Your citations (i.e. works which you have actually mentioned or quoted from in your text) should be listed at the end of your work under the heading of 'References' and will appear in alphabetical order of author if you are using the Harvard style, or in numerical order if you are using the Numeric style of referencing.
A bibliography, on the other hand, is a list of everything you have used to inform your work, cited or not, and is listed in alphabetical order of author (or main entry). It is more unusual to be required to produce a full bibliography but many people use this term when in fact they intend for you to produce only a list of references. It is therefore worthwhile checking exactly what is required.
References and Bibliography are terms that can be used interchangeably, so make sure you know what is required by your School.
In order to produce a list of references or a bibliography you need detailed information about the item you have cited or used. You will find all the information you need for your reference from the item itself. The elements of the reference come from:
- the title pages and reverse of the title pages of books and journals, along with:
- the pages of the article, chapter, quotation themselves
How to construct Harvard references and a bibliography
When using the Harvard style, it is usual to provide both an alphabetical list of citations that have appeared in the body of your work, and a full bibliography listing all the sources of information you have consulted in your research, and this list should also be arranged alphabetically.
At the bottom of the page is an example of what your alphabetical list of references should look like in the Harvard style. This example includes how a book, edited book, journal article, electronic journal articles, website with no author, website with an author, Patents, Standards, thesis, conference paper, illustration, film, video and television broadcast, published music, sound recording and CD-ROM should appear. Personal email communications are not recoverable to anyone wishing to consult your sources of reference, and they should not therefore appear in your list of citations or in a bibliography but should be cited in the text of your work thus: (Cofie, P. (July 1994) Personal communication).
General points about references
- Note that in this style the title and subtitle are made prominent by Italicising the text. You may Underline instead if you wish
- When writing your bibliography you must ensure that you include all the required details about each information source. These vary according to the type of materials you have used, so a reference for a book will include different information to a reference for a patent
- If there are more than three authors, you can include the first and then replace the others with " et al "
- Whatever style of formatting you use, you should stick to it, for example: if you have the surname followed by initials for the first author but then initials followed by surname for any other authors, you should ensure this format is adhered to for all references
- If there is only the copyright year in the book, rather than the year of publication, precede the date with a ©.
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