Extended Essay: Step 6 - Bibliography & Citation

Bibliography & Citation

When you use materials or ideas that are not your own, the reader must be able to clearly distinguish which words are yours, and which are borrowed from another creator. Acknowledgement of other creators happens in two places in your EE, a brief reference in the body of the essay itself, and a longer bibliographic citation at the end of the paper.

This video is a brief introduction to the how and why of citation.

Bibliographic Citations

At the end of your essay you will include a "bibliography" or "works cited" page. This page will have full-length citations for each source that you used in your research. This way someone reading your essay will see the in-text citation, and will know what to look for in your bibliography if they want more information on the source. Citations will look different depending on what kind of source you are citing (a book, an article, a website, etc...)

Parts of a Citation

No matter what kind of source you are citing there is some basic information that must be included, no matter what. Whether you are citing a book or a YouTube video, the information in contains has someone who thought it up and wrote it down or said it -- that is the creator. Sources typically have a name -- that is the title, and so on.

Creator. Title (of a whole book, or single article or webpage). Container (magazine, newspaper, etc.), Other contributors (translators, editors, illustrators), Version (edition of a book), Number (volume or number of a periodical), Publisher, Publication date, Location (page numbers, URL, DOI). Date of Access (for internet sources).

Common Types of Citation

These are examples of citations for some of the most commonly used types of sources. Notice the colors illustrate what piece of information each part corresponds to. The punctuation between each part of the citation is also intentional, notice when there are periods, commas, italics, and quotation marks. In full citations that use more than one line, every line after the first should be indented. Full citations should appear in your bibliography in alphabetical order by creator's last name.

In-Text Citation

In-text citations are like abbreviations for the longer, full citation that is listed in your bibliography or works cited page. In-text citations get sprinkled into the text of your essay so that the reader can see you are acknowledging another scholar's work, but they are no so big that they interrupt their  reading of your ideas. You can format in-text citations a few different ways, but you should make sure it is clear to the reader where your information is coming from -- the creator's name, where in the source you found the information, and sometimes the title of the work itself, should be included in your in-text citations.

You can reference the author and title of a book in the text of your essay, and include the page or paragraph number in parentheses after a direct quotation.

As Howard Zinn points out in his book, A People's History of the United States, "when the war in Mexico began, New York workingmen called a meeting to oppose the war." (159)

Alternatively, you can provide a parenthetical citation with the both author's last name and the page or paragraph number that the quotation comes from.

"When the war in Mexico began, New York workingmen called a meeting to oppose the war." (Zinn, 159)

You can also paraphrase any information that you want to include in your paper, but that you do not need to quote word-for-word. For this, you can use either of the above techniques:

As Howard Zinn points out in his book, A People's History of the United States, there were so many workers in New York opposed the war with Mexico that they actually called a meeting. (Zinn, 159) 

So many workers in New York opposed the war with Mexico that they actually called a meeting. (Zinn, 159) 

Annotated Bibliographies

An annotated bibliography includes not only a list of sources, but also notes on each one about why the information it contains is valid and useful to your research, and how you will use it. It may look something like this: