Making Bibliography Cards for your Research PapaerAs you find each source on your topic, you'll want to record publication and location information. When you first start researching, you may just print this information from electronic sources and indexes. Later, you'll turn it into bibliography cards written in the appropriate format.
To do so, get a pack of 3 x 5 index cards. Use one card per source. These are your bibliography cards. Cards allow you to keep the most promising sources and discard the irrelevant ones at your convenience. Also, cards can be easily arranged in alphabetical order when the time comes to type a Works Cited page for inclusion at the end of your paper.
There are several different bibliographic styles, or ways of documenting sources. As you write your bibliography cards, follow the documentary style assigned by your instructor or preferred by the discipline in which you are writing. For instance:
- Use the Modern Language Association (MLA) style for research papers in the humanities, including literature, history, the arts, and religion.
- Use the American Psychological Association (АРА) style for research papers in the social sciences, such as psychology and sociology.
See MLA citations
Bibliography Cards
What should you include on your bibliography cards? Follow the following models.
ELECTRONIC SOURCES
On your card, note the URL (electronic address), the date of your search, and the title.
PERIODICALS
On the bibliography card, include the title of the article, title of the periodical, date of the article, author (if available), page numbers (if available), and web address. You may also want to note the number of words, if listed. This tells you the length of the article so you can estimate how much information you are likely to get from it.
BOOKS
On the bibliography card, note anything you are going to need to retrieve the book. Relevant information includes the call number, author or editor, title, place of publication, publisher, date, and library where you found the book. This last detail is very important, since it can save you a great deal of time and effort if you are using more than one library.
INTERVIEWS
On these cards, include the name of the person you interviewed, the person's area of expertise, the person's address and telephone, and the date of the interview.
Warning!
If a catalog or index does not provide complete biblio¬graphic information, leave blanks that you can fill in later when you have the actual source.
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