MAKE YOUR BIBLIOGRAPHIES COUNT
<h1>MAKE YOUR BIBLIOGRAPHIES COUNT</h1>
CONTENTS
In this link we will talk about the basics of bibliography and footnotes. Also, we will look at special problems that occur whenever you write bibliographical entries and footnotes. Bibliography is important to the reader because you want to show you have some research on your topic. You want to prove you know what you are talking about. Most professors and some managers require a bibliography so they can check on what you have said. You must be careful not to "pad" your bibliography by listing references that don't apply.
Examine the following bibliographical entry for a magazine article:
Graves, Earl. "Black Enterprise Financial Overview: A New Day for Black
Financial Institutions." Black Enterprise 23 (June 1993): 143-47. 1 December 2006
Academic Search Elite (EBSCO Host).
Notice that what you have just looked at is called a bibliography entry. It consists of a
series of words put in a particular structure. The first line is flush with the left margin. All other lines are indented (called hanging indention). That immediately distinguishes the entry as a bibliographical entry. Next, you will notice that you always begin with the last name and then the first name. In a footnote you have the opposite experience. You always begin (if you have the author) with the first name, perhaps middle initial, and then last name. The first line of the footnote is always indented with all other lines flush with the left margin.
Then, look at the article title. It is in quotation marks, not underlined. You only underline the name of the book or the magazine/journal.
Now, let's study the 23. To remind ourselves, that 23 represents the volume number. Most magazines possess a volume number, sometimes shown on the front of the magazine or within the fine print on the Contents or Acknowledgements page. Sometimes the volume number is found within the fine print of the publishing data. The volume number may appear in Roman numerals and have to be converted to Arabic. For example, the number, XCIII, should be converted to 93. You may always check a dictionary under "Roman numerals" if the Roman numeral conversion doesn't hit your imagination. The form you are looking at is called the Turabian format.
Perhaps, we should next try a footnote for the same bibliographical entry. Notice how the footnote always starts with the first name, if you have an author or a writer. The footnote follows:
1Earl Graves, "Black Enterprise Financial Overview: A New Day for Black Financial Institutions," Black Enterprise 23 (June 1993): 143-47.
Think about: Did you notice that only the first line of the footnote was indented? All other lines are flush with the left margin. Did you notice a period at the end of the entry? Did you realize what 23 stood for? That is the volume number of the magazine. Most magazines have a volume number, and, by placing the volume number in the footnote entry, you help the reader locate the journal. The date is enclosed in parentheses. Dates will vary from magazine to magazine. Fortune is published biweekly, for example. Many of your news magazines (e.g. Time and Newsweek) are published weekly. Some magazines, such as the example of Black Enterprise, are only published monthly. Pay particular attention to when a magazine is published.
Many style manuals exist to prepare bibliography and footnotes. We are going to use Kate L. Turabian (see the link, selected references and the alphabetical listing for Kate L. Turabian. You may be acquainted with the MLA (Modern Language Association) format or the APA (American Psychological Association) format. In our graduate school for the College of Business we use the Turabian format. Find out what your professor wants for a particular format.
Entry writing with a style manual continues to evolve. It is important these days to include the database where you found the information, such as a magazine or a journal. You usually add that information at the conclusion of the bibliographical entry. I have adapted this style from the latest thinking in MLA (Modern Language Association) entries to Turabian. In time, I suspect Turabian will include considerably more in its seventh and future editions on electronic resources. Let's now adapt an entry with the new format in the following way:
Graves, Earl. "Black Enterprise Financial Overview: A New Day for
Black Financial Institutions." Black Enterprise 23(June 1993):
143-47. 1 November 2000 Business and Company ASAP (InfoTrac).
MLA: Graves, Earl. "Black Enterprise Financial Overview: A New Day for
Black Financial Institutions." Black Enterprise 23 (June 1993):
143-47. 1 November 2000 Business and Company ASAP (InfoTrac).
