Skidmore College Department of Classics

Another important means of warding off charges of plagiarism is the bibliography, or list of sources that should appear at the end of every research paper.

If you use secondary sources in your essay you must provide a bibliography. This list of secondary sources must contain only those which you consulted and used in your research papers. Do not pad your bibliographies with works which were not important in your research and had no impact on your paper. This is just filler, and doesn't help the reader (or improve your grade!).

A bibliographic citation carries virtually the same information as a note, but in a slightly different order and format. A bibliography is ordered alphabetically, and a sample follows (note that all of these examples are discussed in the citations page):

G. Crane, ed. The Perseus Project (perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/atlas? sites=Sesklo).

Finley, M.I. The Ancient Greeks. New York and London: Penguin, 1971 repr.

Knox, B.M.W. "The Hippolytus of Euripides," Yale Classical Studies 13 (1952), pp. 3-31.

March, J. "Euripides the Misogynist?" in Euripides, Women and Sexuality. Ed. A. Powell. London and New York, 1990, pp. 32-75.

Seaford, R. "The Structural Problems of Marriage in Euripides," in Euripides, Women and Sexuality. Ed. A. Powell. London and New York, 1990, pp. 151-176.

or

Seaford, R. "The Structural Problems of Marriage in Euripides," in Euripides, Women and Sexuality. Ed. A. Powell. London and New York, 1990, 151-176.

Note that:
1. the first name or names are all abbreviated - they should not be spelled out
2. the authors' names precede the title and end with a period after the last initial
3. the title is italicized or underlined, and ends with a period
4. the city of publication then follows, then the name of the publisher (which is optional), followed finally by the year of publication
5. if the source is an article in a journal or collection of essays, then the bibliographic citation should conclude with the relevant pages ("pp." is the appropriate abbreviation for "pages," though you need not use it if you place the pages consistently at the end).

You need not list primary sources in your bibliography, as long as you've provided proper citations throughout your paper. The only reason to include a primary source would be because you used a translation not available to the class as a whole. If you decide to include in your bibliography such primary sources, the citation should be as follows (and should appear alphabetically under the name of the ancient author):

Sophocles. Antigone. Trans. by R.E. Braun. New York: Oxford, 1973.