Documentation

When you write an academic essay, it is essential to document fully your sources of information, ideas and arguments. This is basic intellectual honesty, and it is at the heart of good scholarship. There are three conventional ways of acknowledging your sources: in-text citations, footnotes, or end-notes. However, these are not equally appropriate in every intellectual discipline. In-text citations are not suitable in history and the humanities. They tend to clutter up the text of your essay and (when abbreviated) they often fail to provide sufficient information. They also are inconvenient for the reader who is forced to constantly refer to a reference list at the end of the paper. End-notes also suffer from this latter disadvantage. If you are using a typewriter, we will reluctantly accept end-notes, but if you are using a word-processor you can and should use footnotes. So please avoid in-text citations, and if possible employ footnotes rather than end-notes.

Bibliographical citations, both in footnotes and in your reference list at the end of the essay, should be provided in full, not in abbreviated or short-hand form. Do not use APA style. Traditional British, Chicago, or Modern Language Association (MLA) style are all acceptable, although Chicago style is preferable. However, if you are using Chicago or MLA style, please make sure your citations are in full (not abbreviated) format and that they are given as footnotes (not as in-text citations). The advantage of using traditional British style is that you have at your disposal such useful abbreviation devices as ibid, op. cit. and loc. cit., conventions that some American styles spurn for no good reason. However, Chicago style does admit the use of such traditional abbreviations, provided that they are used carefully and in moderation.

Students sometimes wonder how extensive their documentation should be. The short answer is: very extensive. It is important to document the sources of your ideas and interpretations as well as all the figures, dates, and other specific factual information that you are asking you reader to accept as true. In principal, every fact and idea in the essay should be footnoted, although you have to make some judgements about what it is necessary or reasonable and useful to document. Very basic information that is to be found in every textbook does not require a citation. However, any idea, argument, statistic, or piece of information that is in the least bit controversial or challengeable does require a footnote indicating your source. A good rule of thumb is: when in doubt, document your source. On average you will need at least two or three footnotes per paragraph. Incidentally, your course materials (textbooks, readers, and study guide) are sources, and you are expected to make use of them (and to cite them properly) in your essays. Another important point is that, wherever possible, you must find and document the original source of a quotation, which is normally a primary source, rather than merely citing a secondary source that has made use of that statement or information before you have. If you cannot locate the original source of a quotation, then you must still indicate who said or wrote it, but with the phase “as quoted by . . .,” followed by a full citation of the secondary source.

Knowing when to use a footnote is a fundamental skill that you will develop as you learn to refine your scholarship and your writing. Generally speaking, there are four occasions when footnotes are either necessary or useful.

1. Footnotes must always accompany a quotation. The essay is a product of your thinking and should be written in your own words. You may, however, come across a passage in your reading that expresses perfectly an idea that you think is necessary to include. Simply to copy another writer’s text into your essay without acknowledging the source is plagiarism. In academic circles plagiarism is considered a grave offence, and can lead to serious consequences. You may, however, copy the passage and acknowledge the source in a footnote. If the quotation is longer than four or five lines, it should be indented and single-spaced, and followed by a superscripted number: ¹
2. Footnotes are also used to acknowledge intellectual indebtedness in a more general manner. For example, you may have summarized in one paragraph the main ideas and arguments of a scholarly paper that you are listing in your bibliography. Even if you have employed no direct quotations, it is customary to have a footnote at the end of the paragraph indicating the source of the information contained therein.
3. Similarly, if you are discussing (in your own words) several alternative interpretations of a topic or controversial issue you can (and should) use footnotes to indicate to your reader the books and articles in which each of these interpretations has been advanced. Often the way in which a topic or issue is conceptualized, and the terms which are employed to discuss it, implicitly suggest an interpretation or perspective on the subject. Different authors use the same or similar terminology, but they mean something different by those same words. An example of this kind of problem is the ambiguity of terms used in the periodization of history. The term “pre-modern,” for instance, is normally used to describe the many centuries before the beginning of the “modern era” which is usually seen as beginning with the Renaissance in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries; but “pre-modern” can also be employed as a synonym for “pre-industrial,” that is, before the process of industrialization (the “Industrial Revolution”) that began in the late eighteenth century and continues to this day. So “pre-modern” can mean either “before the fifteenth century” or “before the nineteenth century,” and it is sometimes even used to mean “before the twentieth century.” Yet a historian who conceives of “modernization” as a lengthy process which took the West five centuries clearly has a different perspective on this process than an economist who is thinking exclusively (or even primarily) of the changes brought about by twentieth-century technological advances. Hence if you are discussing a topic such as “modernization,” you will find it advisable to document the source of each interpretation and each way of using key terminology.
4. Footnotes may also be used to make an explanation that would otherwise interrupt the flow of the argument, to explain a foreign word or phrase, or to give additional biographical information. However, if you find that you are using explanatory footnotes too often, you should re-think your outline. In the main, if something is important enough to be included in your essay at all, it should find an appropriate place in your main text. Explanatory footnotes should be the exception, not the rule, and you should always have a very good reason for resorting to them.

In each of these four cases, the material you have cited, the phrase or sentence, is followed by a small superscripted Arabic number, as indicated at the end of point 1 (above). This number refers to the bibliographical material that appears at the bottom of the page. The first time you refer to a book, you should always provide a full bibliographical reference.

Please note that there is a difference between the way you list an item in your bibliography and the way you cite it in a footnote. In a footnote or end-note, you write the citation as follows:

Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970 (Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 173.

The second time that you refer to the same work, you do so in short form:

Cohen, Rainbow Quest, 207.

In the bibliography, which is arranged alphabetically, you provide the author’s surname first, as in the following example:

Cohen, Ronald. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970. Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003.