Help:Shortened footnotes

Shortened footnotes are one method of citing sources for a Wikipedia article. They are a hybrid of standard footnotes and Harvard-style parenthetical referencing. Shortened footnotes, often with page numbers, appear in the reference section (wherever the reference list markup reflist is placed) and usually link (by Sfn) to the full citation for a source. These full citations usually appear in another list separate from the footnotes. See rationale below.

Please read Help:Footnotes first, as this guide builds upon the methods described there.

Rationale
Shortened footnotes are used for several reasons:


 * Multiple references
 * (a) They allow the editor to cite many different parts of the same source without having to repeat the entire citation.


 * Easier source-editing
 * (b) When full citations are gathered in a separate section the article text is uncluttered and easier to work with.


 * Single place for citations
 * (c) It is easier to edit all the full citations at once.


 * Other
 * (d) The full citations can be sorted or alphabetized.

Overview
The most common method of using shortened footnotes is with the sfn template for the short notes, and templates for the full citation. The and  templates automatically create an anchor for an sfn link, using the author last name and the year. An "anchor" is a landing place for a link to jump to. In the following example, an inline citation such as links to the shortened footnote under "Notes", which in turn links to the full citation in the References list:

{{markup The Norwegian Blue Parrot will not move if its feet are nailed to the perch.{{sfn|Praline|1969|p=12}} Its metabolic processes are a matter of interest only to historians.{{sfn|Praline|1969|p=16}}
 * The brontosaurus is thin at one end.{{sfn|Elk|1972|p=5}} Then it becomes much thicker in the middle.{{sfn|Elk|1972|p=6}}

Using sfn
There are several ways to create the shortened footnote. Most often, the sfn template is used to link to a full citation with simple markup:

The link is normally created from the authors' last names and the year of publication. For sources with multiple authors, pass their last names (to a maximum of four) as multiple parameters to the template:

The sfnp template works the same as the above example, except it places the date in parentheses:

Using harvnb
The sfn template was developed to automate the older process of placing harvnb within tags. This method is still available and used in many existing articles:

The above method will also work with other "harv" templates. These templates link to the full citation in the same way and accept the same parameters, but they each have slightly different formatting. For example, harvp places the date in parentheses:

Manual creation
You can manually create a link to the long citation by creating a custom reference anchor or concatenating, the author's last name, and the publication year. This is rarely used:

You can also place an unlinked shortened footnote within tags:

Bundling citations
The sfnm template supports the inclusion of multiple sources in a single footnote. The harvnb template or other similar templates can be manually bundled in a single footnote, separated either with semicolons or the multiref template:

List of footnotes
The list of footnotes is created by using the reflist template or the tag. Some articles that use only shortened footnotes manually define narrower columns at. References created via sfn, sfnp, sfnm, the standard tags, and list-defined references will all be included in the same list.

Linking
The full citations are usually created with Citation Style 1 (CS1) and Citation Style 2 (CS2) templates. These templates automatically create a linkable anchor from the authors' last names and the year of publication. For example:



allows a "short" citation template, like  in the article.

The anchor can be created manually with sfnref or harvid in situations where the automatic anchors would create issues including:


 * Multiple authors with the same last name
 * No known last name for the author
 * Unusual characters in the author field
 * Multiple works in the same year by the same author
 * Year of publication unknown

For example, an article might cite psychoanalysts Anna Freud and Sigmund Freud. If there are two full citations with the same last name and the same year of publication, as below, then the full citations would need to set custom anchors in the ref parameter. The short inline citation can then be created using the same structure. Note the identical parameters for sfnref and sfn:

Citations templates outside of CS1 and CS2, like vcite templates, Cite court, and cite comic, may require the ref parameter. In rare cases, wikicite can be used to manually create the anchors for full citations written without templates. In the following example from the Bengal famine of 1943, an unpublished but publicly available manuscript by the Indian Government’s Regional Food Commissioner, is used as a primary source. As there are few acceptable places on Wikipedia to use unpublished memoirs as a source, no citation template directly matches the document:



References list
Full citations in the references list may be formatted manually or with citation templates. The reference list is formatted by placing the citations in an unordered list using the  markup. Entries may be sorted by the author's last name. The text size may be formatted with refbegin and refend. The references list is normally displayed in one column with no indenting.

Date
The inline citation should include only the year. The full citation may include the year only or the full date in the date parameter. Most citation templates will extract the year from a full date to form the anchor.

If an author has multiple works in the same year, regardless of whether it is a full date or only a year, then duplicate anchors will be generated. To resolve this, you can suffix the year with a lowercase letter. For example:

If the date is written in  format, you can suffix a lowercase letter in the year parameter:

No author
{{markup
 * In the 1980s, Madonna was named "Artist of the Decade" by Billboard magazine.{{sfn|Dayton Daily News|1990|p=23}}

Explanatory notes
Shortened footnotes can be placed inside explanatory notes in several ways. Explanatory or content notes add explanations, comments, or other information relating to the main content and often require their own citation. There are two technical approaches to using both types of footnotes. A shortened footnote can be placed inside an explanatory note; on Wikipedia, this is referred to as a nested footnote. There are also several ways to combine the contents of a short citation and explanatory note within a single footnote.

