Greetham, B. (2019) How to Write Your Undergraduate Dissertation. London: Bloomsbury. Available from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ulinc/detail.action?docID=6234293 [accessed 27 February 2025].
An appendix (plural: appendices) contains information that is placed at the end of the essay/report, containing additional information that supports the content of the main document, such as background material, evidence or context.
Appendices generally contain information that is NOT ESSENTIAL to the essay/report that you have written, but supports analysis and validates your conclusions. However, sometimes an appendix may be used for ESSENTIAL tables and figures that are too large to fit into the text of an essay/report.
You might have supporting data that you want to include in your assignment, but it would break up the flow of the main document.
Or, you might want to provide additional background information that would be too lengthy to include in the main body of your work.
If you are unsure whether you need to include appendices, or what to include, please ask your module tutor as guidelines can vary across disciplines.
Usually, appendices will go at the very end of an essay or document, after your reference list or bibliography. However, some Humanities subjects request that appendices go before the bibliography.
If the data is highly relevant to the point you are making in your writing, then consider inserting the data within your text, but make sure that it does not break the reading flow for your reader.
Check your assignment brief for guidelines and, if still not clear, check with your module tutor.
If you would like to see examples of appendices in dissertations for your subject, check out our Dissertation Showcase.
Use the headers at the top of the page to select "Subjects" or "Awards" to find dissertations for your subject area.
It is worth noting that not all dissertations will contain appendices, as it can depend upon the nature of the project undertaken.
Include an appendix only if it helps the reader to understand, evaluate, or replicate the study or argument. There is usually no limit on what can be placed in an appendix, but it must be relevant and referred to at the appropriate point in the essay text (e.g. see Appendix). Check the guidelines for your assignment/article about whether there is a limit on the number of appendices you can include.
NOTE: Appendices are not included in the word count.
You must clearly label your appendices (Appendix A, Appendix B, Appendix C, etc.) and each appendix should have a descriptive title explaining what it is (e.g. Appendix A: Interview questions for study participants).
Add page numbers to your appendices in the same format as the rest of your document or essay. Continue the numbering from the text of your essay into the appendix so it feels like part of the whole assignment.
You need to refer to your appendices in the body of your work using labels to show how they support your research or discussion. Doing this will show your reader that the appendix contains information that is relevant to your text and allow them to use the appendix to access supplementary information as they read through the text.
If there is one appendix, the label is “Appendix”. If there is more than one appendix, add a letter, e.g. Appendix A, Appendix B, etc. Refer to the appendix in the body of the text.
Examples:
Appendices should be ordered in the order you refer to them in your work. This will make the appendix more user friendly and easier to access.
Appendices may be authored by yourself (no reference required) or copied from elsewhere (reference required). When referring to other people’s work in an appendix, use the regular in-text citation in the appendix and include the details in the main reference list. When referring in the main text to other people’s work that has been included in an appendix, it will be referred to as “(see Appendix)”, rather than quoting the content of the appendix.
If you have created your own graphs/tables, or images/artwork, using data from other sources, you can make this clear in your in-text citation:
e.g. (Table author's own, data from Smith, 2022)
For further help with referencing styles, see our Referencing and plagiarism guide.
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Appendices may include the following:
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