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List Sources in a Working Bibliography

A working bibliography is a running list of the sources you’ve explored and plan to use in your writing project — with publication information for each source. The organization of your working bibliography can vary according to your needs and preferences. You can organize your sources in any of the following ways:

in the order in which you collected your sources
in categories
by author
by publication title
according to an outline of your project document

Information You Should List in a Bibliography

Type of Source	Information You Should List
All Sources	Author(s) Title Publication year Brief note — or annotation — describing or commenting on the source, indicating how you might use it in your document, or showing how it is related to other sources (for annotated bibliographies only)
Book	Editor(s) of book (if applicable) Publication city Publisher Series and series editor (if applicable) Translator (if applicable) Volume (if applicable) Edition (if applicable)
Chapter in an Edited Book	Chapter title Publication city Publisher Editor(s) of book Book title Page numbers
Journal, Magazine, and Newspaper Article	Journal title Volume number or date Issue number or date Page numbers
Web Page, Blog Entry or Reply, Discussion Forum or Newsgroup Post, E-mail Message, and Chat Transcript	URL Access date (the date you read the source) Sponsoring organization, if listed
Field Research	Title (usually a description of the source, such as “Personal Interview with Ellen Page” or “Observation of Reid Vincent’s Class at Dunn Elementary School”) Date (usually the date on which the field research was conducted)

The entries in a working bibliography should include as much publication information about a source as you can gather.

Your working bibliography will change significantly over the course of your writing project. As you explore and narrow your topic and, later, as you collect and work with your sources, you will add potentially useful sources and delete sources that are no longer relevant. Eventually, your working bibliography will become one of the following:

a works cited or reference list — a formal list of the sources you have referred to in a document
a bibliography or works consulted list — a formal list of the sources that contributed to your thinking about a subject, even if those sources are not referred to explicitly in the text of the document

You can read more about works cited and reference lists in Part Five.

Keeping your working bibliography up-to-date is a critical part of your writing process. It helps you keep track of your sources and increases the likelihood that you will cite all the sources you use in your document — an important contribution to your efforts to avoid plagiarism.

The first five sources from featured writer Ali Bizzul’s working bibliography are shown in the illustration below.

Part of Ali Bizzul’s working bibliography