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Notes and Bibliography System (NB)

In this system, sources are cited in numbered footnotes or endnotes. Each note corresponds to a raised (superscript) number in the text. Sources are also usually listed in a separate bibliography. The notes and bibliography system can accommodate a wide variety of sources, including unusual ones.

General Guidelines from OWL at Purdue University

• Text should be consistently double-spaced, except for block quotations, notes, bibliography entries, table titles, and figure captions.

• For block quotations, which are also called extracts:

  • A prose quotation of five or more lines, or more than 100 words, should be blocked.

  • CMOS recommends blocking two or more lines of poetry.

  • A blocked quotation does not get enclosed in quotation marks.

  • A blocked quotation must always begin a new line.

  • Blocked quotations should be indented with the word processor’s indention tool.

• Page numbers begin in the header of the first page of text with Arabic number 1.

• Subheadings should be used for longer papers.

  • CMOS recommends you devise your own format but use consistency as your guide.

Body of Paper

• Titles mentioned in the text, notes, or bibliography are capitalized “headline-style,” meaning first words of titles and subtitles and any important words thereafter should be capitalized.

• Titles in the text as well as in notes and bibliographies are treated with quotation marks or italics based on the type of work they name.

  • Book and periodical titles (titles of larger works) should be italicized.

  • Article and chapter titles (titles of shorter works) should be enclosed in double quotation marks.

  • The titles of most poems should be enclosed in double quotation marks, but the titles of very long poems should be italicized.

  • Titles of plays should be italicized.

  • Otherwise, take a minimalist approach to capitalization.

    • For example, use lowercase terms to describe periods, except in the case of proper nouns (e.g., “the colonial period,” vs. “the Victorian era”).

  • A prose quotation of five or more lines should be “blocked.” The block quotation should match the surrounding text, and it takes no quotation marks. To offset the block quote from surrounding text, indent the entire quotation using the word processor’s indentation tool. It is also possible to offset the block quotation by using a different or smaller font than the surrounding text.

References

• Label the first page of your back matter, your comprehensive list of sources, “Bibliography” (for Notes and Bibliography style) or “References” (for Author-Date style).

• Leave two blank lines between “Bibliography” or “References” and your first entry.

• Leave one blank line between remaining entries.

• List entries in letter-by-letter alphabetical order according to the first word in each entry, be that the author's name or the title of the piece..

• Use “and,” not an ampersand, “&,” for multi-author entries.

  • For two to three authors, write out all names.

  • For four to ten authors, write out all names in the bibliography but only the first author’s name plus “et al.” in notes and parenthetical citations.

  • When a source has no identifiable author, cite it by its title, both on the references page and in shortened form (up to four keywords from that title) in parenthetical citations throughout the text.

  • Write out publishers’ names in full.

  • Do not use access dates unless publication dates are unavailable.

  • If you cannot ascertain the publication date of a printed work, use the abbreviation “n.d.”

  • Provide DOIs instead of URLs whenever possible.

  • If no DOI is available, provide a URL.

  • If you cannot name a specific page number when called for, you have other options: section (sec.), equation (eq.), volume (vol.), or note (n.).

Footnotes

• Note numbers should begin with “1” and follow consecutively throughout a given paper.

• In the text:

  • Note numbers are superscripted.

  • Note numbers should be placed at the end of the clause or sentence to which they refer and should be placed after all punctuation, except for the dash.

• In the footnotes:

  • Note numbers are full-sized, not raised, and followed by a period (superscripting note numbers in the notes themselves is also acceptable).

  • Lines within a footnote should be formatted flush left. Place commentary after source documentation when a footnote contains both; separate commentary and documentation by a period.

    • In parenthetical citation, separate documentation from brief commentary with a semicolon.

    • Do not repeat the hundreds digit in a page range if it does not change from the beginning to the end of the range.

Sample Citations