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Film & Drama

About Citation Styles

 

There are thousands of citation styles in use. Your lecturer may tell you to use a particular one, or allow you to choose one on your own.

For Drama students the preferred style to use is the Chicago Footnote Style  - you will find the style guide online here.

Guides for each style will tell you how to format the references:

  • Details on which order to present the bibliographic information.
  • Grammar instructions such as how to use punctuation and capitalisation - what is emboldened, underlined, italicised… where the full stops and commas go…
  • Different rules will apply to different formats of sources (journal articles, book with one author, books with several authors, edited books, chapters in edited books, webpages, reports, films, etc. etc…)

Many different styles are in use in Trinity College Dublin - for definitive answers you should use the full style manual for each system.

 

Example

We are going to see what a reference looks like using using different citation styles. Here's the information we want to reference:

  • Reference Type: Journal Article
  • Author: McClimens, Alex; Kenyon, Lynn; and Cheung, Heidi
  • Year: 2013
  • Title: Exploring placement pathways in nurse education
  • Journal: British Journal of Nursing
  • Volume: 22
  • Issue: 1
  • Pages: 8-15

About Footnote Styles

Footnote styles give the reference an ascending number in the text and the full references are listed in that order at the bottom of the page in a footnote. A full list at the end of the work or chapter may also be required - although unlike with numbered styles, this may be in alphabetical order by surname, rather than in order of mention.

The Chicago 16th Edition style is the most well-known footnote style. In Chicago and other footnote styles there are rules that apply if you use a work again in another footnote. If you mention the citation again as the next footnote, then the term “ibid” (“in the same place”) is used instead of the reference. If it is used again after referring to a different citation, then a short form of the reference is used in the footnotes - the manual for the style will tell you what this should look like.

Chicago 16th

In the text:

Blah blah blah1

As a footnote at the bottom of the page:

1 Alex McClimens, Lynn Kenyon, and Heidi Cheung, "Exploring Placement Pathways in Nurse Education," British Journal of Nursing 22, no. 1 (2013).

(elements are separated by commas)

If used immediately again:

2 Ibid.

If used again after a different footnote:

4 McClimens, Kenyon, and Cheung, "Exploring Placement Pathways in Nurse Education."

In the reference list, which is in alphabetical order:

McClimens, Alex, Lynn Kenyon, and Heidi Cheung. "Exploring Placement Pathways in Nurse Education." British Journal of Nursing 22, no. 1 (2013): 8-15.

(first author’s name inverted, elements are separated by full stops)

Subject Librarian for Law

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Terry McDonald
Contact:
4th Floor, Ussher Library (01) 8962733 Terry.McDonald@tcd.ie
Subjects: Law