Cliff notes?
Clifford's Advice on NotesPreparing notes need not be the frightening task it often appears to be. Just keep in mind the purpose of notes: they aid your reader to understand and assess what you have written. Because they contain both information and documentation, notes are an integral part of a good research paper, meant to be read with it.
Most professors will give you a choice between footnotes and endnotes. Footnotes appear at the bottom of the page, and thus are easier to read along with the text. Use the form your professor requests or choose the form you prefer.
There are two general types of notes. The reference note tells the reader the source of the information, and gives credit to the author of a quotation, an idea, or a body of research. Reference notes help the reader make a critical assessment of the history you have written, since they indicate the kind of documentation (whether primary or secondary), date, and author. In a very important sense, reference notes are your way of "proving" your historical case, by reference to publicly verifiable evidence.
The explanatory note carries additional information which is not essential to your text but might be useful or interesting to the reader. For example, explanatory notes may contain translations (or the original) of foreign phrases, provide additional data on a subject mentioned in the body of the paper, or discuss conflicting evidence on a particular point. In practice most explanatory notes also contain references, citing the source of the information in the note.
Every historian must learn the mechanics of notes, because no scholarly work is complete without them. Like the rules of grammar, the rules governing notes provide us with a common basis for communication; and as with grammar, once you have mastered it, you no longer need to think about it -- it's purely mechanical.
When to NoteYou must use a note to acknowledge the source for direct quotations, paraphrases, and use of someone else's ideas or research. Failure to do so constitutes plagiarism. If that advice seems to translate into one note per sentence, do not despair: while the sentence containing a direct quotation must be followed by a note, you may group other references into a single note placed at the end of a related body of material (almost never more than a paragraph). See the example on the style sheet that follows this section.
Numbering NotesThe note number appears in your text at the end of the sentence which contains the material cited, even if the quotation is in the middle of the sentence. The number comes after the period, and should be slightly raised, like this.1
Number notes consecutively through a paper (or a chapter, if you are writing a longer work). Do not use the same number twice, even if the reference is the same. Historians write for the general public as well as the specialist, and therefore the note form must make it easy for the reader, not for the writer.
The Content of NotesA reference note must supply the information necessary to enable the reader to identify and locate the source. Your reader must be able to tell whether the source is a manuscript, a book, an article, a newspaper, a videotape, a Web page, or an oral interview. Your reader must know when and where the source was written or published, and in the case of a manuscript where the collection is located (usually the archive or library and city). A note must also include the page reference, electronic address, or document number of your source.
If you approach note content logically, including all of the necessary information in a consistent form, the process will become truly mechanical.
In most cases, note punctuation does not make grammatical sense. It is, however, an arbitrary system that is generally accepted and must be followed.
The style sheet which follows illustrates a generally acceptable form for notes (based on the Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, the department's official format; Kate L. Turabian, A Manual for Writers of Term Papers, Theses, and Dissertations, 6th ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996 is the shorter version). The commentary following most examples provides information that will help you construct your own notes.
Style Sheet, with Explanatory CommentsProvide the full information about a source only once, the first time you note that source.
For subsequent references, use one of two shorter forms. If the subsequent reference is immediately after the first one, use ibid., which is a Latin abbreviation (thus the period at the end of the word) for "in the same place." It is no longer necessary to italicize the term, even though it is a foreign word. If the page number and/or volume number is the same, use ibid alone; if either changes, use a form like ibid., 37.
For subsequent references which do not immediately follow the first citation, use one of two short forms. The preferred method is the short title: the author's last name, short title and page number. You may also use the author's last name and a page number, but only if you are using no other works by that person (or any person with that last name). In the examples that follow, the reference numbered 1 gives the form for a first citation; the reference numbered 3 illustrates the short title form, for all subsequent references except where ibid. is appropriate.
This style sheet shows book and journal titles italicized; you may underline as a standard alternative. The titles of journal articles always appear in quotation marks.
The small-text comments after each example provide further explanation of note mechanics.
1 Books1.1 Basic:
1 George Rudé, The Crowd in the French Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1959), 67.
Do not reverse the author's first and last names in notes. Use reverse form only for bibliographies where you will alphabetize works by the author's last name. Generally, undergraduate research papers require only notes.
It is now accepted practice to omit the publisher's name, in which case the material in parentheses would be (London, 1959). The date is the copyright date, not the date of the printing.
3 Rudé, Crowd, 74-75.
Choose a short title that makes it easy for the reader to find the book in either your bibliography or the first reference.
1.2 Multiple Authors/Group or Organization as Author/Unknown Author:
1 Fred E. Inbau, James R. Thompson, and Claude R. Sowle, Cases and Comments on Criminal Justice (Mineola, N.Y.: The Foundation Press, 1968), 424.
List authors in the order presented in the book. If the author is an organization, whether the Red Cross or the U.S. Congress, use the group's name as you would a person's. If the author is anonymous, begin the note with the title.
You must include N.Y. after Mineola because the city is not well-known. For major cities no state or country is necessary. We assume Paris refers to the city in France unless you add information after the name of the city (for example, Paris, Tex.).
3 Inbau et al, Cases and Comments, 4.
Et al is Latin for "and the others," and saves having to repeat a long list of authors. Use only for four or more authors; for two or three authors, use the format Adams, Adams, and Jefferson.
1.3 Multi-Volume work:
1 William Conrad Gibbons, The U.S. Government and the Vietnam War, 2 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1986), 2:73.
Even if the publishers use Roman numerals for the volumes, you may (and probably should) use Arabic numerals. For example, with scholarly journal volume 87 is much easier to comprehend than volume LXXXVII.
