Bibliography checklist

Author: Stephen J. Turnbull
Organization: Faculty of Engineering, Information, and Systems at the University of Tsukuba
Contact: Stephen J. Turnbull <turnbull@sk.tsukuba.ac.jp>
Date: June 19, 2020
Copyright: 2020, Stephen J. Turnbull
Topic:Research

There are various styles for bibliographies, also call reference lists. The styles for items are described elsewhere. There are two common practices in ordering the items in your bibliography: lexicographic order by author and order of introduction in the text of the paper. In lexicographic order, besides the usual "dictionary order" by author's names, ties are broken by year of publication (earlier first) and if there is still a tie, add a letter "a", "b", "c", to each of the tied papers. (This tie-breaker is not used in bibliography styles where each paper is assigned an identifier such as a number or short string.) Also, when multiple languages are used, it is the author's option to group by language (then each language can use its normal dictionary ordering), or mix them (in which case some convention needs to be chosen, frequently by romanization of those items which do not use a Latin alphabet.

For the whole bibliography,

  1. Make sure the ordering is correct. This is especially important when the numerical style of citation is used, because insertion or deletion of citations in text, or reordering text, may change the numbers used in citation.
  2. Choose a particular style for the items and make sure it is consistent throughout the bibliography. For example, some styles use "standard" capitalization of all "main" words (so that only articles and prepositions are lowercase), while others capitalize only the first words and proper names. Some styles put publication year after the author names in parentheses, others use square brackets, and still others place the year somewhere else.

For each item in the bibliography

  1. Make sure the format is correct. This is usually not a problem if you type in all the entries yourself or use a bibliography database software to manage your reference list, but it is a big problem if you cut and paste from other sources.

  2. Make sure all the relevant information for that kind of resource is correct. Again, use of bibliography database software helps.

    Especially make sure you always have the date of viewing or download for digital materials, and where possible keep a copy (of course this is difficult for videos and the like). At present I know of no academic journals that permit modification to the text after publication of an issue, but I cannot guarantee that does not happen. Wikis, blogs, newspapers, and many general interest magazines do frequently edit after the publication date. The better ones normally have a note explaining the edit, but they don't always give dates, etc.

  3. Check authors' names against the document. Copy-pasted references frequently contain typographic errors, and I have even seen them in bibliographic references from publishers' website. Your database should contain full names as published. Some journals only provide family names and initials, but wherever possible use full names to help disambiguate authors with similar names.

  4. Check titles against the document.

  5. If you have not systematically double-checked all data in each reference at the time of adding them to your list, you must do this at the time of finishing your document. Especially for important papers in your field, professional readers and even advanced students may know the full citation.