Widely used in the humanities and some social sciences, footnote and endnote
citations appear at the bottom of the page or at the end of the work; readers
are directed to them by superscripts - numbers or symbols in smaller type raised above the text.
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Such notes resemble sentences without verbs:
For example: 17. Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999), p. 28
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The citation in footnotes or endnotes may be complete (providing full information about author, specific work, and location) or abbreviated.
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Footnotes in older works, particularly if published outside the United States, may use Latin abbreviations.
The most common of these abbreviations are Ibid. which means "see the source listed in the preceding citation" and
Op. cit. which means "see the source that was cited somewhere previously in this work". Most American editors and
publishers strongly discourage using these abbreviations.
NOTE: "Footnotes are a kind of low-technology approximation of hypertext that some authors have condemned for diverting readers from an author's main point and others praise as evidence of the quality of scholarship. (Grafton, 1999.)"
