The last thing that is on your mind when you are drafting your
thesis is probably your references pages. You know your sources, you might even
know their authors by name. But when it comes to making that list of documents
at the back of your paper, we need to make it with the idea that... someone
else may have to find those documents someday!
APA, MLA, and various other
disciplines have styles that help us point out the most relevant features of
our sources. "Who wrote it?" is most important to the humanities.
"When was it written?" more important in the sciences. But when we do our bibliographic work we
still need to make decisions sometimes, about what to put where, and what
information is really needed.
Your references should serve the reader – they should dish up
every source in your document in an easily searchable format and contain all
the information the reader may need to find the sources. In the 21st century this is probably a more complex process than ever. Even though we can Google
up a storm, multi-media sources can be hard to track down. And despite our
modern search engine powers, looking for obscure documents, dissertations from
other countries, or a journal by the same name as another journal, can lead to
bibliographic snarls!
Cases in point: Our office recently had to untangle a source snarl
for a client’s references page. And I have dealt with this myself, trying to
track down a master’s thesis I needed to read.
A student reached out to us because she had finished her anthropology
thesis but was at a loss for how to cite some unpublished letters (to and from Edward
Ayer, a major benefactor to the Field Museum and Newberry Library). She had
found the papers unsorted in an archive. Literally found them in a box! She was
a lucky researcher, because she had been looking for the letters based on a
faulty citation. So, it was up to her to fix this paper trail. Carolyn
recommended citing the letters under only Ayer’s name, even though he was not
the author of all of them. Her reasoning:
 |
| Edward Ayer |
“It
appeared to me that the correspondence was held in a single archive of Ayer
correspondence and that what the reader needs is direction to the archive, not
citation to individual pieces. The principle in my editing is to document with
the clearest path of recoverability, so that everything on the reference list
is accessible in a clear location, whether a book, journal, or website, or in
this case an archive of correspondence.”
So, in this case, the other author’s names would
not be of any help. The student needed to cite them under the name of the archive they were
found in – the only way for another researcher to find them until they are
published.
My own problem required a 21st century
solution. I just simply couldn’t find the thesis I wanted to read, and it
wouldn’t show up in ProQuest or anywhere else, not even at the university where
it was written. What was I doing wrong? …The one source I had that referred to
the thesis had mis-typed the title. It was a plain enough title, and the author’s
name was a common enough name, that I was on a wild goose chase until I decided
to chase a different bird – I took to Twitter!
I found the graduate's Twitter account based on his bio, apologized for the bother,
and timidly asked in his mentions (so that others might see)… can you send me
your thesis? He was happy to oblige. It took a while to dig it up, but getting
another citation was worth it I suppose. Now I can cite it as an unpublished
thesis, with the correct title, and hope that the next person who wants to read
about Northumbrian dialects can easily find the little gem I’d tracked down.
Bibliography is partly about giving credit to the
scholars whose research we couldn’t do our own research without. It is also about
keeping track of when and where research was done, for that is relevant information
in many disciplines. But none of that matters if we don’t give our readers the
right bibliographic clues to find those same sources. We’re not just referencing
our sources to cover our own butts or to show our research areas. We’re doing it
so that research can continue in our fields, even when we’re not around to
explain our sometimes cryptic sign-posts. Theses and dissertations are rarely
the end-all-be-all on a topic. Let’s leave nicely legible markers along our
paths so that others might follow, and even surpass the milestones we’ve made.
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