Topic 6    Bibliographies

At the end of your piece of work, you should provide a list of all the things you have referred to in your work. These might be arranged in alphabetical order by author, or in the order they are mentioned in your work. The convention at the Open University is that you should call this list ‘references’.

‘Bibliography’, quite literally means ‘list of books’ – it enables you to find a book (or journal article) in your own library, regardless of where the person who wrote the bibliography got their original copy from. Sometimes there may be sources you have consulted as background reading, but have not mentioned in your work – you might like to put these in a separate list entirely, after your list of references, calling it ‘bibliography’.