Documentation Guidelines of the thesis

1. Books

Here is an example of an incorrect reference:

Wilson, J. “Philosophy and religion.” Oxford, 1961.

This reference is incorrect for the following reasons:

1. It provides only the initial of the author’s first name. The first initial is not enough, first of all, because read­ers may want to know the full name; and second of all, because there can be two authors with the same last name and first initial. If I read that the author of the book Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language is P. Rossi, I cannot determine whether the author is the phi­losopher Paolo Rossi of the University of Florence or the philosopher Pietro Rossi of the University of Turin. And who is J. Cohen? Is he the French critic and aesthetician Jean Cohen or the English philosopher Jonathan Cohen?
2. The book title is in quotation marks. However you choose to format a reference, never use quotation marks for book titles, because this is the method used almost universally to refer to journal articles or book chapters. Also, in the title in question the word “Religion” should also be capitalized. English titles capitalize nouns, adjec­tives, verbs, and adverbs; but not articles, particles, and prepositions (unless they are the last word of the title, as in The Logical Use of It).
3. It is hideous to say where the book has been pub­lished and not by whom. Suppose you find an Italian book that seems important, and that you would like to purchase, but the only publication information in the reference is “Milan, 1975.” Which press published this book? Mondadori, Rizzoli, Rusconi, Bompiani, Feltri- nelli, or Vallardi? How can the bookseller help you? And if you find “Paris, 1976,” to whom do you address your letter of inquiry? And if the book has been published in “Cambridge,” which Cambridge is it, the one in England or the one in the United States? In fact, many important authors cite books this way. Know that, except when they are writing an encyclopedia entry (where brevity is a vir­tue that saves space), these authors are snobs who despise their audience. References like these are sufficient only in the case of books published before 1900 (“Amsterdam, 1678”) that you will only find in a library, or in a limited number of antique booksellers.
4. Despite what this reference would lead you to believe, this book was not published in Oxford. As noted on the title page, the book was published by Oxford University Press, and this press has locations in London, New York, and Toronto. What’s more, it was printed in Glasgow. The reference should indicate where the book was published, not where it was printed. (Here again we make an exception in the case of very old books: because printers were also publishers and booksellers, books then were published, printed, and sold in the same location.) I once encoun­tered a reference in a thesis for a particular book that included “Farigliano: Bompiani.” Knowing that Bompiani is in Milan, I turned to the copyright page (usually located directly after the title page) and learned that by chance the book was printed at a printer located in the town of Farigliano. The person concocting such references gives the impression that he has never seen a book in his life. To be safe, never look for the publishing information only on the title page, but also on the copyright page, where you will find the real place of publication, as well as the date and number of the edition. If you only look briefly on the title page, you may incur other pathetic mistakes, such as leading your readers to believe that the quaint beach town of Cattolica on the Adriatic Sea is the place of publication for a book published by the prestigious Universita Cattolica in Milan. It would be as if an Italian student found books published by Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, or Cornell University Press and indicated that they were published in Yale, Harvard, or Cornell. These are of course not names of places, but the proper nouns of those famous private universities, located in the cities of New Haven, Cambridge (Massa­chusetts), and Ithaca respectively.

5. As for the date, it is correct only by chance. The date marked on the title page is not always the actual date of the book’s first publication. It can be that of the latest edi­tion. Only on the copyright page will you find the date of the first edition (and you may even discover that the first edition was published by another press). Sometimes the difference between these dates is very important. Sup­pose for example that you find the following reference:

Searle, J. Speech Acts. Cambridge, 1974.

On top of the other inaccuracies, by checking the copy­right page you discover that the date of the first edition is 1969. Now, the point of your thesis may be to establish whether Searle talked about these “speech acts” before or after other authors, and so the date of the first edition is fundamental. Besides, if you thoroughly read the book’s preface, you discover that he presented this fundamental thesis as his PhD dissertation in Oxford in 1959 (ten years

earlier than the book’s first publication), and that during that ten-year period various parts of the book appeared in a number of philosophical journals. And nobody would ever think to cite Herman Melville’s nineteenth-century classic as follows, simply because he is holding a recent edition that was published in Indianapolis:

Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, or, The Whale. Indianapolis, 1976.

Whether you are studying Searle or Melville, you must never spread wrong ideas about an author’s work. If you worked on a later, revised, or augmented edition by Mel­ville, Searle, Wilson, you must specify both the date of the first publication and that of the edition you quote.

