the bibliography is not just part of your PhD thesis
it is a fundamental part of your PhD and you should think carefully what you
should are you should not include in the bibliography because it can result in
your thesis instantly rejected by the examiner and in this short video I am
going to explain you some of the precautions which you should take while
making the bibliography and if you are serious about your PhD please watch this
video till the end and we are starting right after this short break
hello and welcome to my channel my name is Tahir and if this is your first
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first let me clear that we are not talking about errors in your
bibliography I have made a video about how to download references for your
bibliography and create a big tech file if you are using latex you can watch
that video if you are using Mendeley or some other software then you should
avoid any errors but even if there are some errors this is not a serious issue
because your thesis will be sent back to you for minor Corrections if there are
only some errors we are talking about some serious mistakes which you can
easily do if you don't know there are not many details about this so therefore
this video is very short but still very important for you so let's talk about
what are these five things so the first is mix of references so when your thesis
is presented to your examiner the first thing the examiner will look of course
it depends on the examiner but an experienced examiner will start looking
at your thesis from the end that person most probably will look first on your
bibliography and what he or she is looking for is a mixed list of
references what an examiner would expect is that most of your references are
relevant to your thesis title most are general
articles some are conferences and few are other like technical reports are any
PhD thesis and the title of the references are the title of the research
papers which you have listed there they are closely related to your field of
research so this is just an overlook of your bibliography and this leads us to
the second point which is irrelevant keywords sometimes you want to put a
reference to something which is related to your work but which is in a paper
which is not related to your research so if the title of the paper is totally
different to your field of research so try to think again whether you really
want to put that reference in or you can get the same reference from an earlier
paper which is somewhat related to your research field because the keywords in
the titles of the research papers in your bibliography are very important I
have mentioned this earlier that when you start your PhD you should make a
very comprehensive list of all the related keywords in your field of
research these keywords will help you in finding the relevant papers and also
while you sit back and start writing your PhD thesis because I would like to
see a bibliography full of related keywords in the title of the papers in
the title of the technical report and everywhere now the third point is
textbook references when you start your PhD sometimes you don't know a basics
and you try to understand something very basic some basic law of science are some
basic principle in your field of research and you find this in one of
your textbook and if you don't know this you might be tempted to put the
reference of that textbook in your PhD thesis
remember all textbook references in the PhD thesis can lead to a disaster
because all that knowledge is an established knowledge you should not be
mentioning that in your thesis but if you have learned some specialized
technique I remember that during my PhD I learned principle component analysis
which was a technique for data analysis and I put the reference to that
technique but that book is a specialized book that is not a text book so if your
a reference to a very specific book related to your field that is perfectly
fine but if you don't know the Pythagoras theorem and then you put a
reference to your HST book or even a university level book that is a total
crap the next point is failing to put a major work in your bibliography
you must understand who are the top researchers in your field of research
and this is the first thing you should understand when you start doing PhD I
have made a separate video and I will put a link at this place in this video
which you can watch to learn how you can find the top researcher in your field in
the beginning of your PhD you normally start reading some conference papers
because general paper at that time might be too difficult for you and you are so
attached to any of those conference paper that you select that for your
bibliography and you start putting in the references but you don't know that
that particular researcher has presented his whole work later on in a general
paper which is his major work and you should be aware of that work so once you
find the top researcher then you have to keep yourself abreast with their latest
work for example my PhD was in mobile robotics and a scientist named Sebastian
Thrun was a leading researcher in that field at that time so if my thesis does
not contain any of his reference then it will be an instant reject because I am
missing a very renowned scientist so make sure you don't do that and the last
point is about toxic references some of the references are so toxic I would say
that they can lead to our instant rejection of your PhD thesis what are
those toxic references well some people have presented some research work are
some keywords they have thrown up in the industry which have been proved to be
wrong incorrect and flood and now if you get to know any of those papers and then
you try to build your argument try to build your story on top of that paper
and saying that this is wrong because this and I have
distant dead then basically you are trying to prove something wrong which
has already been proven to be wrong incorrect and if an examiner sees any of
this kind of thing in your thesis or in your references then it will be an
instant rejection and you will fear your PhD your five years efforts will be lost
your thesis will not be sent back to you for correction you will fail absolutely
so therefore avoid this critical mistake you should be aware of these type of
researchers and now regarding what you should put in the bibliography there is
no set rules that how many general papers are how many conference papers
you should put there but because I know that students want to get some numbers
so therefore I am throwing these numbers that you should be putting 60 to 70
percent journal papers in your bibliography ten to twenty percent
conference papers and five to ten percent other references such as
technical reports are some PhD theses so this is just my own personal opinion
this is not written anywhere there is no such rule so I hope that this short
video will help you avoid these little mistakes in your bibliography I have a
lot of videos about PhD students in my on my channel and if you are a PhD
student you must watch all of those videos those will help you and if you
have any questions please put in the comments and I will definitely answer
your questions thanks for watching see you next time
you