Ten Common Referencing and Bibliography
Errors
If
you are losing marks for bibliography, you might find this list helpful.
1.
References with no page numbers.
If a piece of information comes from a specific page in a book or article, give
the page, either in a footnote or within an in-text reference.
2.
Texts in the bibliography which were not referred to in the essay. All texts that you referred to in your
essay should be in the bibliography and nothing else. You should not refer to
works that you looked at for writing your essay but which you did not actually
refer to – encyclopaedias, guides for how to structure an essay, etc.
Presumably, you did not refer to them because no idea or information from these
works appeared in your essay.
3.
Putting book titles within in-text references. An in-text reference has the author’s
surname, the year of publication and the page number in brackets, or else just
the year and page number, if it is transparent from the main text who the author is. Do not put book titles in place of the
author’s surname. See here for detailed
guidance.
4.
Separating out books, journals and web pages in the bibliography. The bibliography should list the texts
in alphabetical order of the author’s surname. You should not have one section
for books, another for journals, a third for web pages. There should be no
separate sections.
5.
For book entries in the bibliography, omitting the
publisher or place of publication. For
any book in your bibliography, you must identify the publisher in the
bibliographic entry, e.g. Oxford University Press, and the place of
publication, e.g. Oxford.
6.
Not putting the right things in italics. The title of a book always needs to be in italics. The
title of a journal should also always be in italics. The title of an article in
a journal is not in italics. (Normally marks are not lost for this though.)
7.
No bibliography, but all the information in the footnotes. Some journals allow for this, but the
university where I teach requires a bibliography, no matter how much
information is in the footnotes.
8.
Giving full web addresses for material available in print. If a text is available in both print
and online, and the page numbers of the printed version are given online,
please do not give the whole web address, either when referencing or in the
bibliography. You can just write as if you found a hardcopy of the text. Some
students present information like what is below, in footnotes, within in-text
references or in the bibliography:
I
am not sure if this is always, strictly speaking, an error, but it is hard on
the eye and there is usually a better way of doing things.
9.
For internet sources, giving only some of the relevant information available. Some internet sources provide the
information about who the author is and when the material was placed online,
e.g. entries from The Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy do this. If
you can give this information, you should. If you cannot, look for guidance
online on how best to do the entry.
10.
In the bibliography, not listing the texts in alphabetical order of the
author’s surname.