The short answer to this is ‘no’, you are not supposed to do this. In a worst case scenario, your marker might think you are trying to create the impression that you have read more books and articles than you actually have, and that you are artificially inflating your bibliography. However, I trust you! That’s probably not what you are doing. Rather, I am assuming you have read these texts and they have informed your thinking on the topic, but it was more in a general way. You really want to give them due credit, you just did not find anything specifically citation-worthy in them. If this is the case, keep reading. This blogpost makes some quick and easy suggestions for solving this dilemma.
If these readings have indeed provided you with important knowledge for the essay topic, it would actually be an omission to not include them in your essay. However, they should not just feature in the bibliography. The trick is to find a way to cite them in the essay itself. Here are two suggestions for how to do this:
First, if the text in question provides a good summary or discussion of an aspect of your essay topic, find an appropriate place to insert a quick parenthesis such as ‘also discussed in X, 2012’, or if it really helped you even a ‘this particular aspect is also expertly summarised by X, 2012’ or ‘X (2012) provides a particularly insightful discussion on this’. This can be part of the text flow but more often than not is easiest inserted in brackets.
Second, in various parts of your essay there will be places where you want to provide little overviews of the texts that are the most relevant for the specific points you are discussing. If you are not doing this yet, be aware this is good practice, and especially strong essays in the higher grade ranges tend to do this at least to some extent. This is usually placed at the beginning of a paragraph or section, and could be something like ‘Some of the more compelling critiques of Wallerstein’s World Systems theory are provided by X (1984), Y (1999) and Z (2015)’ or ‘A number of authors discuss the implications remittances have for transnational migration flows (for example X (1999), Y (2008) and Z (2023)’. This is usually part of the so-called funnel technique, in which you start with such broader overviews, and then funnel in on the specifics. If you include such fairly general mini-overviews into your discussion, it should be easy to find a place for referencing all the readings you have been making use of.
On this second point, however, a little warning: This should not descend into what is often referred to negatively as reference-dropping. These references should not just be dropped into the discussion for the sake of inflating the bibliography. They should serve a purpose in your discussion. For example, the above sentences should provide a useful entry point to discuss in more detail at least some of the works cited, and contribute to the discussion – in other words be part of an effective funnel, not just stand alone. A certain number of entries in your bibliography is important to provide enough substance for your discussion, but quality is always more important than quantity.
In summary, do not list readings in the bibliography that you did not read at least to some extent, or did not cite in the essay. If you did read them, and found them useful, find a way of integrating them into the essay discussion in the form of at least one in-text reference. This can be done in a fairly general way, as shown in the examples above, but you need to make sure the reference(s) serve a purpose and are an integral part of the discussion of the essay.
