Any claim must be based on a source, of which you must say the reference (witht the page) in the footnotes ; or your claim must be based on a contomporary reference. It means that you cannot quote your studying courses. You can only quote what you have read : it is forbidden to act like if you have read something when you haven't.
The first thing thesis supervisor does to evaluate a thesis is to look at the bibliography. Looking at its lenght, he knows what kind of references we find to work with, and looking at its structure, he knows how rigorous our work has been. In the end of the first year of master, a bibliography must be 6 to 8 pages long.
Bibliography are structured in three parts :
- Sources : the very basis of our work, we need to say whether it's a translated source or not.
- Working instruments : dictionary, encyclopedias, atlas …
- Studies : those are the historians's works. We never split articles from books, and we organize them in alphabetic order.
Don't forget to put the table of contents at the end ! We can also create an Index, but that's optional.
Zotero allows you to manage bibliographies and footnotes (though I've never used it, but I know it was quite useful to my colleagues). However, it is configured for Americans, so if you are not American, you will need to change it to accomodate your works and to make sure it has the presentation standard you need.
My teacher gave me for advice to have a abbreviated presentation of my sources during all of the thesis when you need to cite a source in the footnotes, then to make sure it is very detailed in the bibliography.
FOR SOURCES :
NAME OF THE AUTHOR IN SMALL CAPS, Title in italics, ed. First name Last name of the editor, Publishing house, City of the publishing house, date, number of volumes or of pages.
ex : Iʙɴ ʿᴀṬĀʾ ᴀʟʟĀʜ, La Sagesse des maîtres soufis, trad. Eric Geoffroy, Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1998, 313 p.
ex: Iʙɴ ᴀʟ-ṢᴀʙʙĀɢ̇,The Mystical Teachings of al-Shadhili: Including His Life, Prayers, Letters, and Followers. A Translation from the Arabic of Ibn al-Sabbagh's Durrat al-Asrar wa Tuhfat al-Abrar, trad. Elmer H. Douglas et Ibrahim M. Abu-Rabi, State University of New York Press, Albany, 1993, 274 p.
FOR STUDIES AND WORKING INSTRUMENTS :
If it is a book :
NAME OF THE AUTHOR IN SMALL CAPS, First name, Title in italics, Publishing house, City of the publishing house, date, number of pages.
ex : Aᴍʀɪ, Nelly, Un « Manuel » Ifrîqiyen d’adab soufi. Paroles et sagesses de ‘Abd al-Wahhâb al-Mzûghî (m.675/1276) compagnon de Shâdhilî, Contraste Editions, Sousse, 2013, 272 p.
If it is a journal article :
NAME OF THE AUTHOR IN SMALL CAPS, First name, « Title of the article »,Title of the journal in italics, journal issue (year), p. XX-XX.
ex : Cʜɪʜ, Rachida, « Sainteté, maîtrise spirituelle et patronage: Les fondements de l'autorité dans le soufisme », Archives de sciences sociales des religions, 125 (2004), p. 79-98.
If it is an article in a collective work :
NAME OF THE AUTHOR IN SMALL CAPS, First name, « Title of the article or of the chapter», in First Name Last Name (Ed.), Title of the book in italics, Publishing house, City of the publishing house, date, p. XX-XX.
ex : Gᴇᴏғғʀᴏʏ, Eric, « Entre ésotérisme et exotérisme, les Shâdhilis, passeurs de sens (Egypte – XIIIe - XVe siècles) », dans Aïni Bennaï (Ed.), Une voie soufie dans le monde. La Shâdhiliyya, Maisonneuve & Larose, Paris, 2005, p.117-129.
About the bibliography's presentation :
- The authors's names must be in small caps, not in all caps ! On Google Docs, it is not possible to create small caps, so I've find a website to transform letters in small caps.
- Be careful to not confuse fascicle and journal issue.
- Any abbreviations should be stuck to the following, you need to create a non-breaking space (Two elements will remain glued together even when crossing the line). Honestly, I've never managed to create one, whether on Google Docs nor Microsoft Word, my teacher told me that we can put a warning in the beginning of the thesis to warn the jury that there will be no non-breaking space if it really doesn't work.
- In French, we don't put the english quotation marks (“”), but the french ones («»).
- It is obligatory to put the number of pages when you put the articles and chapters's references in the bibliography (ex : p. 15-37).
- We do not mention the publishing house when it's an article's reference (only for books).
- We do not mention any journal's volumes. Most academic journals specialised in history (in France at least) only publish once a year, with multiples fascicles of 100-200 pages, La plupart des revues académiques spécialisées ne paraissent qu’une fois par an, en plusieurs fascicules de 100 à 200 pages whose pagination is continuous between each fascicle ; librarians put them together in one volume by the end of the year, which means that we do not have to say which fascicle we are refering to.
It's better if you can create a reversed paragraph : the beginning of the sentence is normal, and if it takes more than 1 line, it needs to go towards the right. Example :
