9.18 Reference Notes, General

Reference notes may be found within a text (in-text notes), but are usually presented at the foot of a page (footnotes) or at the end of a chapter or document (endnotes). Reference notes pertain to works that have been directly cited or paraphrased, whereas a bibliography lists the works consulted. Footnotes and endnotes are generally referenced by means of a raised (superscript) numeral, letter or symbol immediately following the item in question. The superscript follows all punctuation marks except the dash:

• As Kenneth Dyer points out in a recent article,¹ the ambassador’s criticism of the countries involved²—India, Pakistan and Bangladesh—upset a number of delegates.

The principal differences between notes and bibliographies are as follows:

• Reference note entries are numbered.
• The author’s name is not inverted.
• Components of the entries are separated by commas rather than periods, and there is a space but no punctuation between the title and the opening parenthesis before the publication information.
• The publication data is placed within parentheses.
• Page numbers indicate the exact position of the citation.

© Public Services and Procurement Canada, 2024
TERMIUM Plus^®, the Government of Canada's terminology and linguistic data bank
Writing tools – The Canadian Style
A product of the Translation Bureau