DISS: Bibliographies

Bibliographies in Undergraduate Project Reports, Theses, and Dissertations

The bibliography of your report is a list of all of the books, articles etc. used in the project and referred to in the report. There are official standards for these things, but here are some examples that cover most references required in reports.

• A book:
  W. Wang. Beginning Programming For Dummies, 4th edition. John Wiley & Sons, 2006.
• A journal article:
  S. Brin and L. Page. The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual web search engine. Computer Networks 30(1-7):107-117, 1998.
• A conference paper:
  O. Kammar and G. Plotkin. Algebraic foundations for effect-dependent optimisations. In Proc. 39th ACM SIGPLAN-SIGACT Symp. on Principles of Programming Languages, POPL 2012, pages 349-360, 2012.
• A source on the web that you can't fit into any other category:
  Wikipedia. Hash table. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hash_table, accessed 10 Oct 2013.

The author of an item on the internet - as in the last example above - is often unclear, so please just do the best you can. In such cases, using the publication venue (Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, etc.) is a reasonable solution since then at least these items will appear together in your list of references.

The exact presentation of the information is not nearly as important as providing enough information and using a consistent format. You must provide enough information to enable the reader to find exactly the item you are referring to without guesswork or search. If you can add information to make it easier to do that, then please do so. You should also indicate what the item is without forcing the reader to look it up. So don't just give a URL without indicating title, author (if known), etc. It is easy to get this right, and failure to do so is a sign of sloppiness that the reader may suspect extends to other aspects of your work.

You can cite items in the bibliography in the style "In Brin and Page (1998), ..." but it is more typical in Informatics to give every item in the bibliography a unique identifier which is used to refer to it in the text. If you use LaTeX bibliographies (BiBTeX with the \cite command) then this happens automatically and you can choose between numbered citations like [17] (bibliographystyle{plain}) and author-initials-plus-year citations like [ST93] (\bibliographystyle{alpha}), etc. with automatic sorting of entries.

DBLP is a very useful resource for finding the information you need to include in bibliography entries. Once you have found an item, you can export the BiBTeX entry using the icon.