bibliography in historical research

• Referencing
• Bibliographies

How to create a bibliography or reference list

A list of all cited source materials, known as a bibliography or reference list , must be included at the end of your essay.

They are divided into two sections: primary sources and secondary sources . Each of these sections need to be in alphabetical order .

Each bibliographical reference needs:

• the author's last name followed by their first initial(s)
• the year of publication
• the name of the work (in italics)
• the publication details

What is the difference between a bibliography and a reference list?

Depending on the assessment task, you will either be asked to create a bibliography or a reference list. Here are the differences between the two:

• A bibliography lists all of the materials that have been consulted during your research, regardless of whether or not you've quoted from them
• A reference list  states only the sources that you've quoted in your assignment

Regardless of which you're required to create, you must follow the formatting shown below.

Correct Format for Different Source Types

These examples use the popular APA (American Psychological Association) referencing style. 

Required Elements:

Author's Surname, First Initials. (Year of Publication).  Name of book . City of Publication: Name of Publishing Company.

Academic Journal Articles

Author's Surname, First Initials. (Year, Month day OR Season - if known - of publication). Article title.  Name of Journal the Article Appeared In ,  Journal Volume Number (Issue or Part Number), page number(s) of the article.

Newspaper or Magazine Articles

Author's Surname, First Initials. (Year, Month day of publication). Article title.  Name of Newspaper/Magazine , page number(s) of the article.

Speaker's Surname, First Initials. (Year, Month Day Speech was Given). Title of Speech.  Institution, City the Speech was Given at/in.

Author's Surname, First Initials. (Year of Publication). Name of webpage.  Retrieved from URL.

Ancient Sources

Ancient Author's Name.  Name of Ancient Work.  (Name of Modern Translator that You're Using, trans.). Location of Modern Translation's Publisher: Name of Modern Translation's Publishing Company, Year of Modern Translation's Publication.

Referencing a Source Found in Another Source

On some occasions you find a source in the pages of different source. Your first task should be to try and quote the source you have found separately from the book that it is in. Do this, look in the bibliography of the book in order to gain the necessary details.

However, if you cannot find the information necessary to create a separate bibliographical entry, you will need to create a bibliographical entry that acknowledges the book that the source was found in.

To do this you will need:

• as many of the details that you can find of the source you are using. (Anything you don't know is left out).
• the full bibliographical details of the book it was found in, along with the page number in the book where the source was found. This is preceded by the phrase "As found in" and the entire bibliographical reference is placed in brackets.

For example:

Nixon, R. (1969). (As found in US Government Printing Office 1969, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon , Washington D.C.: US Government Printing Office, pp. 903).

Example Reference List

Reference List

Primary Sources

Appian.  The Civil Wars .  (John Carter, trans). New York: Penguin, 1996.

Department of Defence. (1959). Strategic basis of Australian defence policy . Canberra: Department of Defence.

Department of Defence. (1976). Defence White Paper . Canberra: Department of Defence.

Millar, T. (1979). The political-military relationship in Australia . Strategic and Defence Studies Centre Working Paper , 6, p. 12.

Nixon, R. (1969). (As found in US Government Printing Office 1969, Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: Richard Nixon , Washington D.C.: US Government Printing Office, p. 903).

Secondary Sources

Dibb, P. (2007). The self-reliant defence of Australia: The History of an Idea . (As found in   Huisken, R., & Thatcher., M. (eds). History as policy: Framing the debate on the future of Australia’s defence policy . Canberra: ANU Press and Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, p. 11-26).

Horner, D. (1997). Security objectives . (As found in Mediansky, F. (ed). Australian foreign policy: Into the new millennium . South Melbourne: Macmillan, p. 73-92).

Lawson, E. (2009). The Australian defence environment . Australian Defence Force Journal , 179, p. 70-81.

White, H. (2007). Four decades of the defence of Australia: Reflections on Australian defence policy over the past 40 years . (As found in Huisken, R & Thatcher, M. (eds). History as policy: Framing the debate on the future of Australia’s defence policy . Canberra: ANU Press and Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, p. 163-187).

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Bibliography Research

Introduction.

• National Bibliography
• Personal Bibliography
• Corporate Bibliography
• Subject Bibliography
• Catalog & Bibliographies
• Other Tools for Finding Bibliographies

A bibliography is a list of documents, usually published documents like books and articles. This type of bibliography is more accurately called "enumerative bibliography". An enumerative bibliography will attempt to be as comprehensive as possible, within whatever parameters established by the bibliographer.

