Template:Refbegin/doc

refbegin and its complementary closing template  are used to apply any of several optional styles or presentational choices for bibliographies or reference lists&mdash;that is, lists of fully-specified references, sources, or works cited, sorted alphabetically by author or contributor&mdash;that appear in Wikipedia articles.

These bibliographies or reference lists frequently appear in dedicated sections within an article, variously titled,  ,  ,  ,  , and so on.

Wikipedia referencing or citation systems that use bibliography-style reference lists include: 'shortened' footnotes and 'general' referencing. The 'full' footnote referencing system does not use those lists. Any articles may contain a "Further reading" section or other sections with bibliography-style listings, that refbegin formatting could be applied to.

The formatting options provided by this template are: Each use of refbegin, with or without parameters, needs an accompanying closing template to 'turn off' the formatting;  does not take any parameters.

Font size reduction is applied by default. Multi-columns and hanging indent may be applied separately or combined.

Usage
This template is used only for references—it should not be used to create lists of text which are smaller, in columns, or which have other style data associated with them.

With all (optional) parameters shown:

Placement
A refbegin is placed immediately below the header of the bibliography/references section its formatting will be applied to. The closing template is placed within the same section, at the end of the bibliography/references list content.

When used, each occurrence of refbegin should always be paired with the corresponding closing :

The formatting provided by refbegin is "turned on" at the location where the template is placed, and is applied to all text after and below it, until it is "turned off" by a closing template (which expands to c). Failing to provide a closing may produce unwanted effects in other sections that may appear below the 'References', 'Bibliography' etc. section, such as 'External links' sections that are usually placed at or near the article's end.

Option 1: Default behaviour
The default usage (without parameters) applies a style that reduces the text size of the bibliographies/reference list entries. This can be useful to make a long bibliography/list of references display more compactly, and it also mimics the formatting style applied to footnotes by the reflist template.

A reflist formats footnotes—any text in the article body that is placed between ref tags—that may be auto-generated by the cite.php extension. In the case of articles using the 'shortened' footnotes referencing system, these footnotes will typically contain an abbreviated citation such as p that corresponds with an entry in the bibliography/references list section (other text such as discursive notes may appear as well).

The font size is set to 90% in the corresponding TemplateStyles page.

If the 'full' footnotes referencing system is used (i.e. there is no separate bibliography/references list, all cites/references are defined in  tags), then use alone:

If there is a bibliography/references list but no footnoted citations (e.g. in general references or parenthetical referencing systems) then use and  like so:

If there are footnoted citations and a separate bibliography/references list (i.e., the WP:CITESHORT system), then place to generate the footnotes in one section (immediately above the bibliography/references list), and use  in the latter section:

Option 2: Multiple columns
If a value with a unit is supplied as the first parameter, i.e., the template will display the bibliography/references list in columns with a minimum width of that value, allowing the browser to determine the optimal number of columns. Using for instance is useful for short citations. If no parameter is specified, the default is a single column.

References



Option 3: Hanging indentation
A hanging indentation may be applied to bibliographies/reference lists by using the indent parameter. This option can be useful in long bibliographies/reference lists and in particular when individual entries in the list are long, i.e. they wrap over more than one line in the browser display window. Applying a hanging indent to the list makes it much easier to distinguish the keywords (i.e. normally the authors' names) in the bibliography and makes them stand out from preceding and succeeding lines of text. Hanging indents in bibliographies also form part of several widely used citation style implementations, such as APA, MLA, and Chicago.

To use, set.