Traditional Footnoting Styles

Though it can be tedious, source citation is an important step in the writing process. There are various types of citations, but the most commonly used are footnotes, which allow writers to document their sources using a numbered list at the bottom of each page of their documents. Most editors and professors tend to prefer different styles for citing sources, but the four most common styles are MLA, APA, Turabian and Chicago.
  1. Modern Language Association (MLA)

    • The MLA format requires that each footnote be only one sentence long. For works that have an author, the footnote should look like this: "Last name, first name. Title of Source. (Publication city, copyright date) pg #." When citing an article, put quotes around the title instead of underlining it and underline the publication (e.g., The New York Times). Website documents require the name of the document, name of the cite, date published, date accessed and URL address.

    American Psychological Association (APA)

    • APA style is very similar to MLA style with a few exceptions. First, APA prefers that the copyright date come after the author name and before the source title. This date should be in parenthesis. Second, the source title should be italicized, not underlined or quote marked. In general, APA discourages the use of footnotes in papers that will be published, since it is costly for the editors to print footnotes on every page.

    Turabian

    • Turabian also requires a similar order of information in a footnote, but writes the author's name first and then last. For example, a Turabian footnote would look like this: "Erik Zurcher, Turkey A Modern History (London: I.B. Taurus, 2005), 15." The title should be italicized and the last number is the page number being referenced in the text.

    Chicago

    • In the Chicago style, footnotes are far less expansive than the references page that will come at the end of any paper. They provide only the last name of the author, the title and the page number of a source. Citing the same source as above, but in the Chicago style, would look like this: "Zurcher, Turkey A Modern History, 15." It is expected that when using the Chicago format for footnotes, there will be a references or bibliography page at the end of the paper including more information on each source.

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