"General" bibliography

I'm in the process of writing some training content - primarily PPT and a workbook - where I'm pulling in a LOT of "bits" of information from a ton of sources. This content can be split, spliced with other content, and re-used.

Given the nature of the content (e.g., not a paragraph or essay form), is it acceptable to create a type of "general" bibliography? For example, for just a few bullet points, I may draw the information from multiple sources. The bullet points are NOT direct quotes, just ideas gathered from the sources. However, I want to give credit where credit is due. So, is it acceptable just to list all used sources in a bibliography?

Thanks.

Solution 1:

It seems you're looking to create your own rules for your own context. In a formal academic context, if you got the idea somewhere, you certainly stick it in the bibliography, and I could see value in abiding by that (as a consumer, I might judge a work by the "company it keeps," i.e. the sources it leans on, and certainly as a skeptic I might want to follow paper-trails to see that sources weren't being misrepresented).

The other use for citations and bibliographies, besides attribution, is to point the scholar toward sources where they can dive deeper than you're currently doing. I've seen bibliographies include "useful" sources that were never even quoted in the work. If yours gets so lengthy as to be unusable for this purpose, you might want to create a separate "list of resources."

I still have a few concerns with the approach:

You say, "I'm pulling in a LOT of 'bits' of information from a ton of sources. This content can be split, spliced with other content, and re-used." This would make accurate attribution very hard, and sounds like it strays dangerously toward plagiarism or bad scholarship. Make sure you don't run the risk of representing a source as saying something it doesn't. (Note: as noted, we're not talking about direct quotes here; that's easy, just attribute it directly.) But if you're synthesizing concepts from multiple sources, try to make it clear which parts you took from whom. If one sentence contains a bit of source X, a bit of source Y, and a bit of your own original ideas building on both... then rearrange your thoughts to make the sources clearer, lest you represent the sources' ideas as yours or vice versa.

Things that are "common knowledge," maybe not to everyone at large, but to anyone with basic knowledge of the topic, don't always need attribution. Say that a biography says, "Jonathan Edwards profoundly affected the course of American religious life." As long as you're not making the direct quote, IMO you don't have to mention this source just because you first discovered his importance there; everybody who knows who Jonathan Edwards was knows his impact. (But if the source then expounds on it significantly, or offers unique perspective that other sources don't, you might wish to point to it.)

Also, beware of "attribution chaining." Let's say... Charles Spurgeon used the term "Chequebook of the bank of faith," using a transactional, banking metaphor for spiritual disciplines. Let's say that scores of writers since used the same metaphor, perhaps without direct attribution. You don't have to cite all 10 people who show the concept; go straight to the source and just cite Spurgeon. (Similarly, when it comes to direct quotes, never cite a source's quotation of an earlier source; find the original.)