First-Year English FAQs
A tentative or sample bibliography is a list of the research sources you will try to locate to conduct your research. It is different than the work cited list in the paper because the tentative bibliography will probably contain many more source citations than the ones you will actually use in the paper. Each instructor will likely provide his or her own guidelines for a tentative or sample bibliography, but all instructors are looking for the types of sources they requested--professional magazines, journals, etc.--and titles of articles that specifically relate to the hypothetical thesis statement or research question, and the publication information.
It is common to find that one-third to one-half the research sources on your tentative bibliography are not available, so it is usually a good idea to locate at least twice as many specific bibliographic citations than you will need for your tentative bibliography. By having additional citations, you will save yourself time when trying to gather your research materials because you can move on to additional sources using the citations you have already located rather than being forced to go back and find more bibliographic citations in specialized periodical indexes or databases.