Bibliographies will list both secondary and primary sources. They are perhaps most valuable to historians for identifying primary sources. (They are still useful for finding secondary sources, but increasingly historians rely on electronic resources, like article databases, to locate secondary sources.)

Think of a bibliography as a guide to the source base for a specific field of inquiry. A high quality bibliography will help you understand what kinds of sources are available, but also what kinds of sources are not available (either because they were never preserved, or because they were never created in the first place).

Take for example the following bibliography:  

British autobiographies; an annotated bibliography of British autobiographies published or written before 1951 by William Matthews

Call number:  Z2027 .A9 M3 1955

Publication date: 1955

Like many bibliographies, this one includes an introduction or prefatory essay that gives a bibliographic overview of the topic. If you were hoping to use autobiographies for a paper on medieval history, the following information from the preface would save you from wasting your time in a fruitless search:

The essay explains that autobiography does not become an important historical source until the early modern period:

Finally, the essay informs us that these early modern autobiographies are predominantly religious in nature--a useful piece of information if we were hoping to use them as evidence of, for example, the early modern textile trade:

All bibliographies are organized differently, but the best include indexes that help you pinpoint the most relevant entries.

A smart researcher will also use the index to obtain an overview of the entire source base: the index as a whole presents a broad outline of the available sources--the extent of available sources, as well as the the strengths and weaknesses of the source base. Browsing the subject index, if there is one, is often an excellent method of choosing a research topic because it enables you quickly to rule out topics that cannot be researched due to lack of primary sources.

The index to  British Autobiographies , for example, tells me that I can find many autobiographies that document British social clubs (like White's and Boodle's), especially from the 19th century:

Unlike indexes you might be familiar with from non-fiction books, the indexes in bibliographies usually reference specific entries, not page numbers.

A bibliography's index will often help guide you systematically through the available sources, as in this entry which prompts you to look under related index entries for even more sources:

Types of Bibliographies

There are four main types of enumerative bibliographies used for historical research:

enumerative bibliography: 

1. Enumerative bibliography: the listing of books according to some system or reference plan, for example, by author, by subject, or by date. The implication is that the listings will be short, usually providing only the author's name, the book's title, and date and place of publication. Enumerative bibliography (sometimes called systematic bibliography) attempts to record and list, rather than to describe minutely. Little or no information is likely to be provided about physical aspects of the book such as paper, type, illustrations, or binding. A library's card catalog is an example of an enumerative bibliography, and so is the list at the back of a book of works consulted, or a book like the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, which catalogues briefly the works of English writers and the important secondary material about them. ...  (from McGill Library) 

Read more from their lecture on bibliographies from this linked Word Doc: Lecture I Discussion

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Annotated Bibliographies

Note:   The guidelines below are general suggestions to help you write an annotated bibliography for a history class.  Your professor might give specific guidelines that provide more detail than the information here.  Always follow your professor’s instructions.

What is an annotated bibliography?

An annotated bibliography is a description of a set of related sources that address a common topic.  It is a very useful tool in helping you analyze sources and organize your research.  Professors will often assign annotated bibliographies when they want to help you figure out which sources will be most important to your project and in what ways you will make use of the sources.  At other times, professors assign them as an exercise in and of themselves, to help you take the first steps toward mastering a body of historical literature.  Depending on the guidelines from your professor, a source entry in an annotated bibliography will be anywhere from a short paragraph to a page long.

What are the components of an annotated bibliography?

An annotated bibliography usually contains three parts:

Source Citation : Like a regular bibliography, an annotated bibliography provides proper citation information for each source.  Remember that historians usually use Chicago style.  Visit our citation section for information about formatting your citations.  Your professor may allow other styles, such as MLA;  check which style your professor recommends.

Source Summary : The first part of your entry will summarize the source concisely.  Aim not to dazzle your professor with extensive detail, but to state briefly the topic and main argument of your source.  If you are annotating a secondary source, in addition to summarizing the main idea, you will want to give information about how the source is organized, the main types of evidence the author relies on, and how the author makes his or her argument.  If you are annotating a primary source, in addition to the main idea, explain the type of source (e.g. a letter, newspaper, census report, etc.), identify the author (include the author’s position and other information to help the reader understand the writer’s perspective and why s/he was in a position to create the source), and state the author’s intended audience.

