Write your bibliography
A bibliography is a list of the resources you used to write your essay. There are lots of different methods of writing bibliographies, but most secondary schools and universities use the ‘Author-date' (Harvard) system.
When using this system, you need to include slightly different information for different types of resources:
Books
- author's name – surname followed by first initial
- year of publication of the edition you're using
- title, in italics
- publisher
- place of publication, usually a city.
One of the books used to write this site was Ned Kelly: a short life. It was written by Ian Jones in 2003, and published by Lothian Books in the suburb of South Melbourne in Victoria. In our references it appears as:
Jones, I 2003, Ned Kelly: a short life, Lothian Books, South Melbourne, Vic.
Magazines, newspapers & journals
- author's name – surname followed by first initial, if there's a by-line
- year of publication
- title of the article in single quote marks [‘...']
- name of the publication, in italics
- specific date, including volume number if applicable
- page number.
If there's no by-line and you don't know who wrote the article, record the:
title of the article
name of the newspaper
date
page number.
So your reference would look like:
‘Yorta people vow to fight on', The Age, 19 Dec 1998, p 8
Websites
- name of the organisation or person who made the site
- name of the site
- date you looked at the site
- complete web address
If you used this site in an assignment you would reference it as:
State Library of Victoria, ergo, viewed 15 March 2011, <http://www.ergo.slv.vic.gov.au>
The main thing to remember about bibliographies and referencing is to be consistent. Check whether your teacher has a preferred system – if not, pick one and stick to it.
