list done, and successfully completing your project.