Source Evaluation : Your source evaluation explains how the source contributes to a particular topic.  If you are producing an annotated bibliography in anticipation of writing a research paper, your professor might ask you to consider exactly how you will use the source in your paper.  What does the source do for your argument?  Is it one of the key pieces of evidence supporting your case?  Does it offer crucial background information?  Does it present a counterpoint to your argument that you need to address?  Other professors might want you to focus more on an evaluation of the source itself.  In this case, be sure to discuss the strengths and weaknesses of the source.  Did you find the argument persuasive?  If so, explain what made the argument work well.  Were you unconvinced by some of the author’s claims?  If so, explain why.  You will also want to put the source into the context of the field as a whole.  What does this source teach us that we did not know before?  Is it filling a particular gap in the field?  Is it refuting a long-held assumption?  Authors will often explain how they understand the contribution of their work, so begin by looking in the introduction for such information.

While the  source citation ,  summary , and  evaluation  are the key components of an annotated bibliography entry, your professor might also ask you to include other information, such as:

A list of related sources:  The purpose of listing related sources is to position the source you have annotated in its appropriate historiographical field.  Note the work’s place in dialogue with other sources.  Is your source responding to a specific article or book?  Is your source considered the foundational work in a field?  Where does the author of your source position him or herself in relation to other scholarship on the subject?  A good way to figure out what related sources to list is to look at the author’s footnotes.  What studies does the author rely on the most?  Note that you do not need to annotate these related sources.  Your job is to describe in a sentence or two what the source is about and how it relates to the main source you have just annotated.

What are the steps for writing an annotated bibliography?

• The first step  is to decide which sources will be most critical for your topic.  Often, your professor will assign an annotated bibliography relatively early on in the writing process, so perhaps you do not yet know exactly which sources will be the most important or how exactly you will use them.  To help you figure that out, think about the research questions that led you to your topic in the first place and then think about which sources would best help you answer those questions.  A major benefit of writing an annotated bibliography is that, by the end of it, you will have a far better idea of what your project looks like, what you are arguing, and what evidence you have to support your argument.
• Once you have identified your key sources,  the second step  is to put into writing the main argument of each source.  To help you glean the author’s argument, take a step back and look at the big picture.  What problem is this author trying to address?  What holes in our knowledge does the writer intend to fill?  If you are having trouble capturing the main idea, reread the author’s introduction and conclusion.  In those sections, the author is likely to lay out in detail the larger argument.
• Now that you know the main argument of the source,  the third step  is to figure out how successfully the author supported the argument.  Look back through the source and see exactly what evidence the author used to make his or her case.  Is there enough evidence?  Do you agree with how the author interpreted the evidence?  In this step, you will also want to put this source into conversation with other sources.  Ask how this source fits in with the other ones you have read.  Does it agree with them?  Disagree?  Did you find some sources more convincing than others?  If so, why?
• The fourth step  is figuring out how this source will be most helpful to you when writing your paper.  Once again, return to your original research questions.  If you have a working thesis statement, revisit that as well.  Ask yourself:  What did I learn from this source?  What gaps in my knowledge did this source help me fill?  Now that I have read this source, has my thinking about my topic changed?  Think about the actual structure or outline of your paper.  At what point in your paper do you think you will draw on this source?  Why will it be particularly useful to you at that point?
• The fifth step  is to put it all together.  At the top of each entry, write down the citation information.  Then delve into your summary.  In an annotated bibliography, every sentence counts, so make sure your writing is direct and that you articulate the main points you want to make efficiently.  Once you have summarized the source, move on to your evaluation, discussing whether or not you found the source convincing and/or how you will use it in your project.  Be sure to provide any other information your professor has asked you to include.

Sample Entries From an Annotated Bibliography

Blanchard, Paula.   Sarah Orne Jewett: Her World and Her Work .  New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1994.

Part of the Radcliffe Biography Series, which publishes the life stories of prominent American women, Blanchard’s book is the definitive biography on Jewett.  As her subtitle implies, she not only seeks to illuminate the events of Jewett’s life, but also to contextualize her writings and provide a critical reading of her most famous works.  Many of the chapters in Blanchard’s biography are devoted specifically to major texts, such as  Deephaven, The Country of the Pointed Firs , and  The Tory Lover .  Blanchard provides background on Jewett’s writing process (such as where she wrote and the degree of revisions she made) as well as brief literary analyses.  Most of Blanchard’s chapters are centered on key relationships and themes in Jewett’s own life.  Blanchard argues that it is only by thoroughly situating Jewett in her historical moment that we can understand her literary work, thereby issuing a critique of scholars who claim we can study Jewett’s canon in isolation.

