bibliography
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What is a bibliography?
A bibliography is a systematic list, study, and description of written and printed works, especially books. It organizes detailed information from a lot of sources so people can access useful information. Bibliographies list works by system, such as descriptive or enumerative, or study works as tangible objects, such as critical or analytical. Bibliographies give organized information about an author's works, all or selected works on a subject, or about a country or period. They can describe a book's physical features like paper, binding, printing, typography, and production. Students and scholars use bibliographies to get information, establish publication dates, verify authenticity, and assess value for textual study.
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Why do you need a bibliography when writing a report or essay?
A bibliography systematically catalogs, studies, and describes written and printed works, especially books. Bibliographies list works according to a system and study works as tangible objects. They provide organized information about an author's works, all works on a subject, or a country or period. Students and scholars use bibliographies to access information, establish a book's publication date and authenticity, and assess its value for textual study.
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What is the difference between a bibliography, works cited, and references?
Bibliography is the systematic cataloging, study, and description of written and printed works, especially books. Bibliographies list works according to a system and study works as tangible objects. They provide organized information about an author's works, all works on a subject, or a country or period.
Works cited and references both refer to sources that provide supporting information. The terms are often used interchangeably to list sources you directly cited in your work.
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How does citing sources in a bibliography help avoid plagiarism?
Creating a bibliography and citing sources is essential to academic honesty and avoiding plagiarism. Plagiarism is presenting someone else's ideas or words as your own without giving credit to the original author.
A bibliography is a systematic list of written works, organized by author, subject, or other criteria. By including a bibliography in your work and citing your sources, you are giving credit to the original authors whose ideas and words you have used. This shows that you have done your research and are not trying to pass off someone else's work as your own.
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bibliography, the systematic cataloging, study, and description of written and printed works, especially books.
Bibliography is either (1) the listing of works according to some system (descriptive, or enumerative, bibliography) or (2) the study of works as tangible objects (critical, or analytical, bibliography). The word bibliography is also used to describe the product of those activities: bibliographies may take the form of organized information about a particular authorâs works, about all (or selected) works on a given subject, or about a particular country or period. A bibliography may also consist of meticulous descriptions of the physical features of a number of books, including the paper, binding, printing, typography, and production processes used. These bibliographies are then used by students and scholars to gain access to information about material for study in a given area and to help establish such facts about a book or other printed work as its date of publication, its authenticity, and its value for textual study.
Descriptive bibliography
The primary purpose of descriptive bibliography is to organize detailed information culled from a mass of materials in a systematic way so that others can have access to useful information. In the earliest bibliographies, the organizing principle was simply that of compiling all the works of a given writer into a list created either by the worksâ author (autobibliography) or by an authorâs biographer. The Greek physician Galen (2nd century) and St. Bede the Venerable (8th century) were among the earliest Western compilers of autobibliographies. One of the first biographers to include bibliographies in his lives of church writers was St. Jerome in his 4th-century De viris illustribus (âConcerning Famous Menâ).
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Bibliography was manageable when books were still manuscripts copied out in the scriptoria of medieval European monasteries. After the invention of printing in the 15th century, however, books proliferated, and organizing information about them became both more necessary and more practical. As early as 1545 the idea of a universal bibliography that would include all past and present writers roused the Swiss writer Conrad Gesner to compile his Bibliotheca universalis (1545; Universal Bibliography). Three years later he published a second volume, Pandectarum sive partitionum universalium libri XXI (âTwenty-one Books of Encyclopaedias or Universal Divisions [of Knowledge]â), in which the entries, arranged alphabetically in the earlier volume, were rearranged under 21 subject headings. Gesnerâs attempts at both universality and classification earned him the title âthe father of bibliography.â
The vast numbers of books published in the 20th century required elaborate methods of classification, with the Dewey Decimal Classification, the Library of Congress Classification (based on its collection), and the Universal Decimal Classification becoming the most widely used. In the last quarter of the 20th century, the widespread use of computers in processing this systematized information revived the possibility of creating a universal bibliography.
Critical bibliography
Critical, or analytical, bibliography began early in the 20th century when scholars developed techniques to study the physical features of books. They were first successful at dating, identifying, and authenticating the earliest printed books, known as incunabula, which date from the second half of the 15th century. Methods pioneered at the British Museum and the University of Oxfordâs Bodleian Library were accurate in assigning early hand-printed books not only to countries and towns but to specific printers. Such methods were later extended to the study of the physical features of machine-printed books. The application of the techniques of critical bibliography to rare editions, questionable chronologies, and false editions has had important results for textual criticism.