Information to collect for a working bibliography

For an entire book

  • All authors; any editors or translators
  • Title and subtitle
  • Edition (if not the first)
  • Publication information: city, publisher, and date
  • Medium: print, Web, and so on
  • Date you retrieved the source (for an online source)

For an article

  • All authors of the article
  • Title and subtitle of the article
  • Title of the journal, magazine, or newspaper
  • Date; volume, issue, and page numbers
  • Medium: print, Web, DVD, and so on
  • Date you retrieved the source (for an online source)

For an article retrieved from a database (in addition to preceding information)

  • Name of the database
  • Accession number or other number assigned by the database
  • Digital object identifier (DOI), if there is one
  • URL of the journal's home page, if there is no DOI
  • Date you retrieved the source

note: Use particular care when printing or saving articles in PDF files. The files themselves may not include some of the elements you need to cite the source properly. You may need to record additional information from the database or Web site where you retrieved the PDF file.

For a Web source (including visual, audio, and multimedia sources)

  • All authors, editors, or composers of the source
  • Editor or compiler of the Web source, if there is one
  • Title and subtitle of the source
  • Title of the longer work, if the source is contained in a longer work
  • Title of the Web site
  • Print publication information for the source, if available
  • Online page or paragraph numbers, if any
  • Date of online publication (or latest update)
  • Sponsor of the site
  • Date you accessed the source
  • The site's URL

note: For the exact bibliographic format to use in your working bibliography and in the final paper, see 56b (MLA), 61b (APA), or 63d (Chicago).

tip: Your school may provide citation software, which automatically formats citations in any style using bibliographic information submitted by researchers. Many databases format citations with a mouse click, and some Web sites offer fill-in-the-blank forms for generating formatted citations. You must carefully proofread the results from these programs, however, because the citations sometimes include errors.