Many papers within the humanities use the Notes and Bibliography (NB) citation system described in The Chicago Manual of Style. If the copyrighted material appears within the text, you should place the superscript number directly after the quoted text.

If the content note discusses a particular word, the footnote number should appear at the end of the word.įootnotes signifying copyright permissions normally appear underneath an image, graph, or chart. Content notes in APA style appear as superscript numbers that come before dashes and parentheses but after all other forms of punctuation. When footnotes do appear in an APA-style research paper, they signal a content note or a copyright permission. American Psychological Association (APA) StyleĪs with MLA style, APA style encourages writers to include in-text citations inside parentheses. In some cases, such as making a content note about a word choice, it’s appropriate to place the footnote at the end of a word or after a comma rather than at the end of a sentence. In most cases, MLA footnotes appear as a superscript number placed after the punctuation at the end of the sentence.

To include information that is not essential to the main text, many authors would prefer to make content notes at the bottom of the page in a footnote. For example, you could insert a footnote next to the name of a scientific study to explain that the study has faced scrutiny. Beyond that, you might use a footnote to add additional information to a section of text. For instance, you could use a footnote to specify a particular book edition or list a long string of different sources. In the first instance, you may need to include a footnote to clarify a complex bibliographical note. When using this style guide, there are only a few instances where it’s appropriate to insert footnotes.

Papers written in MLA style include parenthetical citations rather than footnotes or endnotes.

Foot note