Note: After the page numbers new information is added about the date accessed and the actual library database used. This kind of information in the bibliographical entry allows the reader to appreciate what the writer has gone through in doing the research. It also alerts the reader about the importance of a particular database, such as Dow Jones Interactive or Lexis-Nexis.
Note that you have a period placed inside the quotation marks before you write the magazine title, Black Enterprise. That title is underlined, not in quotation marks. You are next confronted with an Arabic number, the magazine or journal volume. Please place that number even though it is not required for every bibliographical entry. You are saying to the reader you will make it easy to find the publication you have listed. Turabian then places the date, weekly, monthly, bimonthly, biweekly, or whatever, in parentheses. The date should be written as a military format to save using commas: 24 October 1996. June 1993 was used in the previous example. A colon follows the parentheses. Then, you write the page numbers of the article.
Often, you want to give "oomph" to your bibliographical entry. Therefore, you adopt an extra citation called the annotation. Here, you summarize after the entry what exactly the book, magazine article, or newspaper section said in a short sentence. You need up to 3-5 sentences. In the MLA Handbook "an Annotated Bibliography, or an Annotated List of Works Cited, contains descriptive or evaluative comments on the sources." What that means is you can comment on the value of the reference to your report and the specifics of certain sections of the reference. Be careful not to use opinion; deal with the facts of the publication.
You can start your sentence with a verb. You want to give the essence of the reference.
The annotation must begin with a capital letter and create some form of sentence, according to Chicago Style Manual author, Kate L. Turabian. The sentence is tacked on after the last period of the entry. I would urge you to space down once and slightly indent the annotation. Dr. Karin Duran, one of our reference librarians at Oviatt Library, CSUN, in her handout on the use of the library cites these examples as forms of annotations:
Lyman, Howard B. Test Scores and What They Mean. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice Hall, 1978.
Provides detailed descriptions of a variety of testing theories and their uses in commonly available tests.
The annotation should be indented three spaces from the entry and begin on the line after the bibliographic information.
The page numbers are written without "p." or "pp." That is because Turabian omits those abbreviations when a volume number is given. You would only use those abbreviations if you didn't have a volume number. Let's take the middle of an entry for Business Week and see how that would work:
Business Week, 23 September 1996, pp. 104-107, 110, 114, 118.
This magazine is an exception, because it does not have a volume number.
Let's take an interview that you want to prepare a Turabian bibliographical entry for. The entry reads:
Matteo, Sylvan, Manager, Legal Administration. Interview by author, 12 March 1996, Emerson
School, Culver City. ABC Oil Corporation, Los Angeles, California.
MLA: Matteo, Sylvan, Manager, Legal Administration. Personal interview. 12 March 1996.
Immediately you notice that the last name occurs first as in any bibliographical entry. You have a new element of the job title that follows after a comma. Then, you are obliged to write "Interview by author." You are the author or the interviewer. Please do not write your name in place of author. The date follows written in a modified military format. The interview actually took place at the Emerson School in Culver City. That was because the interviewer found the interviewee at that location, not the place of work, the ABC Oil Corporation. The name of the company the interviewee works for is given as the last part of the entry. In this case, you have different cities because of where the interview occurred.
Suppose you want a footnote from the previous interview. You need to construct the footnote a little differently from the bibliographical entry. You might start this way:
1Interview with Sylvan Matteo, Manager, Legal Administration, ABC Oil Corporation,
Los Angeles, at Emerson School, Culver City, California, 12 March 1996.
Did you notice that you always start with the first name and then the last name in a footnote? The toughest part of the footnote involved handling where the interview took place as opposed to the company where the individual worked. The date was the last item in the footnote.
Newspapers present different problems. Turabian is a little vague on how to handle a newspaper. You have to remember in dealing with a newspaper that the section of the paper is most important. For example, when you read the National Edition of The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, you encounter sections. The National Edition is divided into three or four sections, depending on the day of the week. The Wall Street Journal can be divided into four sections, including Marketplace, The First Section, Money and Investing, and Weekend Journal. Let's take a typical entry for a newspaper and see if we can analyze it:
Pacelle, Mitchell. "In the Suburbs, Job Strife Starts in the Parking Lot." The Wall Street
Journal, 25 October 1996, B(Marketplace), pp. B1, B12. Accessed Current Date
Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe/General News.
