Summary
Most researchers are comfortable citing books and journal articles, but many struggle when they need to produce full bibliographical references for less common sources such as unpublished conference papers, theses and dissertations, audiovisual materials, and web-based documents. Journal guidelines are often brief or silent on these items, which leads to inconsistent, incomplete, or misleading references. Yet these “unusual” sources still need to be documented clearly so that readers can find them, evaluate them, and cite them accurately in turn.
This article offers practical guidance on constructing complete references for a range of non-standard sources. It explains how to treat published and unpublished conference papers, what information to include when citing theses and dissertations, how to reference audiovisual materials such as CDs, DVDs, artworks, and television episodes, and how to document web pages, websites, and online documents. For each category, it outlines the key elements you should record (author or creator, title, date, venue or institution, publisher, location, identifiers such as DOIs or URLs) and shows how these elements map onto the familiar patterns used for books and articles.
The article concludes with a checklist to help you capture essential details while you are working with sources, rather than trying to reconstruct them later. By following these principles and adapting them to your chosen style guide (APA, Chicago, MLA, Vancouver, or journal-specific styles), you can produce consistent, fully informative references for less common sources and maintain a high level of accuracy and professionalism in your bibliographies and reference lists.
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Producing Complete Bibliographical References for Less Common Sources
1. Why Unusual Sources Cause Problems
By the time most scholars prepare theses, dissertations, or journal articles, they have cited books and journal articles so many times that the basic patterns feel almost automatic. You know to include author, year, title, publisher or journal name, and pages, and your preferred style guide shows you the exact order and punctuation. Difficulties arise, however, when you need to cite materials that do not fit neatly into those standard categories: an unpublished conference paper, a recorded lecture, a painting in a gallery, or a web-based report that is updated regularly.
Unfortunately, even detailed author instructions offered by journals and publishers often provide only one or two examples for these less common sources – or remain silent altogether. As a result, reference lists may omit crucial pieces of information, such as the conference location, date, or the institution that granted a degree. The purpose of this article is to offer clear, adaptable guidance for such cases. The exact formatting will depend on the style you are using (APA, Chicago, MLA, Vancouver, or journal-specific variations), but the core information you need to record is relatively stable across systems.
2. Conference Papers and Presentations
Conference papers are a frequent source in academic work, but they can appear in two very different forms: published contributions in an edited volume or proceedings, and unpublished presentations that exist only as handouts, slides, or author manuscripts. The way you reference them depends on which category they fall into.
2.1 Published conference papers
If a conference paper has been published as part of a collection of proceedings, an edited book, or a special journal issue, you should generally treat it like a chapter in a book or occasionally like a journal article. The essential elements include:
- Author(s) of the paper
- Year of publication
- Title of the paper
- Title of the proceedings volume or book (and editor names, if required)
- Page range of the paper
- Publisher and place of publication (for book-style references)
- DOI or other identifier, if available
Some styles also invite or require details about the original conference – such as the conference name, location, and date – particularly if the volume title does not make this obvious. For example, a proceedings volume titled Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on X may make further details unnecessary, whereas a more generic title may need extra context.
2.2 Unpublished conference papers and presentations
Unpublished conference papers are more challenging, because there may be no publisher or page numbers to cite. In such cases, your goal is to provide enough information to identify the work and the event clearly:
- Author(s) of the paper
- Year (and often month) of presentation
- Title of the paper or presentation
- Name of the conference, seminar, or workshop
- Location of the event (city and country, plus institution if relevant)
- Indication that the contribution was an unpublished paper or oral presentation
Depending on your style guide, you may label the source as “unpublished conference paper,” “paper presented at…,” or similar. If you have a direct URL to a conference repository or a posted slide deck, you may include that as well, but be cautious: hosted files can move or disappear, and not all conferences provide stable URLs.
3. Theses and Dissertations
Theses and dissertations occupy a halfway position between books and unpublished manuscripts. They are often bound, archived, and even catalogued in libraries, but they are typically submitted to fulfil degree requirements rather than to serve as commercial publications. As a result, reference formats may treat their titles more like book titles or more like article titles, and the publication details focus on the awarding institution rather than a publisher.
3.1 Core information for theses and dissertations
Whatever style you adopt, you should aim to record:
- Author’s name
- Year of completion (sometimes also month)
- Full title of the thesis or dissertation
- Type of degree (for example, MA thesis, PhD dissertation)
- Department or faculty (if requested by your style guide)
- University or awarding institution
- Location of the institution (city and country)
Some style guides also ask you to specify whether the thesis is unpublished or was retrieved from a particular database (for example, a national thesis repository or a commercial service). For theses available online, you may add a URL or DOI if one is provided.
3.2 Title formatting
The way you format the title (italics vs quotation marks, sentence case vs title case) will depend on your chosen referencing system. In some systems, thesis titles appear in italics like book titles; in others, they appear in quotation marks like article titles. The important thing is to follow the book/article pattern of your chosen style consistently so that your reference list remains coherent.
4. Audiovisual Sources
As research becomes more interdisciplinary and multimodal, scholars increasingly draw on audiovisual sources: CDs, DVDs, streaming media, podcasts, films, paintings, installations, and television series. These sources require you to think carefully about who should be treated as the “author” and what you are actually citing.
4.1 General principles
When citing audiovisual materials, ask yourself two questions:
- Who is primarily responsible for creating the work you are quoting or analysing?
