How To Organize Citing Sources In A Dissertation: 5 Great Tips

Citations are so important some of the most important things that if you take for granted, your paper will definitely fail. It is because of this reason therefore that you need to make sure that you pay attention to detail, and most importantly, so that you do not miss out on anything when it comes to writing a good paper. You can end up writing a very good paper, but due to the fact that you may have not paid attention to the citation resources, chances are high that you will definitely fail your paper. The following tips will help you organize your resources in the best way possible, and in the process earn you more marks too.

Names

Always remember that whichever citation style you are using, you will only ever get to use the last name of the author and the year in which the text was published. Do not make the mistake of doing anything other than this. Anything else other than these will render your paper a fail.

Page numbers

Whenever you are referencing a book, make sure that you include the page numbers. This is because it is close to impossible to reference the whole book in an essay.

Two author papers

In the event that you are writing a paper and the book or content that you want to reference has two authors, use their last names. Make sure that you start with the name of the first author then the second one.

In the event that there are more than two authors, start with the first author, and then for the rest of the other authors that come after that, write in italics et al. which is supposed to mean and others.

Non-identifiable author

In the unlikely event that the book you are referencing does not have an identifiable author, instead of struggling with it or writing something that you may come to regret later on, simply write the author as Anon.

Alphabetical order

All references are supposed to be handled in alphabetical order, when you are finally composing the reference list at the end of your paper. This will perhaps come in handy for you if you inserted the authors manually.

For those who are using MS Word however, if you choose to use the reference pattern that is built into the program, it will automatically list the authors alphabetically.