Now that we have seen how not to cite a book, I will show you five ways to correctly cite these works by Searle and Wil­son.² Let it be clear that there are other methods, and that each method could be valid provided it does the following: (a) distinguishes the book from articles or the chapters of other books; (b) indicates unequivocally both the author’s name and the title; and (c) indicates the place of publica­tion, the name of the publisher, and the edition. Therefore each of the following five examples works. Each has its pros and cons; however, for a number of reasons that will soon become clear, we will prefer the first example:

1.

Searle, John R. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. 5th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. First pub­lished 1969.

Wilson, John. Philosophy and Religion: The Logic of Religious Belief. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

2.

Searle, John R., Speech Acts (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1969).

Wilson, John, Philosophy and Religion (London: Oxford, 1961).

3.

Searle, John R., S p e e c h A c t s, 5th ed., Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1974. First published 1969.

Wilson, John, P h i l o s o p h y a n d R e l i g i o n, London, Oxford University Press, 1961.

4.

Searle, John R., Speech Acts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.

Wilson, John, Philosophy and Religion. London: Oxford University Press, 1961.

5.

Searle, John R. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Lan­guage. 5th ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974. Wilson, John. 1961. Philosophy and Religion: The Logic of Religious Belief. London: Oxford University Press.

Naturally there are also hybrid solutions. For instance, the fourth example could contain the subtitle as do the first and fifth. As we shall see, there are even more complex sys­tems that include, for example, the title of the series. In any case, we can consider all five of these examples to be valid. For now, let us disregard the fifth (the author-date system), because it applies to a specialized bibliography that we will discuss later when we address the subjects of notes and the final bibliography. The second example is typically American, and it is more common in footnotes than in the final bibli­ography. The third example, typically German, is nowadays fairly rare, and in my opinion does not offer any advantage. The fourth is also quite popular in the United States, and I find it quite annoying because it does not allow us to imme­diately distinguish the book’s title. The first system tells us all we need to know, and that we are in fact referring to a book and not an article.

2. Journals

Consider these three different ways to cite a journal article:

Anceschi, Luciano. “Orizzonte della poesia” (Horizon of poetry). Il Verri, n.s., 1 (February 1962): 6-21.

Anceschi, Luciano. “Orizzonte della poesia.” Il Verri, n.s., 1:6-21. Anceschi, Luciano. Orizzonte della poesia. In “Il Verri” (February 1962): 6-21.

There are other systems also, but let us immediately turn to the first and the third examples. The first presents the article in quotation marks and the journal in italics; the third presents the article in italics and the journal in quo­tation marks. Why is the first preferable? Because it allows us at a glance to understand that “Orizzonte della poesia” is a short text and not a book. As we shall see, journal articles are included in the same category as book chapters and con­ference proceedings. Clearly the second example is a varia­tion of the first, but it eliminates the reference to the date of publication, and is therefore defective—it would have been better to at least include: Il Verri 1 (1962).

You will note that both the first and second examples include the indication “n.s.” or “new series.” This designa­tion is quite important because a previous series of Il Verri appeared in 1956 with another first issue. If I had to cite a reference from the first issue of volume one of the previous series, I would specify the volume in addition to the issue number, as follows:

Gorlier, Claudio. “L’Apocalisse di Dylan Thomas” (The apocalypse of Dylan Thomas). Il Verri 1, no. 1 (Fall 1956): 39-46.

In addition, note that some journals number the pages pro­gressively over the year. Therefore, if I wanted, for these journals I could omit the issue number and record only the year and the pages. For example:

Guglielmi, Guido. “Tecnica e letteratura” (Tecnique and literature). Lingua e stile, 1966:323-340.

If I then find this journal in the library, I will realize that page 323 is in the third issue of the first volume. But I do not see why I should subject my reader to this exercise (even if other authors subject theirs) when it would have been so much more convenient to write:

Guglielmi, Guido. “Tecnica e letteratura.” Lingua e stile 1, no. 3 (1966).

This reference makes the article easier to find, even though it lacks page numbers. Also, consider that if I wanted to order the journal from the publisher as a back issue, I would care only about the issue number, not the pages. However, I do need to know the first and last pages to determine the length of the article, and for this reason it is recommended to include the page numbers:

Guglielmi, Guido. “Tecnica e letteratura.” Lingua e stile 1, no. 3 (1966): 323-340.

