Critical Investigation Task #2

Academic research and bibliography

As you know, a detailed bibliography is crucial to reach the top grades in your coursework. Refer to our Essential Reading List which contains titles of 45 of the most important books for the Critical Investigation, most of which are either in the school library or media suite. We also have some excellent new books in DF07 that have been added in the last 12 months. If you haven't used any of these yet, make sure you take advantage of these excellent resources this week.

Those underlined on the list are the twenty most important or useful in previous years but, obviously, not all of the texts on this list will be directly relevant for you...you'll need to spend a fair amount of time searching through them (especially the contents and indexes) to find the key quotes and ideas that will impress the examiners.

You must include references (i.e. quotes or specfic references to theories/statistics/reports) to quite a few of these books if you want an A or B. These will be footnoted in your essay (this is called a citation). The more academic sources you have, the stronger your essay will be - so borrow them from the library, look at them in lesson or make a note of them for the trip to the BFI Library. If the book belongs to the Media department, you will have to do your research in class or in DF06 during a free period - the books can't leave school unfortunately.

Task #2 is to pull this information together in an updated blog posting of all your notes and quotes so far INCLUDING a complete bibliography of your research so far. Make sure you include the following:

• Author-Year-Title-Place-Publisher info;
• Quotes (+ Page References) from the book that can be linked to your study;
• A short explanation of each one explaining how it is relevant to you/your topic.
• Finally, post up on your blog a Complete Bibliography (so far) to include ALL the books you currently have quotes from. It MUST contain at least TEN different academic books or journals as well as all your online and Media Magazine sources.
• Note: your FINAL bibliography will be much more extensive than this - we are simply looking for a minimum of 10 academic sources from your research so far.

Most people find formatting a bibliography very difficult the first time - there are quite specific rules that you need to follow and universities are very fussy about how it is presented. Use this 'Guide to writing bibliographies' to help or try this really useful bibliography formatting and creation tool: 'BibMe'. Personally, I recommend using the Microsoft Word referencing feature to make managing your bibliography as simple as possible.

Deadline: Wednesday 25 November