We talked about some of the practical aspects of writing a thesis.
There are two kinds of references: author-date and notes and bibliography. The former are more widely used in the sciences while the latter are more common in the humanities. Author-date styles put references in the text like this (Green 2023). Notes and bibliography styles have references in footnotes like this.1 To add to the fun, many notes styles use abbreviated references for all references to a work after the first one.2 This is very hard for a human to keep track of. Both styles use bibliographies.
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.
The simplest one is the one I demonstrated: Microsoft Word. It has a function where you can store bibliographic information and then have Word format your citations and bibliography. Google Docs has a similar feature. This is the easiest way to make a bibliography. As long as the data is entered correctly, the formatting will (almost) certainly be accurate. If you are using an author-date style, you can enter the references in your document by hand and just have the program do the bibliography.
If you are going to use one of the notes and bibliography styles, you probably want to use a separate program that can format the references for you. 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. As I said earlier, 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 is not, we have a subscription to an electronic edition of the whole thing. I am most familiar with Chicago and it is what I would use.
The Claremont Colleges Library has guides to APA style, MLA, Chicago, and Legal citations (which are very tricky).
Purdue’s Online Writing Lab is also very good. It has quick references for all the major style guides.
Finally, Matthew Butterick’s Practical Typography is where you should go for answers to questions about typography.
One correction. I believe I said that the APA style is not an academic style. That was an error. I was thinking of AP or Associated Press. APA is American Psychological Association; it is a style guide for academic work.
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.