3. Multiple authors and an editor

Let us move on to the chap­ters of larger works, be they collections of essays by the same author or miscellaneous volumes. Here is a simple example:

Morpurgo-Tagliabue, Guido. “Aristotelismo e Barocco” (Aristotelian- ism and the baroque). In Retorica e Barocco: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici, Venezia, 15-18 giugno 1954 (Rhetoric and the baroque: Proceedings of the third international conference on humanism, Venice, June 15-18, 1954), ed. Enrico Castelli, 119-196. Rome: Bocca, 1955.

This reference tells me everything I need to know. First, it tells me that Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s text is part of a collec­tion of other texts. Although it is not a book, the number of pages his article occupies (77) tells me that it is quite a sub­stantial study. Second, it tells me that the volume is a col­lection of conference proceedings by various authors titled Retorica e Barocco. This is important information because I may discover that some bibliographies list it under the head­ing of “Convention and Conference Proceedings.” Finally, it tells me that the editor of the collection is Enrico Castelli. This information is also important, not only because some libraries may catalog the volume under his name, but also because bibliographies alphabetize multiauthor volumes under the name of the editor (ed.) or editors (eds.), as follows:

Castelli, Enrico, ed. Retorica e Barocco. Rome: Bocca, 1955.

These distinctions are important for locating a book in a library catalog or in a bibliography.

As we shall see when we conduct an actual experiment of bibliographical research in section 3.2.4, I will find Mor­purgo-Tagliabue’s essay cited in the Storia della letteratura italiana (History of Italian literature) published by Garzanti in the following terms:

On this topic see the miscellaneous volume Retorica e Barocco: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale di Studi Umanistici (Milan, 1955), and in particular Morpurgo-Tagliabue’s important essay “Aristotelismo e Barocco.”

This is a terrible reference because (a) it does not tell us the author’s first name; (b) it makes us think that either the con­ference was in Milan or the publisher is in Milan (neither is true); (c) it does not indicate the publisher; (d) it does not indicate the length of the essay; and (e) it does not indi­cate the editor of the volume, even though the designation of “miscellaneous” would seem to imply that the volume is a collection of essays from various authors requiring an editor. Shame on us if we wrote such a reference on our bibliograph­ical index card. Instead, we should write our reference so that there is free space for the missing information:

Morpurgo-Tagliabue, G_________________ . “Aristotelismo e Barocco.”

In Retorica e Barocco: Atti del III Congresso Internazionale di Studi

Umanistici ____________________ , edited by_______________________ ,

________________ . Milan:_________________ , 1955.

This way, we can later fill in the blanks with the missing information, once we find it in another bibliography, in the library catalog, or on the title page of the book itself.

4. Multiple authors and no editor

Suppose I want to index an essay that appeared in a book written by four different authors, none of whom is the editor. For example, let us cite a German book with four essays by T. A. van Dijk, Jens Ihwe, Janos S. Petofi, and Hannes Rieser. In this case, we should note the names of all four authors because we must include them in the bibliographical entry. But in a note, we should indicate only the first author followed by et al. or “and oth­ers” for convenience:

T.A. van Djik et al., Zur Bestimmung narrativer Strukturen auf der Grundlage von Textgrammatiken (On the determination of narra­tive structures based on textual grammar), etc.

Let us consider the more complex example of the essay “Anthropology and Sociology” by Dell Hymes. This essay appears in the third book of the twelfth volume of a multiauthor work, in which each volume has a title different from that of the entire work. Cite the essay as follows:

Hymes, Dell. “Anthropology and Sociology.” In Current Trends in Linguistics, ed. Thomas A. Sebeok, 1445-1475, vol. 12, bk. 3, Lin­guistics and Adjacent Arts and Sciences. The Hague: Mouton, 1974.

If instead we must cite the entire work, the information the reader expects is no longer in which volume Dell Hymes’s essay resides, but of how many volumes the entire work consists:

Sebeok, Thomas A., ed. Current Trends in Linguistics. 12 vols. The Hague: Mouton, 1967-1976.