Particularly useful for my project are the chapters that discuss Jewett’s coterie of literary friends in New England and her close relationship with Annie Fields.  In a chapter entitled “Neither Marrying Nor Giving in Marriage,” Blanchard seeks to uncover Jewett’s own motivations for remaining single, as well as place Jewett’s single status within the scholarly conversation about nineteenth-century unmarried women.  She aligns herself with both Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Lillian Faderman in saying that Jewett’s personal friendships and relationships with women (as well as male family members) were sufficiently fulfilling for her and therefore precluded a desire to marry.  I will use Blanchard’s text in my paper to support my argument that unmarried women were deeply enmeshed in their communities, rather than being social pariahs stigmatized as “old maids.”  I will also use some aspects of Blanchard’s argument as a point of departure, however, as I disagree with her claim that women’s close female friendships precluded marriage.  Rather, I see Jewett’s friendships as helping her craft a meaningful life as a single woman instead of inhibiting her desire or ability to marry.

Glickman, Lawrence B.   A Living Wage: American Workers and the Making of Consumer Society.   Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997.

Glickman traces the history of the idea of a living wage from the end of the Civil War to the 1930s.  He argues that American workers moved from seeing themselves as producers to seeing themselves as consumers, which in turn altered American attitudes toward wage labor and the role of government in the workplace.  Relying mainly on discourse analysis, Glickman divides his book into four parts that track the changing rhetoric of wage labor in different sectors of American society.  Situated in two different historiographies, Glickman’s book brings together scholarship on labor history and consumer history.  His contributions mainly center on identifying the agency of workers in labor reform and New Deal policies, as well as in showing that consumerism engaged workers more fully in the civic sphere rather than depoliticizing them.  He also demonstrates that wage labor was heavily racialized and gendered.  The book’s main weakness is Glickman’s heavy reliance on discourse analysis as a methodology.  By placing so much emphasis on rhetoric, Glickman does not give the reader a sense of the details of labor reform, nor does he connect idealized rhetoric with the actual lived experience of American workers.

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Bibliography and Historical Research

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National Bibliography

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National bibliographies attempt to describe the publishing output of a specific region of the world. Most national bibliographies will also be circumscribed by a time period. Examples of national bibliographies include:

• La imprenta en México (1539-1821) by José Toribio Medina Call Number: Q. 015.72 M46me Publication Date: 1907-1912 8 volumes.
• American Bibliography: A Chronological Dictionary of All Books, Pamphlets, and Periodical Publications Printed in the United States of America from the Genesis of Printing in 1639 down to and including the Year 1820 by Charles Evans Call Number: 015.73 ONLINE Publication Date: 1941-1959 Should be a standard reference work for anybody wanting to find early American published primary sources. 12 exhaustive volumes, organized by year. Each volume includes an author index, subject index, and printer index, with a cumulative index composing the final volume.
• Bibliography of American Imprints to 1901 by American Antiquarian Society Call Number: Q. 015.73 B4712 ISBN: 3598333404 Publication Date: 1992 Despite being seven times as large (92 volumes), this work never achieved the status of Charles Evans's American Bibliography . Still, for anybody interested in finding American, published primary sources from after 1820 (where Evans's bibliography ceases), this reference work is indispensable. Entries are organized alphabetically by title, with multi-volume indexes for author, subject, and date.

National bibliographies will usually include an introductory essay on the printing history of the nation or region covered. They will be organized either alphabetically by author, chronologically by date of publication, thematically by broad subject, or some combination of the above. A really good national bibliography will include at least some indexes, such as a general subject index, an author index, and maybe an index of printers and publishers. However, national bibliographies vary widely in scope, detail, and quality.

National bibliographies are useful to the historian in helping him or her establish the publishing output of a nation or region: in the search for primary sources, they help to answer the question, "what documents were actually published in a given place at a given time?" Without this knowledge, a historian could waste hours, days, weeks, and even months searching for publications that were never produced in the first place.