- Are you referring to an individual component (a track, an episode, a specific work of art) or to the larger container (an album, a television series, a gallery exhibition)?
In many styles, individual components (songs, episodes, individual artworks within a series) are formatted like article titles (often in quotation marks), while the larger containers (albums, television programmes, exhibition titles) are formatted like book titles (often in italics).
4.2 Possible information to include
Essential elements for audiovisual sources may include:
- Creator(s): artists, directors, producers, performers, or presenters
- Year of release or creation (or, if necessary, the range of years)
- Title of the individual piece (song, episode, artwork)
- Title of the larger work (album, television series, exhibition)
- Medium (CD, DVD, streaming service, painting, photograph, sculpture, etc.)
- Publisher, record label, production company, or museum/gallery
- Place of publication or institution location
For a CD, the “author” might be the main recording artist, while for a film it might be the director. For a television episode, some styles emphasise the writer and director; others treat the show’s creator as a key figure. Always check your style guide for preferred practices, but the logic of treating those responsible for creating the source “like authors” remains the same.
5. Web Sites, Web Pages, and Online Documents
Web-based sources are now ubiquitous in research, but they are also the most unstable and variable category. URLs can change, content can be updated, and entire sites can disappear between the time you draft your paper and the time it is published. For that reason, references to web sources must be as precise and complete as possible.
5.1 Authors and titles
Start by identifying an author wherever possible. This may be:
- an individual author (for example, the writer of an online article or report);
- a corporate author (such as an organisation, government body, or research centre);
- occasionally, no clear author at all (in which case the site or page title may take the leading position).
Next, record the titles that structure the source:
- title of the specific document or page you are citing;
- title of the broader website, platform, or collection (if relevant).
The combination you use will depend on how your style guide handles web sources, but the goal is always to make it clear what exactly you consulted.
5.2 Publishers, versions, and dates
Where available, you should also include:
- publisher or sponsoring organisation (which may be the same as the author in some cases);
- version or edition information (for example, “Version 2.1” or “Revised edition”);
- at least one date: date of publication, date of last update, or date of retrieval.
Because web content changes frequently, many styles now suggest (or require) giving the date in full (day, month, and year) rather than just the year. If you are citing a document that clearly states both an original publication date and a last-updated date, you may need to report both (for example, “Published 15 March 2019; updated 2 July 2021”), depending on the style guide and your purpose.
5.3 URLs and DOIs
Finally, you will need to provide a direct link to the source. This may be:
- a URL (preferably a stable or canonical link, not a temporary session link), or
- a DOI (digital object identifier) if the document is registered with one.
DOIs are particularly valuable because they tend to remain constant even when the underlying URL changes. When a DOI is available, many style guides now prefer you to use it instead of, or in addition to, the URL. In any case, you should always check web-based sources just before submitting your article to confirm that the links still work and that the content has not changed in a way that would affect your argument.
6. Adapting to Different Style Guides
All of the principles discussed above are about content – the pieces of information you should capture so that a reader can locate and verify your sources. The exact order and formatting of those pieces will depend on the style system you use. For example:
- APA often uses sentence case for titles and emphasises years and DOIs.
- Chicago offers author-date and notes-and-bibliography variants with slightly different layouts.
- MLA uses title case and tends to include medium and container titles in a specific hierarchy.
- Vancouver emphasises numeric order and may abbreviate some details.
When dealing with less common sources, a sensible approach is:
- Identify a reference model in your style guide that is closest to your unusual source (for example, a chapter in an edited book, a report, or a film).
- List all the information you have about your source using the content guidelines above.
- Arrange those pieces to fit the nearest model, adjusting labels and punctuation to match your style’s conventions.
If your department or journal has its own examples for rare sources, follow those first. When no example is available, consistency and completeness matter more than matching every comma to an imaginary template.
7. A Practical Data-Capture Checklist
One of the most time-consuming parts of building a bibliography is chasing down missing details for sources that you consulted months or years earlier. You can save yourself considerable frustration by capturing key information the first time you encounter a source, even if you do not yet know whether you will cite it. For unusual sources, make a habit of noting:
- full names of authors or creators;
- full titles (including subtitles) of papers, talks, episodes, artworks, or web documents;
- container information (conference name, album title, series title, exhibition name);
- dates (publication, presentation, or last update) in as much detail as available;
- institutions, publishers, or production companies and their locations;
- identifiers such as DOIs, catalogue numbers, or stable URLs.
Whether you manage your references in a simple spreadsheet, a note-taking system, or dedicated software such as EndNote, Zotero, or Mendeley, including these details from the outset will make it much easier to produce clean, complete bibliographical references at the writing stage.
8. Conclusion
Producing complete bibliographical references for less common sources can feel daunting when your style guide offers only one or two cryptic examples, but the underlying logic is simple: provide enough accurate, specific information to let your reader find the source you used. For conference papers, this means naming the event and its location as well as the author and title; for theses, it means identifying the degree and institution; for audiovisual materials, it means specifying creators, titles, media, and production details; and for web resources, it means documenting authors, titles, dates, and stable links.
By focusing on these core elements and then fitting them to the pattern of your chosen referencing system, you can handle even unusual sources with confidence. The result is a reference list that not only satisfies journal requirements but also serves your readers and fellow researchers by mapping your sources clearly, transparently, and professionally.
