The dissertation (especially its theoretical part) is based on the study of various sources. The use of other people’s thoughts and data collected by other authors is accompanied by a link to the publication. For this are footnotes.

What are the footnotes in the thesis

Before describing how to make notes in a dissertation, you need to decide on the terminology.

Definition 1

The word “footnote” means the text that is placed at the bottom of the page after the feature that separates it.

The footnote may contain text of different content – notes and explanations of the author, translation of foreign words used by the characters, etc. In the thesis work, such objects are not provided, but bibliographic references are necessary.

Definition 2

Bibliographic references are an element of the document’s help.

Bibliographic references indicate information (of a bibliographic nature) about the document referred to, considered or cited (in whole or in part), which is sufficient to find and identify it.

Bibliographic references are of different types. The composition of the elements is distinguished:

• Full bibliographic link. Such a link makes it possible to identify, search for a document, as well as to give its general characteristic.
• A brief bibliographic link, focused only on the search document. It is made on the basis of the principle of laconicism.

According to the location of the links are:

• Placed inside the text of the document – inline.
• Placed in a footnote (bottom of the page) – subscript.
• Rendered for the text (in the balloon) – endnote.

In order of mention links are:

• Primary (when the source is mentioned for the first time).
• Repeated (the above information can be specified in abbreviated form).

Bibliographic references (footnotes)

An example of bibliographic references in the final qualifying work is most often given in the training manual. It is usually recommended to use either inline links (in square brackets after the quotation), or subscripts.

To make footnotes in the thesis work is somewhat more complicated than inline links.

Example 1

Compare the examples: [5, c. 30] and 2 Talkien V. Logistics in the service sector: studies. for universities. – M .: Transport, 2018. – p. 30.

In the first case, just the source number is indicated, and after the comma the page number is difficult to make a mistake, in the second case there are quite a lot of details of the document, and the design differs from the design in the list of sources used (it will not work just to copy).

Standard 7.0.5 contains a list of elements included in the subscript bibliographic reference. In this case, you can omit some of them, so as not to overload the text with too voluminous footnotes.

How to make notes by standards

Standards regulate how to put footnotes. The standard is devoted to questions about what to write in a footnote (which elements to include in it, which separators to use between elements, etc.). Issues of formatting (technical design) attention is not paid. Not even the font of the footnotes is specified. Usually when making footnotes use the following rules:

• The same typeface is used as for the main text of the work (headset Times New Roman).
• The font size in footnotes is chosen 2-4 pt. less (if the text is written in 14 fonts, then footnotes are 10 or 12).
• Line spacing for footnotes is selected single, without paragraph indent.

Not regulated by the standard aspects of the design of each institution of higher education or even the department decides at its discretion, so it is better to study the guidelines or ask for clarification from the department staff responsible for the standard control.