Bibliography/Works Cited Needed for Statement of Purpose?

[Abyss21]

Is a bibliography or a works cited page needed for the statement of purpose? I was planning on using one or two quotations from external sources and discuss my theoretical approaches, including theorists' names and texts.

[TakeruK]

This could be field dependent, but my answer would be no. I personally would not go as far as to directly quote from any sources because that may be too much detail for a SOP. My advice (for someone in my field) would be that if you need to mention a new technique in a recent paper (e.g. saying something like "I want to fit planet light curves using the Smith et al. (2014) models which account for X, Y, and Z") then I still advise against providing a full bibliographical entry. Instead, I would advise the student to phrase it like this example so that a reader unfamiliar with Smith et al. (2014) can understand why you would use it from context.

The reasoning is that either the reader will immediately understand what model you mean, or they won't and they will not take the time to look it up. But I would use statements like this sparingly in a SOP.

[vaporeon]

I included two references in mine, because I couldn't figure out how to meaningfully talk about my prior work or my interests without citing a few papers. I did not have any direct quotes though, and kept this to a minimum. It worked for me - accepted to my dream school!

[Abyss21]

Thank you for the suggestions, everyone! I've decided to keep one quotation in my statement of purpose but to not have a Works Cited page since that seems to be the norm. Also, congratulations vaporeon (love that name by the way) on getting into your dream school! Hopefully things go that well for me too.

Edited November 7, 2016 by ThePomoHipster