You may have asked yourself: How does she come up with such funny and clever titles for these articles, day in and day out, week after week, year after year? The answer is, I don’t know. They just offer themselves to me. They spring, fully formed, from my skull like Athena from the temples of Zeus. Today’s is especially inspired. I originally called it “Bibliomania” but then this new title manifested from the ether and I was compelled to switch. I’ll use “Bibliomania” another time.
Why do I feel like this is going to be a long and involved Shelf Life? Probably because I have more to say about references than a normal person would ever want to hear. For what it’s worth, the amount a normal person wants to hear about reference lists and citations is zero. If you have a normal-person amount of interest in references, you should stop reading now. As it is, you’ve already read too much.
What I’m not going to cover in this article is how to format the references in your bibliography, because reference formatting depends upon the style manual used for whatever publication your work will appear in (if a short work) or the publishing company uses (if a longform work). There’s no reason for me to go into the fine points of Chicago reference style when you may very well be called to use APA, for example.
I’m also not going to cover the circumstances under which you have to cite your source. That is a topic, or probably a whole series of topics, for another day (other days).
What I am going to cover in this article is:
Difference between a reference list and a bibliography, and when to use each.
The difference between footnotes, endnotes, and parenthetical citations—and when to use each.
Technical issues in publication that can arise if you try to include multiple reference lists in one work.
Reference list helper tools.
Which is plenty to be getting on with.
A few preliminaries before we dive into this very exciting topic.
First, I want you to know that if you are writing for publication by another entity—that is, you’re not self-publishing—for instance, if you are writing an article for publication in a journal or writing a nonfiction book to publish with a publishing company—then formatting your reference list perfectly is probably not necessary. Hands down, the most important thing is to include all the information readers need to find the work you are citing. Formatting that information correctly is much less important.
This is because many publishers now employ automatic cleanup and pre-editing processes as part of production that handle a lot of the cleanup production editors used to do by hand (and by hand I mean personally, but with a computer). When I started in book production, manuscripts coming into production would be run through a series of Word macros to clean them up basic formatting stuff like:
Removing extra spaces after a period (ONE space after a period is the correct number);
Replacing two or more hyphens in succession (--) with the em dash (—) character;
Removing blank lines between paragraphs;
Replacing a bunch of spaces at the start of each paragraph with an automatic tab;
Running spell check and correcting obvious misspellings;
Replacing straight quotes (the prime ʹ and double prime ʺ marks) with curly or “smart” quotes;
And so on. For the record, this was as tedious as it sounds. Today, all of that (and a lot more) is done by software before the manuscript is handed over to a copyeditor to do the substantive editing. In my experience with multiple providers of this service/software, the pre-editing algorithm can format references automatically. Some of them even reach out to online sources like PubMed and WorldCat and verify that the information is correct, returning a query for a human to investigate if they can’t find the source or something is wrong.
All this to say, I get authors reaching out to me to ask how they should format their reference list for their papers ahead of submission and my answer is: Don’t. Don’t waste your time. If you’ve included all the information we need to find the source you’re citing, we can take it from there.
As a writer, I wouldn’t assume this—but I would ask the publisher how much effort to put into your reference list before you put in the effort. Never send a person to do a computer’s job.
I forgot the second preliminary thing so we’ll just move on.
Remember when you were in college and you would get marked down if your bibliography wasn’t formatted perfectly? I want you to know that the same professors who marked you down for handing in an imperfect bibliography are the people who turn in the sloppiest, shoddiest bibliographies I have ever seen. I used to produce textbooks, which are primarily written by college professors. And, whew, the reference lists they’d turn in. Embarrassing.
If you are writing a work of nonfiction, of any length, you may find you need to cite some sources. It’s possible that not all the information in your work is going to come from within your own skull. You may be sharing information from another source, and you need to point your readers to that source so they can go see it for themselves, if they want to.
Citations are very important in scholarly and academic publishing. In fact, the impact factor of a journal is derived using citations to that journal in the numerator. You can read more about impact factor at Clarivate. To summarize, the impact factor of a journal is a metric that generally helps measure how influential that journal is in its field.
Any citation includes two parts. There’s a callout, which appears within the running text and indicates that “this text right here comes from or otherwise relates to a source that we’re citing.” The callout may be a superscript number1 (Roman or Arabic) or letter, or it could be a numeral in parentheses(1), or it could be a parenthetical citation (Forrest 2023), which is sometimes called an “author-date-style” citation because the parentheses contain—you’ll never believe this—the author’s surname and the publication year. The callout in the text points to a corresponding reference in the reference list, like this:
Forrest, Catherine E. "Referential Treatment." Shelf Life 3, no. 6 (2023). Accessed January 19, 2023. https://catherineforrest.substack.com/.
If you’re wondering why I characterized this as Shelf Life 3, no. 6, it’s because we’re in the third volume of Shelf Life (vol 1 being 2021, vol 2 being 2022, and vol 3 being 2023) and this article the sixth of the year.
