Reference and bibliography

Reference is the part of the document that includes the sources or bibliographic resources that were used as theoretical support for the research.

Bibliography is all the material consulted to do an investigation.

The difference between reference and bibliography is that the reference refers to all the authors or resources that have been cited in a research work, while the bibliography only refers to the authors or resources that were used but were not cited in the document.

	Reference	Bibliography
Definition	List of authors and / or publications cited in a research work.	List of authors and / or publications that served as bibliographic support in an investigation.
Characteristics	Alphabetical order. Last name and first name of the author, title of the work, year, place and link of the publication. 1.5 line spacing. French sangria. It goes before the bibliography. Its inclusion is mandatory in all work that includes textual citations. Its writing is governed by APA standards.	Alphabetical order. Last name and first name of the author, title of the work, year, place and link of the publication. 1.5 line spacing. Goes after references. Its inclusion is optional. Its writing is not governed by APA standards.

What is a referral?

A reference, list of references, or bibliographic references It is the part of an investigation or written work where all those sources (authors, books, documents, resources) that were cited are recorded throughout the text.

The function of the reference is to support what has been argued and allow the readers of said document or research to corroborate the veracity of the citations used..

For this reason, all academic or research work that uses verbatim citations must include a reference in the document presented..

Characteristics of the references

The APA standards, which standardize the presentation of written research papers, suggest a series of rules that characterize bibliographic references and allow them to be clearly identified in a document:

• Order: the references are arranged in alphabetical order, according to the last names of the cited authors.
• Structure: surname, job title, year, place of publication and link if it is a digital document.
• Line spacing: the line spacing of the reference list must be 1.5.
• Position: references always come before bibliography.
• Style: French indentation (it is the space left on the left side in the first line of the first paragraph).

Every time a citation is added to the research paper, it must be incorporated into the references. Therefore, everything that has been included in the references is because it is cited within the body of the research work.

If an investigation is based on previous works, these must appear in the references. Even if they belong to the author of the document presented.

References must be indented (it is the one in which the first line of a paragraph is slightly separated from the left side).

Reference example

This is an example of a list of bibliographic references extracted from the book Think fast, think slow, from Daniel Kahneman:

What is a bibliography?

A bibliography is a list of all the resources that were used in the research. This includes books, essays, digital documents or audiovisual materials that have been consulted to support the arguments presented, even if they have not been directly cited. For this reason, bibliographies are also called "external references.".

As the bibliographic sources consulted do not always serve to support the research, many times it is requested to exclude the bibliography of the final document, since it is not considered necessary.

In fact, there are no APA standards for writing bibliographies, so many times it is resorted to copying the structure of the references. The important thing, in any case, is that the essential data of the authors or works that served as the context for the research appear.

Characteristics of a bibliography

A bibliography has the following characteristics:

• Order: it is written in alphabetical order.
• Structure: surname, job title, year, place of publication and link if it is a digital document
• Line spacing: must be 1.5.
• Position: included after references.

The sources consulted do not have to be included in the body of the work. If they are included as a verbatim quote, then they are references.

Bibliography example

This is an example of a bibliography found in the book What is mathematics?, by Richard Courand and Herbert Robbins:

See also: Difference between thesis and thesis