CZ:Bibliography

What is a Bibliography?

A bibliography is a listing of the most valuable sources on a topic, including articles and books. Citizendium bibliographies, to be maximally useful, should also be annotated, and include links to Web pages with copies of the articles and books, when available.

Links to external websites, with original (otherwise unpublished) content, belong on links pages, not on bibliography pages.

Purpose

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. Usefulness increases with the quality of the source, how recent it is, how available it is (online or through inter-library loan), and whether it guides users through the literature. Popular sources are usually not included unless they are influential in their own right, or better sources are lacking.

The article bibliographies do not necessarily reflect the sources authors actually use in preparing the article. In other words, these are not "References" sections. Wikipedia has a policy to the opposite effect because the editors there have to convince each other they know something about the topic. In the Citizendium, the editors are the evaluators.

Heading and format standards

Headings

What headings are appropriate depends on the field and the topic. In History, for example, bibliographies can be divided into "Primary Sources" and "Secondary Sources."

Citation schemes and listing notes

Authors should use the bibliographic citation scheme common to the discipline involved. (Ask what models are used by leading publishers and journals in the field.) 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.

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.) Amazon.com and books.google.com are useful for dating. A major library online catalog is Melvyl from the University of California.

Major articles

Major articles will have long bibliographies that appear on the Bibliography subpage. A short selection called "Further reading" points the user to 5 to 20 most useful sources. Major topics have thousands of books and articles, and CZ does not try to be comprehensive but only includes the most useful resources.

Guidelines for editing

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, Questia, Ebsco, Project Muse, Gutenberg, Swetswise. 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 or discredited 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.

Effort should be made to balance biased sources with sources on the other side(s).

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

In every case enough information should be given so that a reference librarian can obtain the item through inter-library loans or online sources.

Items that are listed in the footnotes should also be included in the bibliography if they are generally important to the topic (but not if they are incidental).

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