Not all national bibliographies cover the publishing output of an entire nation. Some national bibliographies will cover an entire continent, while others will cover a region within a nation. For example:

• Biblioteca hispanoamericana, 1493-1810 by José Toribio Medina Call Number: 016.98 M46BI1958 Publication Date: 1958-1962 Bibliography of works printed in Spanish America, or works about Spanish America. Organized by year of publication, and then alphabetically by title. Includes book-length introductory essay and an author index. Many of the titles in this bibliography are available in a microfilm set called Medina's Biblioteca hispano-americana , available from CRL through Interlibrary Loan.
• A Bibliography of Illinois Imprints, 1814-58 by Cecil K. Byrd Call Number: 015.773 B99B Publication Date: 1966 Entries arranged chronologically. Index includes authors, subjects, genres (e.g. almanacs, periodicals), and titles.

To learn much more about national bibliographies, see the guide created by the Slavic Reference Service on National Bibliography .

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• Chicago Manual of Style: Annotated bibliography example Remember that your annotated bibliographies are not simply lists. They are creative, rhetorical devices that map out the scholarly conversation on a topic.
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• Citing republished/bound primary sources (14.160: Citations taken from secondary sources) When possible, always find and cite the original. If this is absolutely impossible, you may need to cite a primary source that is republished in a secondary source.
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• Messy database URL? Just include the database name (14.72: URLs for journal articles) For databases that don't have short URLs for articles, just include the database name in place of the URL.
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Annotated Bibliographies

What is an annotated bibliography?  

An annotated bibliography is a description of a set of related sources that address a common historical topic, often used to organize research and analyze sources. They can help you understand how to analyze and compare multiple historical arguments and provide structure to a historiographical paper. 

Each section of an annotated bibliography should include:

• Source Citation in Chicago style - Your professor will have specified what type of Chicago style you are to use.
• When annotating a secondary source, you want to include how the source is organized, the main types of evidence the author relies on, and the author's argument. 
• When annotating a primary source, you should also explain the type of source, who created the source, and the author's intended audience.
• You will want to consider several questions for this section. How does the source contribute to your argument? Is it a key piece of evidence supporting your thesis? Does it provide relevant background information? Does it offer a counterpoint to your argument? 
• Assess the source's strengths and weaknesses. Did you find the source persuasive or reliable? Were there some aspects of the source you felt needed more evidence or were unexplained? 
• Put the source in context with the field as a whole. Does the source fill in a gap in the current knowledge or literature on the topic? Is it refuting a long-held assumption? What does the author say about how their work contributes to our understanding of the topic?

“Annotated Bibliography Revised - UCLA History.”  UCLA History , UCLA, https://history.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/assets/annotated_bibliographies.pdf.

Writing an Annotated Bibliography in Steps

First Step: Decide which sources will be most critical for your topic.

• To help you figure that out, think about the research questions that led you to your topic in the first place and then think about which sources would best help you answer those questions. A major benefit of writing an annotated bibliography is that, by the end of it, you will have a far better idea of what your project looks like, what you are arguing, and what evidence you have to support your argument.

Second Step: Writing the main argument for each source

• What problem is this author trying to address? What holes in our knowledge does the writer intend to fill? If you had to describe this source to someone who had never read it, what would you say? If you are having trouble capturing the main idea, reread the author’s introduction and conclusion. In those sections, the author is likely to lay out in detail the larger argument.

Third Step: Deciding whether the author successfully supported their argument

• Look back through the source and see exactly what evidence the author used to make his or her case. Is there enough evidence? Do you agree with how the author interpreted the evidence? In this step, you will also want to put this source into conversation with other sources. Ask how this source fits in with the other ones you have read. Does it agree with them? Disagree? Did you find some sources more convincing than others? If so, why

Fourth Step: How does this source help you write your paper or understand your topic

• . Once again, return to your original research questions. If you have a working thesis statement, revisit that as well. Ask yourself: What did I learn from this source? What gaps in my knowledge did this source help me fill? Now that I have read this source, has my thinking about my topic changed? Think about the actual structure or outline of your paper. At what point in your paper do you think you will draw on this source? Why will it be particularly useful to you at that point?

Fifth Step: Put it all together

• At the top of each entry, write down the citation information. Then delve into your summary. In an annotated bibliography, every sentence counts, so make sure your writing is direct and that you articulate the main points you want to make efficiently. Once you have summarized the source, move onto your evaluation, discussing whether or not you found the source convincing and/or how you will use it in your project. Be sure to include any other information your professor has directed.

“Annotated Bibliography Revised - UCLA History.” UCLA History , UCLA, https://history.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/assets/annotated_bibliographies.pdf. 

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