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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.

9.19 Books

If it is not included in a bibliography, cite the source work in detail the first time it is noted. A footnote or endnote description of a book should contain the same information as a standard bibliographic reference (see 9.08 Compiling a bibliographic entry(a)).

The place of publication, publisher’s name and date of publication should be enclosed in parentheses, but page references should remain outside the parentheses. The author’s name is followed by a comma, the name of the place of publication is followed by a colon and one space, and the publisher’s name is followed by a comma. A comma follows the parentheses:

  • 1. Michael Ondaatje, The Cinnamon Peeler (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1992), p. 13.

If the source material is listed in a bibliography at the end of the text, reference notes may not require elaborate treatment. The first reference to a book may comprise only the author’s initials and surname, the title of the work, and the relevant page number(s).