MLA: Pacelle, Mitchell. "In the Suburbs, Job Strife Starts in the Parking Lot." The Wall
Street Journal 25 October 1996, pp. B1+.
Notice you have the date in a different location for the newspaper entry than when you use a magazine or journal entry. It is important to specify the letter of the section as well as what it is called. You use "p." or "pp." A volume number does not exist, so you need "p." or "pp." Again, the second and succeeding lines of the entry are indented.
Now, let's say you want to turn the newspaper article by Pacelle into a footnote. Your efforts might look this way:
1Mitchell Pacelle, "In the Suburbs, Job Strife Starts in the Parking Lot," The Wall Street Journal, 25 October 1996, B(Marketplace), pp. B1, B12.
Did you notice the newspaper article follows the pattern for the bibliography with the exception of the first name at the beginning? Did you spot the period at the end of the entry? You always have a period at the end of the footnote.
Books are fairly easy to handle because examples of them are shown in the syllabus. You have to remember to include the publishing place and publishing house as well as the copyright date. Publishing place and publishing house are not easy to find. You have to look on what is called the Frontspiece or the first page of the text, for example. Suppose you wanted to find the publishing place and publishing house on the Frontspiece. You look at the bottom of that busy page and find several cities listed. Which one do you choose? You, normally, do not select any city that appeals to you. You take the first city, Cincinnati, for example, as the major publishing place. The other cities that follow are probably other locations where the book is also published, including European and Asian cities. Now you need to look for the publishing house, which is usually above the publishing places. You may note that your book or reference has a division connected with it. Be sure in writing your bibliographical entry to include the division as well as the main company that publishes the book (e.g. South-Western Publishing Company, a division of Thomson International).
Books as an entry cannot stop with the title. As always, you start with the last name of the author. Let's take this example:
Sullivan, George. Work Smarter, Not Harder. New York: Facts on File
Publications, 1987.
MLA: Sullivan, George. Work Smarter, Not Harder. New York: Facts on File
Publications, 1987.
New York, New York does not have to be repeated in the entry. You assume it is New York City where most publishing houses reside. Normally, it would be helpful to place the city and state before the colon. "Facts on File Publications" is the name of the publishing house. The publishing place is New York City.
Books require footnotes as well. In the previous Sullivan bibliographical entry, let's see how the footnote would look:
1George Sullivan, Work Smarter, Not Harder (New York: Facts on File Publications, 1987).
Did you notice how the Turabian format allowed you to place the publishing place and publishing house in parentheses for the footnote? If you had a particular page number for the Sullivan reference, the entry would read: , 1987), p. 45.
Suppose you have two authors. Suppose you have more than three authors. How do you handle the bibliographical entry? You still work with the last name as your major consideration. Let's take an entry:
Angell, David, and Brent Heslop. The Elements of E-Mail Style:
Communicate Effectively via Electronic Mail.
Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.
MLA: Angell, David, and Brent Heslop. The Elements of E-mail Style:
Communicate Effectively via Electronic Mail.
Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.
Did you notice you used commas before "and" and mentioned the last name first (as in true in all bibliographical entries for Turabian).
For a multiple-author entry of more than three, you might want to try applying "et al." Et al. means "and all the rest." It is not discriminatory to place only one author's name when you have so many authors. You would be writing forever. Notice sometime how the first author comes first in the alphabetizing of a book through the Library of Congress system. It is simply a way of classifying data. Suppose Mr. Brown's book had been written by five authors. The entry might look like this:
Brown, Harry M., et al. Business Report Writing. New York:
D. Van Nostrand Company, 1980 (paper).
The "et al" takes care of all the other authors and their contributions to the book. It is a shorthand way of classifying the authors.