It is not absolutely necessary to give the total number of volumes of a work, but that information can help your reader. If you do not include the number of volumes, the relevant portion of the note would be ...Vietnam War, vol. 2 (Princeton University Press, 1986), 73.
3 Gibbons, U.S. Government and Vietnam, 2:245.
1.4 Translation:
1 Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum, trans. William Weaver (San Diego: Harcourt, 1989), 325.
You must include the translator's name, because otherwise your reader would assume that Eco wrote in English. Some books have been translated more than once, and translations vary in reliability. For all of those reasons, your reader must know the translator's name. However, the name of the translator does not appear in subsequent citations; for those, use the basic format described in 1.1. The only exception to this rule is the obvious one: if you are citing more than one translation, you will need to distinguish between them. In that case, you will probably want to use some form of abbreviation as indicated in example 7.1.
1.5 Edited book:
1 Margaret Higonnet, ed., Lines of Fire: Women Writers of World War I (New York: Penguin Putnam, 1999), xxii.
Margaret Higonnet would appear in this form as author only when you cite either her contribution to the book or the entire book. Otherwise you list as author the person who wrote the article or chapter you are using, as illustrated in the next example.
The lower case Roman numeral used for the page number represents a frequent practice of numbering pages in the editor's or author's introduction in Latin. You may not change these numbers to Arabic, because to do so would be to give the book two different page 6s.
3 Higonnet, Lines of Fire, xxv.
1.6 Article or Chapter in an edited book or anthology:
1 Peter Paret, "Clausewitz and the Nineteenth Century," in Michael Howard, ed., The Theory and Practice of War (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1965), 29.
Quotation marks indicate that the work in question is not a separately bound item, but is part of a larger work.
If you have not cited the Peter Paret chapter, but have cited other chapters from the same book and so have already given the full information on Howard's book, then use the short form after giving the complete author and article/chapter title.
3 Paret, "Clausewitz," 33, 42.
Use a comma to separate non-consecutive page citations. Use a hyphen to indicate inclusive pages, as in 33-42.
1.7 Quotation in one book from another book:
1 Lytton Strachey, Literary Essays, 220-25, as quoted in Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), 3.
At a minimum, the note must indicate Lytton Strachey, as quoted in.... The reasons are serious ones. First, you may not lie to your reader by copying Fussell's note and implying that you read the original rather than Fussell's extract. Second, it is just possible that Fussell misquoted or quoted out of context. If he did, you have at least told your reader that responsibility for the misquote goes to Fussell rather than you.
3 Siegfried Sassoon, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer 71, as quoted in Fussell, Great War, 29.
1.8 Encyclopedias and other reference works:
1 A.J.P. Taylor, "Bismarck, Count Otto von," Encyclopaedia Britannica (3rd ed., 1957).
Some reference articles are unsigned; if so, begin with the title just as you would with any unknown author.
Notice the spelling of Encyclopaedia. This work uses the Latin form. Always check to make sure that you have reproduced your source exactly.
When the item is arranged alphabetically in the work as it is in encyclopedias, volume and page number are unnecessary.
The edition number is necessary for books as well as reference works, as the text changes from one edition to another. When you do not include an edition number for a book or reference work, we assume that you are citing the first edition.
3 Taylor, "Bismarck," Encyclopaedia Britannica.
In theory you do not have to include Encyclopaedia Britannica in the short form. However, Taylor has written much on Bismarck. If you are citing this particular piece it is likely that the paper will also include references to others of Taylor's more substantial works on Bismarck. It is better to include too much than too little information.
2 Periodicals2.1 Newspapers:
1 [Jacksonville] Florida Times-Union, January 12, 1996.
Material in brackets [ ], as you may have guessed by now, indicates the author's intrusion -- whether into a footnote formula or into a direct quotation. In this case, the reader needs the city name to locate the newspaper. In other cases it is the name of the state, or even both state and city, that must be inserted. For example, The Times [London] is the correct citation.
There is no short form for newspapers except through abbreviation, as explained in 7.1.
2.2 General-circulation magazines:
1 Evan Thomas and Stuart Taylor Jr., "Judging Roberts," Newsweek, August 1, 2005, 24.
For major magazines like this one, no publisher is needed. For smaller and less known magazines, such as literary or special-interest publications, you should add the information necessary for your reader to locate the source.
3 Thomas and Taylor, "Judging Roberts," 27.
2.3 Scholarly Journals:
1 Margaret H. Darrow, "French Volunteer Nursing and the Myth of War Experience," American Historical Review, 101 (1996): 85.
Some periodicals appear not in volumes but in issue numbers. In that case the format would be no.2 (1989): 26.
3 Darrow, "French Volunteer Nursing," 92.
3 Manuscript (Unpublished) Sources
3.1 Document in a collection of papers:
1 General Ambrose E. Burnside to Elihu Benjamin Washburne, October 11, 1870, vol. 71, Washburne Papers, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
The basic format for unpublished material is to include the following, in this order: (1) Title or description of document and date, (2) box or carton or folio number or other identifying specific, (3) name of collection, (4) depository or library, and city where it is located. Some manuscript collections are arranged in volumes, others in numbered cartons, and others are uncatalogued. Use whatever identifying specifics you have to help your reader locate the item.
The abbreviation ms. is often used for manuscript.
3 Burnside to Washburne, October 11, 1870, Washburne Papers.
3.2 Unpublished manuscripts:
1 Edwin Child, "Memoirs," King's College, London, 43.
This particular manuscript has page numbers and is bound together. However, the title appears in quotation marks rather than being italicized because it is unpublished.
3 Child, "Memoirs," 56.
3.3 Thesis or dissertation:
1 Francis X. Gannon, "A Study of Elihu Benjamin Washburne," (Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, 1950), 6.
3 Gannon, "Study of Washburne," 49.
