82 PRS Proofreading and Editing Service PhD Experts • All Academic Areas • Fast Turnaround • High Quality Referencing styles and guidelines differ so markedly at times and in such tiny details at others that general advice beyond a mantra chanting ‘precision, precision, precision, consistency, consistency, consistency’ in your ear can only be so helpful. There are some general trends and distinctions that are worth knowing, however: a bibliography, for instance, is usually arranged alphabetically by the last names of authors (for help with the details of alphabetical order, most style manuals – the APA Manual is a good example – will provide instructions and examples), and a bibliography can contain not just all the sources you actually cite in your paper, but also any sources that you don’t directly cite in your paper but that nonetheless influenced your thinking as you did your research and drafted your article. A list of references or works cited, on the other hand, includes only the sources – all of them – that you cite in your paper. If you’re using an author-date style of citation, your reference list will be arranged alphabetically by authors’ last names just as a bibliography is, but while a bibliography usually includes the publication date near the end of a reference, in an author-date system the date of a source will follow immediately after the author name(s) in the list because dates are part of the way in which readers will find and identify sources. Dates should be kept in mind while listing references in both systems, however, since they determine the order in which sources by the same author(s) should be listed: some systems arrange such items with the earliest publication first moving forward in time to the latest, while others will have you list the most recent publication first with others following in reverse chronological order. For numerical referencing styles, neither author names nor dates are used to arrange the sources; instead, items are listed in the reference list in numerical order (the same order in which they’re cited in the paper) because in this case it is the number of a source that allows your readers to find and identify it. PARt II: PRePARIng, PResentIng And PolIsHIng YoUR woRk