We were going to talk about some of the practical aspects of writing a thesis. But, alas, I was sick. This is what I was going to say.
You cannot figure out the rules for citations by reasoning because they are arbitrary. And you cannot trust online databases to get the citations right; they will say stuff like “Leviathan had two authors, one of whom is still alive!” (Leviathan was published in 1651 and only one guy wrote it. I promise.)
Software can mostly manage the first problem. There are a number of bibliography management programs. They keep a database of your sources and have plugins that allow them to format your bibliography in your word processing program, such as Microsoft Word of Google Docs. While I have not compared them all, I think zotero is a good choice. It can get bibliographic information out of, say, the library’s website, and it does a very good job of formatting references and bibliographies. The library has an https://library.claremont.edu/zotero/ to this program. It is what I would use.
But you still have to edit the information it grabs from other sources. There is no way around that.
You are also going to have to choose a citation style. Zotero will do the work of formatting your citations, but you still need to tell it what to do. Basically, you want it to look like your sources look. Generally speaking, projects in the humanities use what is called a notes and bibliography style, where there are abbreviated references in footnotes to the text and full citations in a bibliography, while projects in the social sciences use author-date styles, where references are given in parentheses in the text followed by a references section with full citations.
The Chicago Manual of Style has a quick guide that will explain the differences and will be good enough for almost any question you will have. If it isn’t, we have a subscription to an electronic edition of the whole thing.
Purdue’s Online Writing Lab is also very good. It has quick references for all the major style guides.
The Claremont Colleges Library has guides to APA style, MLA, Chicago, and Legal citations (which are very tricky).
Finally, Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography is where you should go for answers to questions about typography.
If you look on the sakai site, you will see a folder named “Thesis Front Matter.” This includes a title page and other parts that go in the front of the thesis, such as dedications, acknowledgements, and introductions.
There is also a folder with instructions specific to Microsoft Word.