When we must cite an essay belonging to a collection of essays by the same author, the reference is similar to that of a multiauthor book, except for the fact that we omit the name of the author before the book:

Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. “Ideologia come progettazione sociale.” In Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, 193-224. Milan: Bompiani, 1968. Trans. Martha Adams et al. as “Ideology as Social Planning,” in Language as Work and Trade (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983), 83-106.

You may have noticed that usually the title of a chapter is cited as being “in” a given book, while the article of a journal is not “in” a journal, and the name of the journal directly follows the title of the article.

The series A more perfect reference system might require the series in which a volume appears. I do not consider this an indispensable piece of information, as it is easy enough to find a book if you know its author, title, publisher, and the year of publication. But in some disciplines, the series may guarantee or indicate a specific scientific trend. In this case, the series is noted without quotation marks or parentheses after the book title, and is followed directly by the number of the volume in the series:

Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato. Nuovi Saggi Italiani 2. Milan: Bompiani, 1968.

Anonymous authors and pseudonyms If you are dealing with an anonymous author, begin the entry with the title and alphabetize the entry accordingly, ignoring any initial article. If the author has a pseudonym, begin the entry with the pseudonym followed by the author’s real name (if known) in brackets. After the author’s real name, place a question mark if the attribution is still a hypothesis, no matter how reliable the source. If you are dealing with an author whose identity is established by tradition, but whose historicity scholars have recently challenged, record him as “Pseudo” in the following manner:

Pseudo-Longinus. On the Sublime …

Reprints in collections or anthologies A work that orig­inally appeared in a journal may have been reprinted in a collection of essays by the same author, or in a popular an­thology. If this work is of marginal interest with respect to your thesis topic, you can cite the most convenient source. If instead your thesis specifically addresses the work, then you must cite the first publication for reasons of historical accuracy. Nothing forbids you from using the most accessi­ble edition, but if the anthology or the collection of essays is well prepared, it should contain a reference to the work’s first edition. This information should allow you to create ref­erences such as this:

Fodor, Jerry A., and Jerold J. Katz. “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” In The Structure of Language, ed. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerold J. Katz, 479-518. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Originally published as “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” Language 39 (1963): 170-210.

When you use the author-date system for your bibliography (which I will discuss in section 5.4.3), include the date of the first publication, as follows:

Fodor, Jerry A., and Jerold J. Katz. 1963. “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” In The Structure of Language, ed. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerold J. Katz, 479-518. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.

Citing newspapers References to newspapers and maga­zines are similar to those for journals, except that it is more appropriate to put the date rather than the issue number, since it makes the source easier to find:

Nascimbeni, Giulio. “Come l’ltaliano santo e navigatore e diventato bipolare” (How the Italian saint and sailor became bipolar). Cor- riere della Sera (Milan), June 25, 1976.

For foreign newspapers it may be useful to specify the city: Times (London).

Citing official documents or monumental works Ref­erences to official documents require shortened forms and initialisms that vary from discipline to discipline, just as there are typical abbreviations for works on ancient man­uscripts. Here your best source is the critical literature in the specific discipline you are studying. Bear in mind that certain abbreviations are commonly used within a discipline and you need not explain them to your audience. For a study on U.S. Senate resolutions, an American manual suggests the following reference:

S.Res. 218, 83d Cong., 2d Sess., 100 Cong. Rec. 2972 (1954).

Specialists are able to read this as, “Senate Resolution num­ber 218 adopted at the second session of the Eighty-Third Congress, 1954, as recorded in volume 100 of the Congres­sional Record, beginning on page 2972.”³ Similarly, when you indicate that a text is available in PL 175.948 in a study on medieval philosophy, anyone in the field will know that you are referring to column 948 of the 175th volume of Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Latina, a classic collection of Latin texts of the Christian Middle Ages. However, if you are building a bibliography from scratch, it is not a bad idea to record on your index card the entire reference the first time you find it, because in the final bibliography it would be appropriate to give the full reference:

Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, accurante J. P. Migne. 222 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1844-1866 (+ Supplementum, Turnhout: Bre- pols, 1972).