Nesting footnotes is typically done with the efn or refn templates. Because of a technical limitation, some standard Wikipedia markup elements will not work within a set of  tags, including a second "nested" set of   tags. For example,  will generate an error. Because the templates allow nesting, the same example written as  works as expected.

Nested footnotes
The methods in this section can nest footnotes because the explanatory notes use templates designed to support nesting.

Nesting within efn
This method uses efn to create the explanatory notes and sfn to create footnotes nested in the explanatory notes. {{markup
 * The Sun is pretty big.{{sfn|Muller|2005|p=23}}{{efn|But Muller points out that the Sun is not as large as some other stars.{{sfn|Muller|2005|p=23}}}} But the Moon{{efn|The Moon goes by other names, such as Selena.{{sfn|Braun|2001|p=63}}}} is not so big.{{sfn|Braun|2001|p=46}}{{efn|Historically the Moon was not always considered to be large.}} The Sun is also quite hot.{{sfn|Schmidt|2005|p=334}}

Nesting within refn
This method uses refn to create the explanatory notes and sfn to create footnotes nested in the explanatory notes.

{{markup
 * The Sun is pretty big.{{sfn|Millerd|2005|p=23}}{{refn|group=lower-alpha|But Millerd points out that the Sun is not as large as some other stars.{{sfn|Millerd|2005|p=23}}}} But the Moon{{refn|group=lower-alpha|The Moon goes by other names, such as Selena.{{sfn|Browne|2001|p=63}}}} is not so big.{{sfn|Browne|2001|p=46}}{{refn|group=lower-alpha|Historically the Moon was not always considered to be large.}} The Sun is also quite hot.{{sfn|Smithe|2005|p=334}}

Explanatory notes containing shortened citations
This example creates a separate notes section using the sfn and efn templates. Because the explanatory footnotes do not contain footnote references, there are no technical hurdles.

{{markup
 * The Sun is pretty big.{{sfn|Miller|2005|p=23}}{{efn|But Miller points out that the Sun is not as large as some other stars.}} But the Moon{{efn|The Moon goes by other names, such as Selena – see, for example Jones, The Solar System, MacMillan, 2005, p. 623.}} is not so big.{{sfn|Brown|2001|p=46}}{{efn|Historically the Moon was not always considered to be large, see, for example, Peterson, Astronomy, MacMillan, 2005, p. 623.}} The Sun is also quite hot.{{sfn|Smith|2005|p=334}}

Explanatory notes containing parenthetical citations
This method uses sfn to create the main footnotes, efn to create the explanatory notes and harv to create the parenthentical references in the explanatory notes. The use of inline parenthetical referencing has been deprecated for an article's body text.

{{markup
 * The Sun is pretty big.{{sfn|Mahler|2005|p=23}}{{efn|But Mahler points out that the Sun is not as large as some other stars {{harv|Mahler|2005|p=23}}.}} But the Moon{{efn|The Moon goes by other names, such as Selena {{harv|Brauner|2001|p=63}}.}} is not so big.{{sfn|Brauner|2001|p=46}}{{efn|Historically the Moon was not always considered to be large.}} The Sun is also quite hot.{{sfn|Ferrero|2005|p=334}}

List-defined explanatory notes containing citations
This method uses sfn to create the main footnotes, efn to create list-defined explanatory notes using notelist in the "Notes" appendix, and harv to create links nested within the explanatory notes: {{markup
 * The Sun is pretty big.{{sfn|Mailer|2005|p=23}}{{efn|name="sun size"}} But the Moon{{efn|name="Selena"}} is not so big.{{sfn|Brawn|2001|p=46}}{{efn|name="moon size"}} The Sun is also quite hot.{{sfn|Smythe|2005|p=334}}

Errors
Errors involving tags will be automatically displayed in article, user, template, category, help and file pages. To show error messages on talk and other pages, see Help:Reference display customization.

It is very possible to create an inline citation that does not link to the full citation and to create full citations that do not have a matching inline citation. Often the link and anchor may not match for some reason. To catch these errors, use the User:Trappist the monk/HarvErrors script. When an inline citation does not have a matching full citation and cannot be readily resolved, then it can be tagged with Citation not found.

It is also possible to create duplicate IDs for the inline citation, resulting in invalid HTML. See Help:Markup validation for help in validating and resolving issues.

Examples
These featured articles exemplify the use of shortened footnotes:

This article illustrates improperly implemented shortened footnotes:
 * The article uses sfn (#10, 11, 12) to point to Rothenburg1976, which is a manually defined citation with no anchor (#9); the footnotes and shortened footnotes are mixed.
 * The article uses sfn (#10, 11, 12) to point to Rothenburg1976, which is a manually defined citation with no anchor (#9); the footnotes and shortened footnotes are mixed.