Managing Your Sources with the Bibliographical Index Card File

Naturally, to compile a basic bibliography you must con­sult many books. Many librarians will only lend one or two books at a time, are slow to find each book for you, and will grumble if you quickly return for new books. This is why you should not try to immediately read every book you find, but rather compile a basic bibliography of sources pertaining to your topic. A preliminary inspection of the catalogs allows you to prepare a list of books that you can then begin bor­rowing. However, the list you derive from the catalogs does not say much about each book’s contents, and it is some­times difficult to determine which books you should borrow first. For this reason, in addition to consulting the catalogs in the reference room, you should preliminarily inspect each book. When you find a chapter and its accompanying bibli­ography that pertain to your topic, you can skim the chapter (you will return to it later), but be sure to copy all of that chapter’s bibliography. Together with the chapter that you have skimmed, its bibliography (and if it is annotated, the bibliography’s comments) will show which books the author considers fundamental among those he cites, and you can begin by borrowing those. Additionally, if you cross-check the bibliographies with some reference works, you will determine which books are cited most often, and you can begin to establish a first hierarchy of sources for your topic.

This hierarchy may change as you proceed in your work, but for now it constitutes a starting point.

Now, you may object to the idea of copying the entire bib­liography from ten different sources. In fact, your research may lead you to as many as a few hundred books, even though your cross-check will eliminate doubles. (Organiz­ing your bibliography in alphabetical order will also help you eliminate doubles.) Fortunately, these days every legiti­mate library has a copy machine, and each copy costs about a dime. A specific bibliography contained in a reference work, except in very rare cases, occupies only a few pages. With a few dollars you can photocopy a series of bibliographies that you can easily organize once you return home. Once you have finished the bibliography, you can return to the library to determine which sources are actually available.

At this point it will be useful to begin to document your bibliography. You might at first be tempted to record the titles in a notebook as you encounter them. Later, after determin­ing if the titles are available in the library, you might finish each notebook entry by writing the call number near the title. The problem with this approach is that it becomes more diffi­cult to locate the titles in your notebook as your bibliography grows. Also consider that your preliminary research might generate a bibliography of hundreds of titles, even if only some of them will ultimately be useful to your thesis.

A better system is to create a bibliographical index card for each book. On each card you can record an abbreviation that signifies the library where the book is available, as well as the call number of the book. A single card might contain many library abbreviations and call numbers, indicating that the book is widely available in different locations. (There will also be index cards with no abbreviations—this is trouble!) You can then file your cards in a small index card box. You can purchase a small box of this kind inexpensively from the stationer, or you can make one yourself. You can fit one or two hundred index cards into one small box, and you can take the box with you to the library. This is your bibliogra­phy file, and if your documentation is well organized, it will give you a clear picture of the sources you have found, and those you still need to locate. Additionally, everything will be in alphabetical order and easy to find. If you wish, you could standardize your index cards so that the call number is in the top right, and a conventional abbreviation in the top left that indicates if the book is a good general reference, a source for a specific chapter, and so on.

Naturally, if you do not have the patience to organize and use this system, you can resort to using a notebook. But the disadvantages are evident: you may note the “A” authors on the first page and the “B” authors on the second, but your first page may fill up before you find an article by Federico Azzimonti or Gian Saverio Abbati. You are better off buy­ing an address book, in which you might not record Abbati before Azzimonti if you found the latter author first, but at least they will both be in the four pages dedicated to the letter “A.” The virtue of the index card system is that you can easily reorganize the cards as the bibliography grows and changes, and your cards will always be in true alphabetical order. You may also thank yourself for using this system when you need to use your bibliography file to pursue a related project later (although you will certainly need to supplement it with new sources), and you will have an organized system to lend to someone who is working on a similar topic.

In chapter 4 we will talk about some other types of index card files: the readings file, the idea file, and the quote file; and we will address the applications of each. For now, a brief introduction to the readings file and some preliminary remarks about the difference between it and the bibliogra­phy file will suffice. Your readings file should contain index cards dedicated only to the books (or articles) that you have actually read. Here you can document summaries, assess­ments, and quotes, although you may wish to dedicate an entire file exclusively to quotations. In short, on each card in your readings file you can document everything you will need when you actually begin writing your thesis and your final bibliography, bearing in mind that the book may not be available to you at that time. Unlike your bibliography file, you do not have to carry your readings file with you on every trip to the library. Also, your readings file may require larger sheets of paper, although a system of index cards is always the most manageable.

Unlike the readings file, the bibliography file must also contain index cards for all the books you must find, not only for the ones you have already located and read. It would even be possible for a bibliography file to contain ten thousand titles and a readings file a mere ten, although this would clearly illustrate a thesis that began extraordinarily well but ended very badly. In any case, you should take your bibliography file with you every time you go to a library. Its index cards contain only a book’s essential information, and the librar­ies and call numbers under which the book can be found. At most, you can annotate “very important according to author X,” “absolutely must find,” “so-and-so says this is a worthless work,” or even “buy this.” But any further annotation should be left for the readings file. An entry in the readings file can absorb multiple index cards (one book may generate many notes), whereas each item in the bibliography file comprises one and only one index card.

Finally, construct your bibliography file with care. Do not hastily scribble down titles in stenographic characters, a process prone to error. The better you make your bibliogra­phy file, the easier it will be to preserve and supplement for future research. It will also be more valuable to lend or even sell, and therefore it is worth ensuring that it is legible and well organized. Most importantly, the bibliography file will provide the foundation for the final bibliography, provided that it contains thorough documentation on the books you have found, read, and archived in the readings file.

For this reason, in the following section I will provide documentation guidelines, the instructions to correctly doc­ument your sources so that others can easily find them. Use these guidelines for each of the following:

1. The bibliography file,
2. The readings file,
3. References in notes,
4. The final bibliography.

Although I will return to these guidelines in the chapters in which I discuss these four different stages in preparing the thesis, I will establish them definitively in the following section. These guidelines are of the utmost importance, and you must have the patience to become familiar with them. You will realize that they are primarily functional guidelines, because they allow you and your reader to identify the exact book to which you are referring. But they are also rules, so to speak, of erudite etiquette. Their observance reveals a scholar who is familiar with the discipline, and their violation betrays the academic parvenu, and sometimes casts a shadow of discredit on an otherwise rigorous work. These rules of etiquette matter, and they should not be disparaged as a formalist’s weakness. There is a similar dynamic in sports, stamp collecting, billiards, and political life. If a participant misuses key expressions, he raises suspicion, like an outsider who is not “one of us.” Thus, you must heed the rules of the company you want to join. As the Italian proverb goes, “If in company you don’t pee, a spy or a thief you may be.” And if you wish to violate or oppose rules, you must first know them well enough to expose their inconsistencies or repres­sive functions. So, for example, before you can declare that it is unnecessary to italicize a book’s title, you must first know that this is in fact the convention, and you must understand the reasons for this convention.

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