5. Citing classic works

For the citation of classic works, there are fairly universal conventions that indicate the title-book-chapter, section-paragraph, or canto-line. Some works have been subdivided according to criteria dating back to antiquity, and when modern editors superimpose new sub­divisions, they generally also preserve the traditional line or paragraph marks. Therefore, if you wanted to quote the definition of the principle of noncontradiction from Aristo­tle’s Metaphysics, the reference will be “Met. 4.3.1005b18.” An excerpt from Charles S. Peirce’s Collected Papers is cited as “CP 2.127.” A passage from the Bible is cited instead as “1 Sam. 14:6-9.” References to classical (and modern) comedies and tragedies are comprised of act, scene, and if necessary the line or lines in Arabic numerals: “Shrew, 4.2.50-51.” Nat­urally your reader must know that “Shrew” refers to Shake­speare’s The Taming of the Shrew. If your thesis is on Elizabe­than drama, there is no problem in using this short citation. If instead a mention of Shakespeare intervenes as an elegant and erudite digression in a psychology thesis, you should use a more extended reference.

In references to classic works, the first criterion should be that of practicality and intelligibility. If I refer to a Dantean line as “2.27.40,” it is reasonable to guess that I am talking about the 40th line of the 27th canto of the second canti­cle of the Divine Comedy. But a Dante scholar would rather write “Purg. XXVII.40.” It is best to follow disciplinary con­ventions; these are a second but no less important criterion. Naturally you must pay attention to ambiguous cases. For example, references to Pascal’s Pensees (Thoughts) will differ depending on the edition from which you cite; Brunschvicg’s popular edition is ordered differently from other editions. You can only learn these types of things by reading the criti­cal literature on your topic.

6. Citing unpublished works and private documents

Specify a thesis, a manuscript, and a private document as such. Here are two examples:

La Porta, Andrea. “Aspetti di una teoria dell’esecuzione nel linguag- gio naturale” (Aspects of a performance theory in natural lan­guage). Laurea thesis. University of Bologna, 1975-1976.

Valesio, Paolo. “Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Linguistic Theory.” Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author.

Cite private letters and personal communications similarly. If they are of marginal importance it is sufficient to mention them in a note, but if they are of decisive importance for your thesis, include them in the final bibliography:

Smith, John, personal letter to author, January 5, 1976.

As we shall see in section 5.3.1, for this kind of citation it is polite to ask permission from the person who originated the personal communication and, if it is oral, to submit our transcription for his approval.

Originals and translations Ideally you should always con­sult and cite a book in its original language. If you write a thesis on Moliere, it would be a serious mistake to read your author in English. But in some cases it is fine to read some books in translation. If your thesis is on romantic literature, it is acceptable to have read The Romantic Agony, the English translation published by Oxford University Press of Mario Praz’s La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. You can cite the book in English with a good conscience, but for your reference to be useful also to those who wish to go back to the original edition, a double reference would be ap­propriate. The same is true if you read the book in Italian. It is correct to cite the book in Italian, but why not aid readers who wish to know if there is an English translation and, if so, who published it? Therefore, in either case, the best choice is the following:

Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Milan and Rome: La Cultura, 1930. Trans. Angus Davidson as The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford University Press, 1933).

Are there exceptions? Some. For example, if you cite Pla­to’s Republic in a thesis on a topic other than ancient Greek (in a thesis on law, for example), it is sufficient that you cite an English translation, provided that you specify the exact edition you used. Similarly, let us say your thesis deals with literary studies, and that you must cite the following book:

Lotman, Yu. M., G. Permyakov, P. G. Bogatyrev, and V. N. Toporov. General Semiotics. Ed. Lawrence Michael O’Toole and Ann Shuk- man. Russian Poetics in Translation 3. Oxford: Holdan Books, 1976.

In this case, it is appropriate to cite only the English trans­lation, for two good reasons: First, it is unlikely that read­ers interested in your topic will have the burning desire to examine the Russian original. Second, an original version of the cited book does not even exist, because the English volume is a collection of miscellaneous Russian essays from various sources put together by the editors. Therefore, you should cite after the book title, “Ed. Lawrence Michael O’Toole and Ann Shukman.” But if your thesis were on the current state of semiotic studies, then you would be obli­gated to proceed with more precision. Granted, you may not be able to read Russian, and readers can reasonably under­stand (provided your thesis is not on Soviet semiotics) that you are not referring to the collection in general but instead, for example, to the first essay in the collection. And then it would be interesting to know when and where the essay was originally published—all details that the editors provide in their notes on the essay. Therefore you will cite the essay as follows:

Lotman, Yuri M. “The Modeling Significance of the Concepts ‘End’ and ‘Beginning’ in Artistic Texts.” In General Semiotics, ed. Law­rence Michael O’Toole and Ann Shukman, 7-11. Russian Poetics in Translation 3. Oxford: Holdan Books, 1976. Originally pub­lished in Tezisy dokladov vo vtoroi letnei Shkole po vtorichnym modeliruyushchim sistemam, 69-74. Tartu, 1966.

