A brief discussion on the use of eyebrows, footnotes and endnotes in academic papers

"A footnote is a sign of a scholar".

Footnote, endnote, and headnote are inserted in the upper or lower margins of the page, or at the end of a chapter, to supplement the body information, and to write a good paper, you need to know how to use them correctly.

Footnotes are placed at the lower end of the body of a page of article, play the role of quotation and commentary interpretation, and are reflected in the text in the form of numbers or symbolic superscripts.

Content footnotes can be used to supplement the body or provide more examples of supporting the body of the text; copyright permission footnotes are used to indicate the provenance of large paragraphs of data cited in the text or incorporated into the body, etc., such as when inserting tables and consolidating data, footnotes can be used to annotate the subtitles of rows or columns, shorthand titles, etc.; footnotes are sometimes used to annotate the subordinate units of the notation author. There are a few points to note when using:

The footnotes providing additional content should be concise and should not be overly complex or irrelevant to the main text.

Nor should well-known information be placed in footnotes, but should be less ancillary information that is less noticed.

When providing the source of the citation, it should also be inserted inline references in the body of the body as much as possible, in parentheses, and the references in footnotes are usually followed by a brief explanation.

Footnotes to topics should be avoided as much as possible.

The format of the footnotes for different citations varies slightly, but the format for common books or papers is:

Author name, title/paper name of the citation section, title of book/journal, editor/translator, edition, volume number and issue number, (city of publication: publisher name, year), page number of citation. For example:

ErnestK. Bramsted, Aristocracy and the MiddleClasses in Germany (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 129.

In order to avoid duplication, if a reference is the same as the previous one, it can be expressed in the form of "Ibid, page number", meaning "in the same place", but if the previous footnote contains multiple references, ibid is useless.

The same format as the footnote, but with a different position, is the endnote.

Endnotes provide supplementary information or data, usually used in review papers or research papers, placed at the end of the paper, and also reflected in the text with superscripts, often because the content of the supplementary information or interpretation is too long, inconvenient to put in the footnote, and placed on the same page as the main text. It should be noted that if footnotes are used with endnotes, different superscript number forms are used in the text, marked with consecutive sequences of numbers.

Eyebrow batches are often not used in the body, but can be inserted below the chart title.

Eyebrow batches use font sizes smaller than the body of the text, explaining the symbols, initials, methods, or units of measure in the icon to the reader before reading the icon, but if there are more than two units of measurement, they should be placed in a table and inserted into the row using parentheses.

Of course, using footnotes, endnotes or eyebrow comments has advantages and disadvantages: the advantage of using footnotes is that readers can quickly find the source of the citation or supplementary instructions in the same page, but the footnotes cannot insert too much information and data, so as not to be anti-customer-oriented and occupy the main text. Although history and law disciplines still use footnotes to indicate the source, as mentioned above, they are less used in scientific research papers, and more use of parentheses in the text to name the author and year.

Compared with the endnote, the advantage is that it does not interrupt the reader's reading and does not occupy the main page; it is not convenient for the reader to find the corresponding interpretation when reading the main text, and it is difficult for the reader to judge the importance of the content in the endnote, which sometimes produces the impression that the author deliberately hides the relevant information.

Different citation style guides have different requirements, such as the common MLA Citation (Modern Language Association) recommends the use of content footnotes; the APA Citation (American Psychiatric Association) does not recommend the use of footnotes and endnotes. For scholars who want to submit papers, the first thing to refer to is the requirements of academic journals, in order to correctly annotate and cite.