10 Footnotes and bibliographies
Nearly all historians in North America who write in English use the Chicago Manual of Style/Turabian Style for citations. This includes both footnotes (or endnotes) and a bibliography at the end of the essay. Footnotes indicate to your reader where your information or ideas came from. The bibliography lists – in alphabetical order by author’s last name – all the sources you used. Proper citations are a fundamental rule of academic writing, as they allow readers to verify the accuracy and veracity of the information that you have provided. Citing styles vary from discipline to discipline, but the obligation to cite does not. It is entirely acceptable to present another person’s ideas in your essay. However, it must be done appropriately to avoid plagiarism (see previous page for more information). History essays typically use footnotes rather than endnotes. Footnotes are inserted into the text at the end of a sentence (after the period) or at the end of a quote (after the quotation marks). Footnotes are numbered sequentially using Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3, etc).
What should you footnote?
- All direct quotations, including from the internet
- Any summary of another person’s words or ideas (simply paraphrasing or rewording someone else’s ideas without citing the source of those ideas is still plagiarism)
- The use of someone else’s data or statistics.
- You do not need to footnote general knowledge. This includes basic facts that can be found in any general textbook or encyclopedia.
How much should you footnote?
If you are footnoting each sentence, it is a sign that you are compiling information, rather than doing your own analysis. A rough rule of thumb is that there should be two to four footnotes per page, on average.
Bibliographies are placed at the end of the essay, starting on a new page. List the sources that you used alphabetically, by the author’s or editors’ last name (if there is more than one author or editor, use the first name listed to determine where to put the source in alphabetical order). Where there is no author or editor, list the source by its title. Include only those sources that you actually used to write your paper, and make sure to include a sufficient mix of appropriate books and scholarly articles. List primary sources (original documents) separately from secondary sources (books or articles written about events by historians): you can separate them under the subheadings Primary Sources and Secondary Sources.
The format style for footnotes differs slightly from that for bibliographies. The most common examples of both are provided below. For many additional formatting examples, see the Chicago Manual of Style, 17th edition, which is available electronically through the University of Ottawa library.
Footnote and bibliography format samples are provided in Section 3 of this book.
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