Bibliography

A bibliography enables the reader of a scholarly work to follow up on the author's research and potentially immerse himself more deeply into the given subject at hand. In addition, if the author has cited other works within his own work, then it is standard scholarly practice to include a bibliography containing the works that have been referred to over the course of the work, as a means of avoiding plagiarism and/or intellectual dishonesty. 

What is a bibliography?

Have you ever been overwhelmed by a book's contents? Whether it concerned history or science, you wondered how on earth the author(s) could have such an enormous body of knowledge on the topic in question? Well if you flip towards the back for the bibliography section, you'll see that the contents are based, in large part, on lifted knowledge. A bibliography is a list of the sources—books, articles, websites, interviews—used for a given piece of writing. In books, a bibliography usually appears toward the back; after the chapters and notes, but before the index. 

By listing the authors, titles, publishers, and dates of the sources used for a given book, a bibliography helps establish an author's credibility as a writer, researcher, and conveyer of factual information. Additionally, the Chicago Manual of Style citation guidelines require the use of a bibliography and endnotes.

Usage

When an author uses info from another book as a source, this will generally be noted in the bibliography with a list of the following information: author/s, book title, publisher's name and city, and the date it was published. If a book contains information sourced from a newspaper article or journal, the bibliography entry will usually list the writer, article title, and page number; as well as the name, volume, and date of the publication. 

Certain entries might say "n.p." or "n.d." in lieu of the publication house or publishing date if such info is unavailable to the party responsible for sourcing. Depending on the style and format of writing, a bibliography might alternately be called the "Sources," "References," or "Works Cited" section, depending on the author's citation style. A bibliography is not to be confused with the "Notes" section of a book, which an author might include to expand upon footnotes and tangential info, chapter by chapter.

More information on bibliographies

The word "bibliography" derives from the 2,000-year-old Greek word bibliographia, which refers to the hand-duplication of books. By the 1100s, the word was being applied to the mental process of book writing. The contemporary meaning of bibliography began to emerge during the 17th century.

Bibliography as a discipline falls into four primary branches:

• Analytical bibliography – deals with the effects that book production has on the preservation of texts; essentially, this is a study in book making and printing practices.
• Descriptive bibliography – centers on the description of a book's format and technical details; this was crucial during the early days of book printing, where in many cases the individual copies of a given title were at least partially unique. 
• Enumerative bibliography – lists all of the texts, documents, articles, other books, and further resources that went into the information and quotations of a book.
• Textual bibliography – concerns a book's state in relation to prior versions of the same text; also looks at which party was responsible for different versions, such as the editor, writer, and printer.

In other types of media, listing systems have emerged with names that derive from the word "bibliography," such as discography (music recordings), filmography (movies), and webography (Internet sites).

For the intellectually curious, a bibliography can serve as a guide for further explorations into a topic of interest. In an academic context, students are sometimes requires to write an annotated bibliography, or list of sources used as well as a brief summary of the source and how it is used in their research.