Glossary

Bibliography, reference list, works cited: which one does your style want?

A bibliography lists, alphabetically at the end of a paper, every source you consulted — whether or not each one is cited in the text. Chicago and several humanities fields use the word that way. APA and MLA reserve their lists for works actually cited, which makes those lists narrower than a true bibliography.

Why it matters when you are writing

The distinction matters at submission time. If your department asks for a bibliography and you hand in a reference list, you have left out the reading that shaped your thinking but never got quoted. If a journal asks for a reference list and you hand in a bibliography, the copy editor will query every entry that no sentence points to. Read the instruction literally: the two words are not interchangeable, even though people use them loosely in conversation.

Formatting is where most marks are quietly lost. Entries are alphabetized by the first author’s surname, second and later lines are indented (a hanging indent), and the punctuation between elements is fixed by the style rather than by taste. None of this is intellectually interesting, which is exactly why it goes wrong late at night, and why building the list as you write beats assembling it at the end.

An annotated bibliography is a different assignment again. Each entry is followed by a short paragraph — usually 100 to 200 words — summarizing the source and stating what it contributes to your project. Supervisors set it early in a degree because it forces you to articulate why a source is in the pile before you have written anything around it.

IN PRACTICE

The same reading, two lists

You read Hardin’s monograph for background but never quote it. A Chicago bibliography includes it. An APA reference list does not — unless you add a sentence in the paper that cites it.

OFTEN CONFUSED WITH

What Bibliography is not

Reference list: A reference list holds only the sources actually cited in the text; a bibliography may also include background reading you never cited.
Works Cited: Works Cited is MLA’s name for a cited-only list, so it behaves like a reference list rather than like a full bibliography.
Further reading: A further-reading list is a recommendation to your reader; a bibliography is a record of what informed the work.

Questions about bibliography

Should I include sources I read but did not cite?

In a Chicago-style bibliography, yes, if they genuinely informed the work. In an APA reference list or an MLA Works Cited page, no — those lists are restricted to sources with a matching in-text citation.

How do I alphabetize entries with no author?

Alphabetize by the first significant word of the title, ignoring an initial “A,” “An,” or “The.” Do not move the entry to the end of the list or file it under “Anonymous.”

What is a hanging indent and why does every style want one?

The first line of each entry sits flush left and subsequent lines are indented, usually half an inch. It makes surnames scannable down the left margin, which is how readers actually use the list.

Related terms

Works Cited

MLA calls its end-of-paper source list the Works Cited page, and it holds only the sources you actually cited.

In-text citation

Every borrowed idea in a paper carries an in-text citation: a brief marker — usually an author name plus a year, page, or number — that points to the full entry in your reference list.

Citation style

Every citation style — APA, MLA, Chicago, IEEE, Vancouver, Harvard — is a published rulebook governing how you signal a source in the text and format it in the reference list: punctuation, author order, italics, date placement.

BibTeX

BibTeX stores bibliographic records as plain text, one entry per source, each tagged with a type such as @article or @book and a unique citation key.

DOI

Publishers assign a DOI — a Digital Object Identifier — to an article, dataset, or preprint as a permanent alphanumeric handle that resolves to the work’s current location.

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