Why don't you try an entry? Try both the bibliographical entry and the footnote for the Tom Sant. Can you unscramble this situation?
The author is Tom Sant. The name of the book is Persuasive Business Proposals: Writing to Win
Customers, Clients, and Contracts. The publisher is AMACOM (American Management Associations). AMACOM is located in New York City, and the book was copyrighted 1992.
The authors are Grace-Ellen McCann, Patience Beeres, Eleanor McCadden, and Diane Corradisu.
The book is entitled Study Rooms: The Best Library Option.
The publishers is Harcourt Brace out of New York City.
The publication date is 1997.
How did you do? Please check my answer link for suggestions to solving these puzzling book entries.
Once in a while, you encounter a situation that is not contained specifically in Turabian or other style manuals. Let's say you have to give the entry for an annual report you have used. What do you do?
First, you consider the entry treated like a book. The corporation is the author. The entry might look like this:
- IBM Corporation. Annual Report for Period Ending . . .. Armonk, New York:
- The IBM Corporation, 1995.
You may not have a copyright date on the inside front or back cover. In that case, say n.d., which means no date after the name of the publishing house. The publishing house is the repeat of the corporation. The report is considered published because the corporation or the company issued it.
At this juncture you have probably checked the Hotlinks and found reference to the Purdue Online Writing Lab and its comments about electronic styles. The Purdue Lab does not specifically address Turabian format, and Kate L. Turabian's A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th ed. does not concern itself with handling web addresses as sources of data for bibliography. Lately, thanks to the librarians, I came across a useful reference for electronic styles:
- Li, Xia, and Crane, Nancy B. Electronic Styles: A Handbook for Citing
- Electronic Information
. Medford, New Jersey: Information Today,
- Inc., 1996.
One of the librarians I visited with also suggested that we must include the access date when writing the entry. The access date means when you looked at the web page(s). An adaptation of the APA Style to Turabian might read:
- American Institute for Conservation. Code of Ethics and Guidelines for
- Practice
. Revised ed. New York: American Institute for Conservation, 1994. Online.
- Available: http://www.palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/aic/aicethics/ethdraf2.html
- (17 April 1997).
- MLA: American Institute for Conservation. Code of Ethics and Guidelines for
- Practice
Revised ed. New York: American Institute for Conversation. 1994
- <http://www.palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/aic/aicethics/ethdraf2.html>.
Let's examine what was previously written. First, we had the author as an organization or institute. We kept Turabian's idea of periods. Next, we had the publishing place and publishing house (that happened to be the same organization) and, finally, the copyright date of the publication. Then, we specified we were using the Web by saying Online. Then, the web address was given. At the end we cemented the entry by stating when we personally viewed the web pages. As Li and Crane remind us, the URL includes the protocol, Web site, search path, and file name.
Let's try an electronic style for a footnote of a similar entry. Note the footnote also includes the URL:
-
- 1American Institute for Conservation, Code of Ethics and Guidelines for Practice, revised ed.
(New York: American Institute for Conservation, 1994)<http://www.palimpsest.stanford.edu/byorg/aic/aicethics/ethdraf2.html>(Retrieved 17 April 2000).
When you have printed a database from the Library, take care to read carefully how to set up the bibliographical entry. On Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe, you may find a number of entries:
Byline
Headline
Section
The name of the magazine or journal and the publisher
Let's take an illustration of how to decipher the information:
Waste News January 17, 2000 (appearing at top of printout)
Section: Vol. 5, pg. 12
Byline: Bryce Hoffman
Headline: Ford hopes to turn junk into gold.
You have now been presented with this jumble of information. How do you create a bibliographical format from this mass of data?
First, look for whether the publication has an author, not a publishing house. Next, look for whether the article has a title stated as a HEADLINE. Is the author's or writer's name given? It should be stated as a BYLINE. In the SECTION do you have a volume and a page number or numbers? Now, you can begin your bibliographical entry in the following order:
- Hoffman, Bryce. "Ford Hopes to Turn Junk into Gold." Waste News 5 (17 January
- 2000): 12.