This way you have not led readers to believe you have read the original text because you indicate your English source, but you have provided all the information needed to locate the original.

Also, when there is no translation available for a work in a language that is not commonly known, it is customary to include a translation of the title in parentheses directly after the original title.

Finally, let us examine a seemingly complicated case that at first suggests an elaborate solution, though this may be simplified depending on the context. David Efron is an Argentinian Jew who in 1941 published, in English and in the United States, a study on the gestural expressiveness of Jews and Italians in New York, called Gesture and Environment.

In 1970 a Spanish translation appeared in Argentina with a different title, Gesto, raza y cultura. In 1972 a new edition in English appeared in the Netherlands with the title Ges­ture, Race and Culture (similar to the one in Spanish). From this edition derives the 1974 Italian translation titled Gesto, razza e cultura. How then should an Italian student cite this book?

Let us imagine two extreme cases. In the first case, the student is writing his thesis on David Efron. His final bib­liography will contain a section dedicated to the author’s works, in which he must create references for all the editions separately in chronological order, and for each reference, he must specify whether the book is a new edition of a previous one. We assume that the candidate has examined all the edi­tions, because he must check whether they contain changes or omissions. In the second case, the student is writing his thesis in economics, political science, or sociology, and he is addressing the questions of emigration. In this case, he cites Efron’s book only because it contains some useful informa­tion on marginal aspects of his topic. Here the student may cite only the Italian edition.

But let us also discuss an intermediate case, one in which the citation is marginal but it is important to know that the study dates back to 1941 and is not recent. The best solution would then be the following:

Efron, David. Gesture and Environment. New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941. Trans. Michelangelo Spada as Gesto, razza e cultura (Milan, Bompiani, 1974).

As it happens, the Italian edition indicates in the copyright that King’s Crown Press published the original in 1941, but rather than citing the original title, it gives the full refer­ence to the Dutch 1972 edition. This is a matter of serious negligence (and I can say this because I am the editor of the Bompiani series in which Efron’s book appeared) because an Italian student might mistakenly cite the 1941 edition as Gesture, Race, and Culture. This is why it is always neces­sary to check the references against more than one source. A more scrupulous student who wished to document the for­tunes of Efron’s volume and the rhythm of its rediscovery by scholars might gather enough information to compile the following reference:

Efron, David. Gesture, Race and Culture. 2nd ed. The Hague: Mouton, 1972. Trans. Michelangelo Spada as Gesto, razza e cultura (Milan, Bompiani, 1974). First published as Gesture and Environment (New York: King’s Crown Press, 1941).

In any case, it is evident that the extent of the required infor­mation depends on the type of thesis and the book’s role in its general argument (primary source, secondary source, marginal or accessory source, etc.).

Although the instructions above provide a foundation for creating a final bibliography for your thesis, here we are only interested in creating a good bibliographical reference in order to develop our index cards, and these instructions are more than adequate for this purpose. We will talk in more detail about the final bibliography in chapter 6. Also, sections 5.4.2 and 5.4.3 describe two different citation sys­tems and the relations between notes and the bibliography. There you will also find two full pages of a sample bibliogra­phy (tables 5.2 and 5.3) that essentially summarize what we have said here.

Table 3.1 summarizes this section by listing all the information that your references should contain. Note the required usage of italics, quotation marks, parentheses, and punctuation. Essential information that you should never omit is marked with an asterisk. The other informa­tion is optional and depends on the type of thesis you are writing.

Finally, in table 3.2 you will find an example of a bibli­ographical index card. As you can see, in the course of my bibliographical research I first found a citation of the Italian translation. Then I found the book in the library catalog and I marked on the top right corner the initialism for the name of the library, and the call number of the volume. Finally I located the volume and deduced from the copyright page the original title and publisher. There was no indication of the publication date, but I found one on the dust jacket flap and noted it with reservations. I then indicated why the book is worth considering.

Source: Eco Umberto, Farina Caterina Mongiat, Farina Geoff (2015), How to write a thesis, The MIT Press.