U. of Calgary Press Information for Authors

Information for Authors

3.10. Bibliographical Data

The complete bibliographical details of works cited or used in the preparation of your book should be listed in alphabetical order at the end, just before the Index. If your book is a collection of self-sufficient articles, the relevant bibliographical material may be placed at the end of each article. The headings "Works Cited" and "References" may only be used if the bibliographical listing contains all and only those works actually referred to in the text. The words "Bibliography" or "Selected Bibliography" may be employed in other cases. Bibliographical data must be complete and must include page numbers.

All books in the natural sciences and most in the social sciences should use the author-date system of citation. Typographically, it is the most economical method to deal with, saving both space and time. This system usually obviates the need for footnotes or endnotes. While we encourage authors of books in the other disciplines to use this system as well, the prevailing practice within the literature of a given discipline should be adhered to.

It is not our aim here to provide a complete description of the author-date system. Authors are directed to The Chicago Manual of Style and the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association for extensive (but substantially different) discussions of this topic. Specific disciplines have developed variant forms of the author-date system; detailed accounts of these variants may be found in style guides of the leading journals of the respective fields.

Where notes are used, several factors must be considered in choosing between footnotes and endnotes. The inconvenience of having to flip back and forth between the text and the pages containing the notes must be weighed against the clutter of printing too much footnote material on the text page. Again, if footnotes are lengthy, or if they correspond to text that falls near the bottom of the printed page, it is sometimes necessary to carry parts of them over to the next page-a less than completely satisfactory arrangement.

When compared to endnotes, footnotes stand a much greater chance of actually being read. Consider how important it is for readers to have access to the information contained in your annotation. When the preponderance of details provided in the notes is bibliographical in nature, it might be wise to choose endnotes, because the reader who really needs the information will look it up.

Whether footnotes or endnotes are used, they are to be numbered consecutively, using superscript arabic numerals. The number follows all punctuation except dashes. Rarely should such a number be placed anywhere but at the end of a sentence. Footnotes to a table will appear at the foot of the table itself and will be excluded from the regular footnote numbering sequence. Such footnotes may use asterisks, daggers, or lowercase letters instead of numbers.

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