Posted on Sunday 6 March 2005
I’m reorganizing my reading stack (I have more than a hundred books in an Excel file in philosophy, physics, math, biology and whatnot that are flagged to read eventually), and have been browsing to through my library for references to other books that I might want also need to read. The quality of bibliographies these days is appalling.
Authors frequently use several dozens of books as references for their own books and fail to cite them properly. This is an awful habit. Not only is the data in books impossible to trace and verify, but attempts at further reading are stopped. Books are not islands. If I just read Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, chances are I will want to read other books, perhaps with contrasting views, on the same subject. In my experience, isolated reads in a narrow subject are rapidly forgotten anyway. So why is there is there no bibliography in Manufacturing Consent or in several other excellent books I’ve read?
In Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge, Kline cites more than a dozen philosophers throughout the book, yet his bibliography refers only to Berkeley, Kant, Russell and Whitehead. What about Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Quine, and all the others mentioned in the book?
A good example of what a bibliography should look like can be found in Davies’ The Mind of God. While the book itself is passable, it includes 6 pages of references, classified by chapter, followed by a 2-page select bibliography of what the author believes are important readings in the metaphysics and epistemology of mathematics and physics. Most scientific papers also include this type of bibliography, enabling one to easily see trends and find important information about the prerequisites to a certain field of knowledge.
Take a lesson from Google: references (through the Pagerank mechanism) are an extremely relevant source of information concerning the acuity and importance of a text. Give your readers the material they need to verify and link information together by making good bibliographies. Doing so is not overly labour-intensive and encourages book sales, so it’s in your interests too.
References::
- Herman ES & Chomsky N (2002) Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, New York.
- Kline M (1985) Mathematics and the Search for Knowledge. Oxford University Press, New York.
- Davies P (1992) The Mind of God. Simon & Schuster, New York.
