How to Manage Bibliography Cards
& Note Cards for Research Purposes
Q: Why should we use bibliography cards and note cards?
A: Neatness and organization makes the research process easier and smoother.
Q: What is a bibliography card?
A: A “bib” card is an index card that gives bibliographical information for a research source. You’ll have one
for each of your sources; each one will give the carefully formatted bibliographical entry (according to
MLA style guidelines); and you will arrange and number them sequentially by alphabet.
Examples:
Book
Website
Print Newspaper
Exercise: Open your copies of Jane Eyre to page 564. There you will find an excerpt from Elizabeth Rigby’s
contemporary review of the novel. Use the link to the Perdue University MLA site on Mr. Reynolds’ TeacherWeb page to help you construct a proper bibliography card for Rigby’s review.
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Q: How did you do?
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Rigby, Elizabeth. “Power with Such Horrid Taste.” Rev. of_Jane Eyre,___
________by Charlotte Bronte. The Quarterly Review December 1848._____
________Print.______________________________________________________________
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Notice that we don’t yet have a number in the upper right-hand
corner. That’s because we haven’t located and processed all of
our sources.
Q: Now that we have a bibliography card for Rigby’s review, what do we do with it?
A: We read the source and construct a “note card” for each potentially useful bit of information we can find
in it.
Q: What is a note card?
A: A note card is an index card that contains a single bit of information that may end up in your final project.
My advice to you would be to work with direct quotations at this point. If you later want to change the
quoted material into a paraphrase, you can certainly do that. However, if you paraphrase at this early
stage and later decide that you’d rather have a direct quotation, you’ll have to go back into the source to
find the exact wording as it appeared there. We don’t want to do double work, folks. That’s an
unnecessary waste of time.
Examples:
Q: What information should be recorded on a note card?
A: You can make these cards as intricate as you wish, but three bits of information are crucial:
(1) the idea you might want to incorporate into your paper (quoted at this point??)
(2) the number of the page where you found the information (for print sources)
(3) a number in the upper right-hand corner that matches the bib card for the source that rendered
the information
Exercise: Again, please open your copies of Jane Eyre to page 564. Find one moment in Ms. Rigby’s review
that seems “note”worthy to you. Hee hee . . . couldn’t resist.  Then record the idea—directly quoted at this
stage—on a fresh index card.
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Q: How did you do?
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___“It is true Jane does right, and exerts great moral strength, but it is the
____strength of a mere heathen mind which is a law unto itself.”__________
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_____________________________________________________________________p. 567
Q: Why is there no source number in the upper right-hand corner of our note card?
A: We don’t yet have a full set of bibliography cards, so we can’t order them alphabetically yet.
Q: Isn’t there a danger of losing track of which note cards go with which bibliography cards if the source
numbers aren’t assigned?
A: Yes, but there are at least three ways to avoid this problem:
(1) Find all bibliography sources and order the matching cards before taking notes.
(2) If you want to take notes before you’ve located all bibliographical sources, use rubber bands
or paper clips to keep a bib card and all the note cards that match it together.
(3) Jot down a short-hand title of the source somewhere on the notecard.
Exercise: Go to my Teacher-Website, click on “Links,” and scroll all the way to the bottom of the menu. There
you will find links to two online sources concerning Jane Eyre. Please consult Perdue once more to find the
proper bibliographical formats for these sources and construct bibliography cards for each.
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Q: How did you do?
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______Johnson, Nicholas (2000). The Tension between Reason and Passion in Jane
_________________Eyre. Retrieved from http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/
_________________cbronte/njl.html.____________________________________________________
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______Ciabattaris, Jane (2010, Jan. 8). The Unstoppable Cult of Jane Eyre. The____
_________________Daily Beast. Retrieved from http://www.thedailybeast.com/________
_________________articles/2010/01/08/the-unstoppable-cult-of-jane_eyre./authors____
_________________/bronte/.html#.______________________________________________________
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Q: Now that we have bibliography cards for all three of our sources, in what order should you arrange and
number them?
A:
Ciabattaris . . . .1
Johnson . . . . . . 2
Rigby . . . . . . . . 3
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______Ciabattaris, Jane (2010, Jan. 8). The Unstoppable Cult of Jane Eyre. The____
_________________Daily Beast. Retrieved from http://www.thedailybeast.com/________
_________________articles/2010/01/08/the-unstoppable-cult-of-jane_eyre./authors____
_________________/bronte/.html#.______________________________________________________
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______Johnson, Nicholas (2000). The Tension between Reason and Passion in Jane
_________________Eyre. Retrieved from http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/bronte/
_________________cbronte/njl.html.____________________________________________________
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______Rigby, Elizabeth. “Power with Such Horrid Taste.” Rev. of_Jane Eyre, by
______________Charlotte Bronte. The Quarterly Review: December 1848.__Print.
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