A bibliography is a list of references that appears at the end of your coursework.
You’re referencing the same sources in your bibliography as in your footnotes, but there
are some small differences you need to be aware of.
The order your footnotes are in is dictated by the order in which you’ve mentioned or
quoted your sources. But bibliographies are arranged more systematically.
Firstly, you have any primary sources. So you’ll have a list - in alphabetical order
- of any cases you’ve used.
You’ll also have a - separate - alphabetical list of any legislation that you’ve used.
Once you’ve done that, you then list your secondary sources. I’ll show you a sample
bibliography later in this video, so you can see what I mean.
For sources that have individuals as authors such as books, book chapters and journal articles,
you need to flip their names round. Again, I’ll show you an example of this in a moment.
The final point on this slide is one that students often forget. What you need to remember
is that the bibliography and footnotes are doing different jobs.
Often in a footnote you want to draw your reader’s attention to a particular part
of a source. This could be a page in a book, a paragraph in a case or a section of an Act,
for example. In OSCOLA, we call this pinpointing.
In the bibliography you’re just telling your reader about the source generally. So
you don’t need to pinpoint particular pages, paragraphs or sections in your bibliography.
As I said earlier, authors’ names are one of the few things that have different rules
in the bibliography.
If you’re not sure how to create footnotes for books or journal articles, there is a
separate video on that topic.
The golden rule in footnotes is: you write the author’s name the way they write their
name. If they’ve used their full first names - as Emily Finch and Stefan Fafinski have
done here - then you use their full names. If, on the cover of the book, they had chosen
to call themselves E Finch and S Fafinski then you would call them that.
In bibliographies, though, we ignore that golden rule. Everybody’s name gets flipped
and initialised.
So Emily Finch becomes Finch E. Stefan Fafiniski becomes Fafinski S. See what I mean? Flip
and initialise.
This may seem pedantic, but it really helps your readers. When you arrange your sources
into alphabetical order, the reader can very quickly run their eye down the left hand margin
and find the source they’re interested in.
If the author is an organisation rather than a person then the name isn’t changed. You
wouldn’t flip Home Office into Office H, for example.
I want to draw your attention to a couple of details in this sample bibliography.
Firstly, you’ll see I’ve got my cases separated out at the top. These are in alphabetical
order.
Secondly, I’ve got my legislation. Again, this in alphabetical order. Remember we don’t
need to provide pinpoints in the bibliography, so I haven’t pinpointed any sections - just
the whole Acts.
Finally I have my secondary sources. This is things like books, journal articles, briefing
papers, websites etc.
Many people subdivide their secondary sources so they have a list of books, a separate list
of journal articles, a separate list of websites etc. It doesn’t matter too much whether
you choose to split your secondary sources list up by type or not. This decision may
be led by how many secondary sources you have and what they are.
The main thing to remember is that primary sources - namely cases and legislation - should
always be separated from your secondary sources.
And, you can see in this sample, how the authors’ names have been flipped and initialised. And
then the secondary sources are put in alphabetical order.
You can now watch any of the other OSCOLA videos in this series and also find good-quality
OSCOLA advice and guidance on the library website.
And do get in touch with me if you’re still stuck or confused.