When you make use of someone else’s ideas or words, you must give them credit. This is called referencing (or, making reference to) the other person (or to his/her work). There are a number of common ways in the modern literature that this credit is made.

In Computer Science it is common to have a separate section (or sometimes a special footnote either at the beginning of the paper or at the end of the paper) of your paper entitled "Acknowledgments", which is used to give credit to people who helped you verbally or financially or in some other special way that can’t merely be given by putting some article of theirs into your bibliography. In modern Computer articles this normally comes at the end of the article, but just before a bibliography.

A bibliography is a list of works that are relevant to what you are writing. Although this is sometimes discouraged by some journals, it is usually considered all right to list works that are relevant to your article even when they weren’t explicitly mentioned in the article. When there is a bibliography for an article or book (see below for a method that doesn’t have a separate bibliography), it is the last item in the article….although sometimes when you have Appendices that give a program or a bunch of data, these will come after the bibliography.

A citation is a way of referring to one of these relevant works within the article, for example when you are quoting someone. There are a number of different styles of citation in use.

Some styles, especially in the Humanities, do not have a separate bibliography for the book or article, but instead put each reference into a footnote at the place where it is first mentioned. Later mentions of the same work are often made by means of a complicated system of op cit, loc cit, ibid, and the like. This is a TERRIBLE SYSTEM of citations and you most definitely should not use it.

Another method that is used in the Sciences is to call the first item that is cited [1], the second item [2], etc. Then in the bibliography at the end of the article, items are listed in order [1], [2], [3], … This means that the bibliography is not alphabetized, and that makes it a TERRIBLE SYSTEM, but maybe not so bad as the previous one.

A modification of this last method is to give the bibliography in alphabetical order, and assign [1] to the first entry, [2] to the second entry, and so on. In the text you will say things like "…as [13] says…" This is not so bad as the previous systems, but this department will be happier if you adopt one of the following two methods.

1. (A variant on the last method mentioned). List the items alphabetically in the bibliography, but instead of using the meaningless [1], [2], etc. to give them names, use things like [Pell98] to name an article written by Pelletier in 1998; use [SLS99] to name an article by Sorenson, Lu, and Shaffer in 1999, and so on. The BibTex postprocessor for TeX does a fine job at this, and if you intend to use TeX/LaTeX to produce your thesis, you should know BibTex.

2. List the items alphabetically in the bibliography, and don’t have abbreviations for them. When you want to cite some work in the bibliography, you cite the author’s name and year, in parentheses. For example, you would say "(Pelletier, 1998)". Different journals have preferences for how to cite multiply-authored works; the most common one says that two authors are done like this: "(Pelletier & Rudnicki, 1996)" while three or more authors are done by using the first author’s name and the phrase "et al". For example "(Sorenson et al 1999)".

Often you will be citing a particular page of the article. In method 1, you would say [Pell98, p. 651]. In method 2 you would say (Pelletier, 1998: 651).

Note that either of these last two methods can lead to ambiguities when the same author has two articles in the same year. We normally use a, b, and so on to distinguish them. (Pelletier, 1998a) vs. (Pelletier, 1998b). The bibliography will in this case also have a and b in the dates. There can also be ambiguity when different people have the same abbreviated name, especially when there are multiply-authored items by people with the same letters starting their last names. Make sure that your method distinguishes them correctly.

There are many different styles of writing a bibliography, even when you agree that it should be alphabetized by the author’s name. Different journals and different style manuals give different rules about what should be first, second, etc. Our Department will accept any established style, but you should get an agreement from your supervisor before you go too far. What is common to all the styles is that you have to give the author’s name, the year it is published, the title. If it is a journal article, you need the journal name, volume number, and page numbers. If it is a conference, you will need the name of the Proceedings in which it is published, the editor’s name, the place of the conference, the page numbers. If it is in an anthology, you will give the editors of the anthology, the title of the anthology, the place of publication and the name of the publishing company. And finally, if it is a book you will give the place of publication and name of the publishing company.