After you have selected and focused a research topic and become familiar with your
library’s resources your next step will be to identify specific sources that may help you
develop your topic. The place to begin is with the library’s reference guides: subject indexes,
bibliographic indexes, periodical indexes, reference works, and the book catalogs. Some of
these reference sources may have been used as part of your topic selection process, but now,
you need to return to them and the other reference guides that are appropriate to your
particular topic to conduct a systematic and thorough search for sources. As you find works
whose titles suggest that they will be useful to you, you need to take down the bibliographic
information about each work, again in a systematic and thorough fashion, to prepare a
preliminary or working bibliography.
A bibliography is a list of research sources. At the final steps of your research report
is to type a list of works cited at the end of your paper that is a formal bibliography or listing
of all the sources you have used in writing it. For now, your task is to continue gathering
sources; that is, you need to use the library indexes and other research tools to locate books
and articles for your paper. The list of possible sources you draw up now as you begin your
research is your working bibliography.