HOMEWORK/MAKEUP (NOT BONUS) FOR WEEK 9/10/11
Please take a separate sheet of paper, unscramble the following bibliographical entries, according to the Turabian style, as previously described, and then keyboard your responses. Make sure you alphabetize the entries, including Guffey and Booher (E-writing), and give the list a name, such as SELECTED REFERENCES. In the Guffey reference make sure you include Thomson, along with South-Western Publishing. In addition, don't forget to include the edition of the book for Guffey.
Further instructions: Some of these scrambled entries may have information you don't need in the bibliographical entry. Be sure to alphabetize all the entries. You may also find you need to supply certain information before you complete the entry. The scrambled entries (at least seven) follow:
The annotations are not entirely to reflect the accurate content of the sources. These annotations are intended for educational purposes only.
Steven Greenhouse
Title: Equal Work, Less-Equal Perks
March 30, 1998
pp. C1, C6
The New York Times
Section: Business Day
Database: Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe/General News
The annotation: Talks about how the equal pay for less work occurs in actual practice. Mentions how this concept will affect workers in the 21st Century. The material directly relates to my report on equal pay for equal work at the bank.
Randall E. Stross
How Yahoo! Won the Search Wars
pp. 148-50, 152, 154
Fortune
March 2, 1998
Vol. 137, No. 4
Database: ABI/Inform/Global
Comments: Yahoo is matched against Google for its ability to improve search engine retrieval. Discusses the Yahoo search engine as a more viable alternative to current competitors. Relates to my report by discussing how the evolution of search engines is changing the way retrieval mechanisms are employed.
Peggy Noonan
Title: Simply Speaking: How to Communicate Your Ideas with Style, Substance, and Clarity
Publishing place: New York
ReganBooks, a division of HarperCollins
c1998
Database: Academic Search Elite (EBSCO Host).
Thoughts: Noonan brings out the four-step approach to giving an effective presentation. Discusses how the simplicity of what one says makes all the difference. Creates a pattern a speaker can use to more effectively get across the main message of a speech. Compares how effective politicians get their ideas across with little effort because of the time on task.
Interviewee: Ms. Cynthia Cabrillo
Department Manager
Interview place: Matador Bookstore
Ms. Cabrillo works for CDE Corporation, Burbank
Anticipated date of interview: April 17, 1998
Article author: Ann Davis
Title of Newspaper article: Two-Sided Issues, Or How David Milas Xeroxed Himself Out
Newspaper: The Wall Street Journal
Section: Main, A
Pages: A1, A12
Date: October 26, 1999
Database: Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe/General News
Comments: Explains how David Milas created problems with his board of directors. Describes how an innocent photocopy and e-mail got the CED in a great deal of trouble. Relates to my report by pointing out how ineffective communication can sink the best efforts of a CEO.
Volume 37. January 2000.
Donna P. Pawlowski and John Hollwitz
Title: Work Values, Cumulative Strategies and Applicant Reactions in a Structured Pre-Employment Interview for Ethical Integrity
The Journal of Business Communication
Pages: 58-76
Database: ABI/Inform/Global.
Describes the research of Pawlowski and Hollwitz where random samples were taken of applicants. Points out the discrepancies about how applicants lie about qualifications and work accomplished in other firms. Relates directly to my report where applicants are being tested with sample questions about integrity and ethical considerations. Mentions that work values and integrity are directly related on pre-employment job interviews.
NEWSWIRE SERVICE
Nashville, Tennessee
Newswire Service
11:25 a.m. March 2 Eastern Time
Marriott Launches EventCom Technologies by Marriott; New Service Proved High Tech for Major Hotel Chain
562 words
Accessed 3-30-01
March 2, 2001 Nashville, TN
pages 56 (4)
Database: Lexis-Nexis Academic Universe.
For further information, please check the home page for further help and additional hints, including analytical report memo and presentations.
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Last updated Friday, November 3, 2006