The most important difference between a reference list and a bibliography is the items that are listed in each. A bibliography includes all research materials, including books, websites and scholarly journals, that you consulted throughout the research process. You should include every material you consulted in your bibliography, even if you did not specifically quote or summarize the ideas of the book or website. A reference list, on the other hand, includes only works you quoted, summarized or paraphrased in your paper.
Entries in a reference list or works cited page are always cited in the text of your paper. For example, if you wanted to use a direct quote from Charles Dickens' novel "A Christmas Carol" to describe how the character of Scrooge changed throughout the book, you would need to provide an in-text citation after the quote. Information about the novel would then appear in your references list as its own entry. However, the Sparks Notes character outline you looked at before you read the book, which you did not quote or summarize, would appear only in your bibliography.
Reference lists and bibliographies are similar in that both documents are presented at or near the end of your own document. If you do not have both a reference page and a bibliography, then whichever one you do have will be the last document in your paper. However, if you are going to include both a bibliography and a reference page, you should note one important difference. The bibliography always comes at the end of your paper, with your reference page coming directly before it.
The information presented for each entry in both your reference page and your bibliography will be very similar. Each entry will likely include the author, title and type of publication of the work. However, it is important to remember that a bibliography may include more information than a references page. A bibliography may be annotated, meaning that you give a short summary of each work and how you used the work directly after its entry. This summary would never be needed for a reference page, since the in-text citations have the same function as the short annotations.