7 Hints That Will Help You Compose A Doctoral Dissertation Bibliography

A bibliography list is one of the most important parts of your doctoral dissertation. It contains all the sources that you have used in your research. If you don’t mention a source in the bibliography list, it can be evaluated as plagiarism.

Preparatory Steps

In order to compose a good list, you need to have all the sources that you have used. Carefully look through all the notes and reference materials that you have used in your work and make sure that you have all the titles of books, names of their authors, and other essential details. The required details are determined by the academic writing style that you have chosen for your project. This is why you also need to get a styling manual and see how the chosen writing style determines the correct bibliography format.

You can also use available samples of dissertation bibliography pages that are available on the Internet and in regular offline libraries. These samples can be more helpful than explanations that you can find in writing manuals.

How to Compose the Bibliography for an APA Paper

1. Compose a list in an alphabetical order, sorting out the information in accordance with an author’s last name. If a source has two authors, use the last name of the one who is named first on the title page of the source. If you are writing an APA style paper and a source has more than seven authors, name the first six and continue with ellipsis points. If a source has no author, use the last name of its editor. In case it’s impossible, too, use the first word of the title (without considering definite and indefinite articles).
2. Proceed to the publication year. If possible (for periodic publications, it’s especially important), render a full date with the month name and a particular date.
3. Render the names of the sources after the date. In the titles of articles or books, capitalize only the first letter of the first word. If you need to render the name of the periodic publication like a magazine or a newspaper, capitalize every word in the name.
4. Add the place where the source has been published and the publishing house.
5. Go to an official website of a writing lab and check out whether you have formatted everything correctly. Alternatively, you can find a website that explains APA requirements and use it.
6. Optionally, have the bibliography proofread by professionals who can be found online.
7. If you can’t find the type of your source in the formatting guide, use the most similar one.