Bibliography
The list of works cited or consulted, printed at the end of a book, chapter, or article.
A bibliography is the roster of sources on which a piece of writing rests. In its strictest form it lists only works actually cited in the text; in its looser form it also lists works consulted but not quoted. Both forms are printed at the end of the work and are ordered — by author surname, by date, or occasionally by topic.
The point of a bibliography is not display. It is accountability: it lets a later reader find every source the author leaned on, and, in principle, retrace and challenge every claim. This is why a well-made bibliography follows a strict format (MLA, Chicago, APA, Turabian, and so on) — the format is the promise that any entry can be located.
A bibliography differs from a 'works cited' list only in scope. Works cited is a subset — the sources actually quoted or referenced by number in the text. A full bibliography can include background reading. Both are distinct from the 'further reading' list, which recommends what the reader should look at next and is a piece of authorial curation, not accountability.
Common mistakes: padding a bibliography with sources the author did not actually read; formatting inconsistently, which suggests other kinds of carelessness; and, in the digital era, citing URLs without access dates for pages that will inevitably change. A bibliography is a promise; sloppiness in it reads as sloppiness in the argument.
“Grafton, Anthony. The Footnote: A Curious History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997.”
Keep reading the glossary
A formal reference that lets a reader locate the source of a quote.
A note printed at the bottom of a page giving a citation, a qualification, or a small side-comment.
A note collected at the end of a chapter or book rather than at the foot of the page.
The original record of a quote — the book, letter, speech, or recording in which it first appeared.