Expanded Reference Guide

5. Limiting footnotes

Footnotes count towards your essay's wordcount, so you might want to think about how to limit the number and length of your footnotes. Here are some acceptable methods to do this:

Shortening titles

The majority of titles should be given in full as they appear on the title page. Where a work has a very long title, it is acceptable to abbreviate it:

John Lindsay, The Evangelical History of our Lord Jesus Christ: Harmonized, Explained and Illustrated with Variety of Notes Practical, Historical, and Critical, 2 vols (London: Newbery and Collins, 1757). 

Instead of:

John Lindsay, The Evangelical History of our Lord Jesus Christ: Harmonized, Explained and Illustrated with Variety of Notes Practical, Historical, and Critical. To which is Subjoined, an Account of the Propagation of Christianity, and the Original Settlement and State of the Church. Together with Proper Prefaces, and a Compleat Index. The Whole Dedicated to the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons in Parliament Assembled, 2 vols (London: Newbery and Collins, 1757).

Subsequent references

Full publication details must be given on the first occasion a source is cited. In all subsequent references, though, the shortest intelligible form may be used. This will normally be the author’s surname followed by the page number; if this is ambiguous (because you are citing two books by the same author or two authors with the same surname) then repeat the title in a shortened form:

1. Bender, p. 186.
2. Gallagher, 'Rise of Fictionality', p. 341.
3. Storytelling, Chap. 5.
4. Tuite, ‘Cloistered Closets’, Sect. 3.

Clustering references

References clustered together in the text, within one paragraph, can normally be grouped together in one footnote, as long the referenced work remains clear.

In-text references

For a series of references to the same text, where there is no ambiguity as to what is being referenced, it is possible to incorporate page/line references into the text, normally in parentheses after quotations (for example '(p. 23)'). In order to do this, you must state after the first full citation of the text that 'Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically within the text'.

Note: 

• An example of a footnoted document, using cluster and in-text references, can be found here.
• Footnotes need not repeat information already supplied in the text of the essay leading up to the quotation.
• The abbreviated latin phrases ‘loc. cit.’, ‘op. cit.’ and ‘ibid.’ are confusing to the reader and should not be used.