So. That’s what a citation is.
You may choose to include your citations in a reference list (also called a works cited list) or in a bibliography (which is also, rarely, called a works consulted list). The difference between a reference list and a bibliography is that a reference list contains only works that have been cited within your work—only works you mention directly. A bibliography may contain works that are not cited within your work (not mentioned directly), if they were consulted in the research or writing process or provide additional information germane to the topic of your work.
A reference list has all the other works directly cited in your work and no additional references. A bibliography has all the other works directly cited in your work and additional references.
For this reason, a bibliography is often linked to parenthetical citations (eg, “Forrest 2023”) instead of numeric callouts like this.2 Not every reference in a bibliography is going to have a corresponding callout, because some of those works are not cited directly. With the author-date parenthetical citation, references in the list go in alpha order by author name (or, less often, by date of publication) and it doesn’t matter if they all have a callout or not—you know where to put your “Smith 2003” reference in relation to your “Forrest 2023” reference and your “Jackson 2019” reference, and it does not matter what order they appeared in the text.
When each reference is assigned a number (or letter) as they appear in the text, the reference list is then ordered according to those numbers. So if I cite Forrest3 first, and then Smith et al,4 and finally Jackson and colleagues,5 that’s the order they’ll appear in the reference list. Alpha order and year of publication don’t matter.
When using the numeric callouts for each reference, you’re using either footnote or endnote style. The main difference is that footnotes appear at the bottom of the page upon which the callout appears, and endnotes appear at the end of the paper, chapter, or book.
From a production and page-composition standpoint, endnotes are way better because you don’t have to change the text-block size of each page manually depending on how many footnote references fall on that page. In truth, though, footnotes and endnotes serve a bit of a different purpose.
A footnote is best used to as a space for additional information to accompany the text. For instance, if I wanted to add a funny anecdote about footnotes (as if I didn’t already share all my referential humor), a footnote would be a good place to do that. It’s not a citation to another source, just a bit of extra information. Endnotes are better for references.
Occasionally, an author will want to include both: Footnotes for extra tidbits of information and endnotes to include references. Or, they might have another situation that calls for multiple sets of references, like the set of references (for example, 1 through 50) that go with the main text plus another set of references (for example, a through e) that go with (for example) Table 1.
From a technical publishing standpoint, this is probably fine as long as you’re using different numbering/lettering systems, for instance, Arabic numerals for endnotes, Roman numerals for footnotes, and letters for Table 1’s notes. If you try to include multiple reference lists using the same numbering system, that’s going to cause a linking problem when you try to publish online or in an electronic format. Beware.
While I’m on the topic of footnotes, there’s a couple more things to mention. One is the symbol “numbering” system (obviously it’s not a numbering system if it’s letters or symbols but I don’t know what else to call it). If there will be only a small number of notes (such as for a table or figure, or a handful of scattered footnotes), the symbol system can be used. The asterisk (*) is commonly the first one used, but you can’t use the asterisk for more than one note in the same list because then you can’t tell which callout goes with which note. So you use a progression of symbols in order, for instance:
Asterisk (*)
Double asterisk (**)
Dagger (†)
Double dagger (‡)
Section mark (§)
Parallels (ǁ)
Hash (#)
Pilcrow (¶)
(This is the order prescribed by Chicago Manual, by the way, but different publishers may have different preferences).
The other thing to mention is the unnumbered footnote. In the event that you have only one footnote and it comes right at the start of the text—for instance, if it is a footnote to the article or chapter byline—you can run that as an unnumbered footnote at the bottom of the first page. No callout is necessary for the unnumbered footnote but it should be obvious what it belongs with. For instance, it might be a biographical note about the author. If the author on the byline were “Catherine E Forrest,” an unnumbered footnote at the bottom of page one might read: “Catherine E Forrest is an editor from Maryland, United States.” It is obvious that this note refers to the author on the byline.
Let’s say that you’re going to self-publish, or for whatever reason you do want to prepare a perfectly formatted reference list, but as a normal human person you have no interest in the tedious process. Good news! There are a number of reference management programs out there that can help you format your reference list. The most well-known of these, from my perspective anyway, are Elsevier’s Mendeley and Clarivate’s EndNote. EndNote costs money, I think Mendeley can be used for free but I haven’t tried in quite a while.
They are both pretty robust software packages that do a lot, but if you just need help with formatting your reference list—and if you don’t need an unusual style—Grammarly has a free citation generator that can help. You paste or type your information into a series of fields and it spits out a reference for you in APA, MLA, or Chicago style.
Anyway don’t be a sucker and spend more than the bare minimum amount of time on references and citations. Definitely don’t spend a bunch of time writing about references and citations. You’d have to be a weirdo for that.
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Endnotes
This is an endnote.
Also an endnote.
An endnote citing Forrest 2023.
An endnote citing Smith et al 2003.
An endnote citing Jackson et al 2019.