CZ:Bibliography

What is a Bibliography?

A bibliography is a listing of the most valuable serious sources on a topic, including articles, books and web pages.

The bibliography is most useful in pointing to serious sources that readers can use for further in-depth reading on a topic, for exploring major alternative interpretations, and for preparing a written report like a college term paper or report for a high school AP course.

The article bibliographies do NOT necessarily reflect the sources authors actually use in preparing the article. (Wikipedia has a policy to that effect because the editors there have to convince each other they know something about the topic. In CZ, the editors are the evaluators.)

The bibliography should emphasize English-language sources as much as possible (including translations of course).

It should include both primary and secondary sources. It should if possible indicate that items are available online, and if possible link to them (through JSTOR, Books.google.com, Questia, Ebsco, Project Muse, Gutenberg, etc.) Links to Amazon.com are welcome if they provide new information, such as graphics (e.g. the cover or illustrations), a table of contents, an excerpt, a search-the-book routine, or useful reviews.

Outdated sources should be avoided--although if they are online and better sources are not online, we should include both. If a source is poor quality or heavily biased that should be noted in the annotation.

The bibliography should include short annotations (or sometimes abstracts) making clear the value of the source.

Heading and format standards

Authors should use the bibliographic citation scheme common to the discipline involved. (What do the publishers and journals use?) The Chicago Manual of Style has comprehensive coverage of the alternatives.

For most books, it is optional but not necessary to include place of publication or publisher.

Bibliographies can be divided into SECONDARY SOURCES, PRIMARY SOURCES, and online links. Books and articles can be combined in listing. Alphabetize by last name of the primary author (if no author, then use the title of the book, ignoring "The", "An", etc.)

Date of publication is tricky in the case of multiple editions and translations. (the book can have the annotation that there are multiple editions.) Using the Amazon.com or books.google.com dating is useful. A major library online catalog is Melvyl from the University of California: at [1]

Guidelines for editing

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