Writing a bibliography is best done a little at a time, when you are working on your term paper or book project. At its most basic, a bibliography consists of the name of the author, the title of the publication, the publication date, where it was published, and what company or organization published it.
For all bibliographies, the materials in the list are presented alphabetically by the last name of the author. Specific directions about what words to capitalize in titles, and where to use parentheses, quotation marks or italics in the bibliography are spelled out in detail in publication manuals called style guides.
An annotated bibliography contains all of the specifics about publication and the author that full or select bibliographies contain, but they take it a step further. Annotation means that the bibliography contains notes about the material that is referenced. These may be summaries of the content or evaluations by the author, who may seek to use the space in the annotated bibliography to explain to the reader why a specific source material is relevant to the subject that the author has written about.
Writing an annotated bibliography is an excellent way to learn to read more critically: as you are doing research, you begin to summarize and ask questions about the resource material that you are reading. Writing an annotated bibliography is the best way to help keep track of your notes, and it can help you later on when you are ready to formulate a thesis for your own research paper.
Published annotated bibliographies in mass-market books often take the form of a paragraph (after the publication data) that briefly describes the resource material to the reader. Sometimes this bibliographic list may be called “For Further Reading” or some similar title.
Different areas of academic study use different style guides for their publications. Three of the most common style guides are The Chicago Manual of Style, the MLA (Modern Language Association) Handbook, and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (APA). The Chicago Manual of Style is also used outside academic work. The Associated Press (AP) Stylebook is used extensively in journalism but is generally not used for the kind of writing that needs bibliographic references.
Writers should make the effort to find out which style guide is used by the class, academic journal or publishing house before they invest a lot of time in writing a bibliography. Although the basic format of a bibliography is simple, learning all of the specifics of punctuation and style can be time consuming. And even though most publishing houses have copy editors to check a writer’s work and take care of the specific aspects of style, it is still up to the writer to provide accurate bibliographic data. So getting used to the format at the start of the writing process can save a lot of time later in the publication work flow.