Footnotes are notes placed at the bottom of a page.

They cite references or comment

on a designated part of the text above it. For example, say you want to add an
interesting comment to a sentence you have written, but the comment is not directly
related to the argument of your paragraph. In this case, you could add the symbol for a
footnote. Then, at the bottom of the page you could reprint the symbol and insert your
comment. Here is an example:

This is an illustration of a footnote.1 The number “1” at the end of the previous
sentence corresponds with the note below. See how it fits in the body of the
text?

1 At the bottom of the page you can insert your comments about the sentence
preceding the footnote.

When your reader comes across the footnote in the main text of your paper, he or she
could look down at your comments right away, or else continue reading the paragraph
and read your comments at the end. Because this makes it convenient for your reader,
most citation styles require that you use either footnotes or endnotes in your paper.
Some, however, allow you to make parenthetical references (author, date) in the body
of your work. See our section on citation styles for more information.

Footnotes are not just for interesting comments, however. Sometimes they simply refer
to relevant sources -- they let your reader know where certain material came from, or
where they can look for other sources on the subject. To decide whether you should cite
your sources in footnotes or in the body of your paper, you should ask your instructor or
see our section on citation styles.

Where Does the Little Footnote Mark

Go?
Whenever possible, put the footnote at the end of a sentence, immediately following the
period or whatever punctuation mark completes that sentence. Skip two spaces after
the footnote before you begin the next sentence. If you must include the footnote in the
middle of a sentence for the sake of clarity, or because the sentence has more than one
footnote (try to avoid this!), try to put it at the end of the most relevant phrase, after a
comma or other punctuation mark. Otherwise, put it right at the end of the most relevant
word. If the footnote is not at the end of a sentence, skip only one space after it.

What's the Difference between

Footnotes and Endnotes?
The only real difference is placement -- footnotes appear at the bottom of the relevant
page, while endnotes all appear at the end of your document. If you want your reader to
read your notes right away, footnotes are more likely to get your reader's attention.
Endnotes, on the other hand, are less intrusive and will not interrupt the flow of your
paper.

If I Cite Sources in the Footnotes (or

Endnotes), How's that Different from
a Bibliography?
Sometimes you may be asked to include these -- especially if you have used a
parenthetical style of citation. A "works cited" page is a list of all the works from which
you have borrowed material. Your reader may find this more convenient than footnotes
or endnotes because he or she will not have to wade through all of the comments and
other information in order to see the sources from which you drew your material. A
"works consulted" page is a complement to a "works cited" page, listing all of the works
you used, whether they were useful or not.

Isn't a "Works Consulted" Page the

Same as a "Bibliography," Then?
Well, yes. The title is different because "works consulted" pages are meant to
complement "works cited" pages, and bibliographies may list other relevant sources in
addition to those mentioned in footnotes or endnotes. Choosing to title your bibliography
"Works Consulted" or "Selected Bibliography" may help specify the relevance of the
sources listed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY
 Bowman, John S., ed. The Vietnam War: An Almanac. New York: World
Almanac Publications, 1985. Bradley, Mark, Jayne Susan Werner, and
Luu Doan Huynh. The Vietnam War: Vietnamese and American
Perspectives. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993. Burk, Kathleen, and
Melvyn Stokes. The United States and the European Alliance since 1945.
Oxford, UK; New York: Berg, 1999. Butterfield, Fox. Introduction to The
Vietnam War: An Almanac, ed. John S. Bowman. New York: World
Almanac Publications, 1985. Chamberlain, Marlene. Review of The Girl in
the Picture: The Story of Kim Phuc and the Photograph That Changed
the Course of the Vietnam War, by Denise Chong. Booklist 96, no. 22
(2000): 2103. Chong, Denise. The Girl in the Picture: The Story of Kim
Phuc, the Photograph, and the Vietnam War. 1st American ed. New
York: Viking, 2000. Clinton, William J. "Memorandum on Vietnamese
Cooperation in Accounting for United States Prisoners of War and
Missing in Action, February 18, 2000." Weekly Compilation of
Presidential Documents 36, no. 8 (2000): 348-9. Coming to Terms:
American Plays & the Vietnam War. New York: Theatre Communications
Group, Guidelines for Footnotes and Bibliography
Footnotes and Bibliography (25.45 KB)

The Use of Footnotes

Footnotes are the acceptable method of acknowledging material which is not your own when you
use it in an essay. Basically, footnoted material is of three types:

1. Direct quotations from another author's work. (These must be placed in quotation marks).
2. Citing authority for statements which are not quoted directly.
3. Material of an explanatory nature which does not fit into the flow of the body of the text.

In the text of an essay, material to be footnoted should be marked with a raised number
immediately following the words or ideas that are being cited.

EXAMPLE:

"The only aspect of Frontenac's conduct the king...did not condemn was his care for military
security," Eccles stated, condemning Frontenac's administration.2
 The footnotes may be numbered in sequence on each page or throughout the entire essay.

I. Form and Content of Footnotes:

A. From a book:
1
W. J. Eccles, Frontenac The Courtier Governor (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited,
1959), 14.

[The information given in a footnote includes the author, the title, the place of publication, the
publisher, the date of publication and the page or pages on which the quotation or information is
found.]

B. From an article in a journal:

1
Peter Blickle, "Peasant Revolts in the German Empire in the Late Middle Ages," Social
History, Vol. IV, No. 2 (May, 1979), 233.

C. From a book containing quotations from other sources:

1
Eugene A. Forsey, "Was the Governor General's Refusal Constitutional?", cited in Paul
Fox, Politics: Canada (Toronto: McGraw-Hill Company of Canada Ltd., 1966), 186.

