Citations and Bibliography Writing your Dissertation Thesis

Assignment Task

Literature research

Writing an essay includes the task of finding the right information. This needs some critical evaluation of the quality and scope of the literature you find and are about to use. A good literature research therefore is needed. A good starting point might be a relevant textbook. Also the internet can give you some first insight into the topic. Using Wikipedia sometimes is a good idea, and sometimes it is not. Wikipedia and similar pages can provide an overview of your topic, but definitely are not sufficient to be used as a scientific reference as these pages do not follow scientific standards.

Regarding the quality ofscientific sources, the following rules of thumb apply:

High Quality: Whenever possible use peer-reviewed scientific journal articles, textbooks or books specialized on your topic. They tend to fulfill scientific standards and the information usually is credible and reliable.

Good Quality: So called “grey literature” can also be used as a good source for data or special insights into your topic. This concerns official publications from (government or public) agencies, think tanks or similar organizations (like e.g. the OECD and the World Bank). However, the quality can vary significantly, depending on the publisher, possible political interests and corresponding biases, and the general way of information processing. Try to find out where your information comes from and be very critical in order to find the best possible information you can get.

Bad Quality: Common websites and texts written by unknown, anonymous authors or authors with unknown institutional affiliation. Also newspaper or magazine articles are insufficient as a source for scientific papers. In case you find interesting information in these sources, try to verify them via sources with better quality and with scientific background in the way described above.

A good essay will need more than one source. Using just one textbook will make your essay boring. Additional information helps to overcome this problem. And it also makes the research behind the essay much more interesting and individual.

Citation and bibliography

When writing a scientific essay, one uses thoughts and works of others. You build on the knowledge of others, and others might one day build on yours. Therefore, methods of referring to other peoples work are used to (1) distinguish between their and your thoughts and (2) to enable others to read the same sources you read and assess whether they arrive at the same conclusions, and (3) acknowledge the original knowledge source. Therefore, references on the consulted literature should be given in your whole text, whenever necessary. But depending on the way you use these sources, the way you cite or give references differs

Müller (2007)”. When you cite within the text, the following rules apply:

• Summarize or paraphrase information from a source. Author names and publication year are given in parentheses. If author names are part of the sentence, the year appears in parentheses. For example: “Protected areas are claimed to displace thousands of local people in Africa (Cernea 2006).” Alternatively you may write: “Cernea (2006) claims that protected areas displace hundreds of people in Africa.”
• Summarize information from several sources (order by year and name, separate with comma). “Protected areas are reported to have displaced local people (Schmidt-Soltau 2001, Cernea 2006).”
• If you cite literally from a source you will have to provide the number of the page. “The conservation community should seriously reconsider the nature of its engagement in African countries” (Cernea 2006, p. 182). Alternatively, Cernea (2006, p. 182) argues that “the conservation community should seriously reconsider the nature of its engagement in African countries.

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