Using footnotes and citations are a way to make sure that you attribute any information that comes from an outside source. This includes both primary sources, such as newspapers, government documents, public records, interviews, and other archival materials, as well as secondary sources, which includes books, articles, film, or internet sources about your subject.

A citation refers to the actual text that refers to an outside source. Footnotes are a particular kind of citation that appears at the bottom of the page. All word processors have a built-in footnote function that you absolutely should use.

In-text vs. Notes

There are two main kinds of citations: in-text citations (aka parenthetical citations) and either footnotes or endnotes. Endnotes are only used for some books, don’t worry about them for now. You may be familiar with in-text or parenthetical citations already: these use what is called the “Author-Date” system to place a citation directly within the text as you’re reading. They look like this:

Samples taken from: Cloke, Paul and Mark Goodwin. “Conceptualizing Countryside Change: From Post-Fordism to Rural Structured Coherence.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers New Series 17, no. 3 (1992): 321–36.

On the left, the citation refers to a paraphrased idea, that is, an idea from an outside source put into the author’s own words. On the right, the author is directly quoting a term, “societalization,” from the cited source.

Neither of these citations tell the whole story, because we don’t know enough about the citation from just the author and date in parenthesis. This is why when using author-date, a writer MUST  also have a works cited list at the end of the paper. This reference list of all the citations throughout the article will tell us exactly where to find the articles or book cited in the author-date citations.

Footnotes, on the other hand, provide all the bibliographic data directly in the citation at the bottom of the page. They look like this:

As you can see, the footnotes contain all of the bibliographic information (author full names, titles, publication information, and in this case, page numbers for direct quotations. While a works cited page is not always required when footnotes are done accurately (because all the necessary information is in the footnote citation), many authors still include a bibliography or works cited page, in part so that all of the sources are listed together in one place. For a shorter paper with few sources, it is even less necessary, but it is always a good practice to include one.

Making a Footnote

To make footnotes, use your word processor’s “Insert footnote” function. In Microsoft Word for Mac, this is found in the “References” tab at the top. All other word processors also have this ability.

This feature is great because if you move footnotes around, or delete one, it will automatically renumber the notes.

Style

How you format your footnote citation is known as its style. There are many styles that are widely used; the two most popular for the humanities are MLA and Chicago Style.  There are excellent summaries of these two styles on the Purdue OWL site which will provide you with most of what you need:

Each field has its own preferences for style; most humanities professors will use either MLA or Chicago. Prof. Rosenberg doesn’t really care which you use, so long as you are consistent within your paper. For this assignment, if you only have a couple cited sources you probably don’t need a works cited page.  Note that there are slight differences in formatting for citations in footnotes vs. a bibliography or works cited page, mostly concerned with name order and periods vs. commas. Just follow the templates.

If you have questions feel free to email Jake.