D. From a standard reference work:

1
Norman Ward, “Saskatchewan,” in The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., Vol. 3, 1935.

J. K. Johnson and P. B. Waite, “Macdonald, Sir John Alexander,” in The Dictionary of

2

Canadian Biography, Vol. 12, 599

E. From the Internet:

In citing material read on the Internet, it is not sufficient to indicate the website alone. You must
provide information about author, title, and date of the document you are using, as follows:
1
T. J. Pritzker, (1993). "An Early Fragment from Central Nepal"
[Online]. Available: http://www.ingress.com/~astanart/pritzker/pritzker.html [1995, June].

The final date [1995, June] is the date the website was consulted.

For more information about how to cite electronic information see Xia Li and Nancy Crane, The
Handbook for Citing Electronic Resources or http://www.uvm.edu/~ncrane/estyles/.

II. Rules to Remember in Writing Footnotes:

1. Titles of books, journals or magazines should be underlined or italicized.

2. Titles of articles or chapters—items which are only a part of a book--are put in quotation
marks.

III. Abbreviating in Footnotes:

The first time any book or article is mentioned in a footnote, all the information requested above
must be provided. After that, however, there are shortcuts which should be used:

(a) Several quotations in sequence from the same book:

The abbreviation to be used is "Ibid.," a Latin word meaning "in the same place." (Notice that
Ibid. is not underlined). Ibid. can be used by itself, if you are referring to the same page as the
previous footnote does, or it can be combined with a page number or numbers.

Example:
1
Gerald Friesen, The Canadian Prairies: A History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1984), 78.
2
Ibid.
3
Ibid., 351.

(b) Reference to a source that already has been cited in full form but not in the
reference immediately preceding, is made by using the author's last name (but not the first name
or initials unless another author of the same surname has been cited), the title--in shortened form,
if desired--and the page number.

Example:
1
William Kilbourn, The Firebrand (Toronto: Clark, Irwin and Company Limited, 1956), 35.
2
John L. Tobias, "Canada's Subjugation of the Plains Cree, 1879-1885," in Sweet Promises: A
Reader on Indian-White Relations in Canada, ed. J. R. Miller (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1991), 224.
3
Kilbourn, The Firebrand, 87.
4
Tobias, "Canada's Subjugation of the Plains Cree," 226.

Bibliography
The bibliography should be on a separate page. It should list the relevant sources used in the
research for the paper. This list should be arranged alphabetically by the surname of the
author. (Unlike the footnote reference, the surname is shown first, set off from the rest of the
information.) The information required is: author, title, place of publication, publisher and date
of publication.

NOTE: The information is separated for the most part by periods (rather than by commas, as in
the footnotes) and the parentheses enclosing the facts of publication are dropped.

EXAMPLE:
Eccles, W. J. Frontenac The Courtier Governor. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Limited,
1959.

Johnson, J. K. and P. B. Waite. “Macdonald, Sir John Alexander.” In The Dictionary of

Canadian Biography, Vol. 12,
591-612.

Koenigsberger, H. G. and George L. Mosse. Europe in the Sixteenth

Century. London: Longmans, 1971.

Laslett, Peter. "The Gentry of Kent in 1640," Cambridge Historical Journal, Vol. IX, No. 2
(Spring 1948): 18-35.

Pritzker, T. J. (1993). "An Early Fragment from Central Nepal," [Online]. http://www.ingress.
com/~astanart/pritzker
/pritzker.html. [1995 June].

Tobias, John L. "Canada's Subjugation of the Plains Cree, 1879-1885." In Sweet Promises: A
Reader on Indian-White
Relations in Canada, ed. J. R. Miller. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991: 212-240.

Ward, N. “Saskatchewan.” In The Canadian Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., Vol. 3, 1931-1938.

Notes
A note tells where you learned something you wrote in your paper. Every time you quote someone or
mention a fact that needs backing up, put a note number right there in the text.
For instance, if you say in your paper that most American students write their papers the night before
they’re due, put a note number at the end of that sentence.1 That small number says, “See note 1 for my
source.” If you quote a researcher who wrote, “Papers written the night before they’re due tend to be
shorter than other papers,”2 put a note number at the end of the quote. That little 2 says, “See note 2 for
the source of this quote.”
In your notes, write your sources. Let’s say that the source in note 1 is a book and the source in note 2 is an
article. Books and articles have slightly different formats. If you learn those two formats, you’re halfway
there:

1. Sara Stickler, Habits of Harried Students (New York: Vanity Press, 2013), 42.
2. Howard Noggin and Shirley Noddin, “The Psychology of Paper-Writing Panic,” Brain Fun Newsletter 32
(2013): 4.
If you put all your notes together at the end of your paper in one list, they’re called endnotes. If you put
each note at the bottom of the page where its text number appears, they’re called footnotes. Endnotes and
footnotes are exactly the same except for where you put them. Your instructor will probably tell you which
to use.

Bibliographies
A bibliography is a list of the sources you used in your notes. (Some teachers might also ask you to include
sources you read but didn’t end up actually using. You might also be asked to include sources you didn’t
read but that would be of interest for further reading. Be sure to ask what your instructor expects you to
include in your bibliography.)
The sources are in alphabetical order by the author’s last name. The author’s last name comes first to
make alphabetizing easier:
Noggin, Howard, and Shirley Noddin. “The Psychology of Paper-Writing Panic.” Brain Fun Newsletter 32
(2013): 4.
Stickler, Sara. Habits of Harried Students. New York: Vanity Press, 2013.

Another system
This post has described the “notes-bibliography system.” Some teachers may ask you to use the “author-
date system” of citing. You can read about that system here (click on the “Author-Date” tab).
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