Hi,

When exactly do you use footnotes in your writing? Is there are guidelines that anyone could share with me? E.g. use footnote when term refereed to does not directly relate to your research topic.

My PhD is in the life sciences.

A.

I'm in the life sciences and I've never used a footnote, if that helps! :p

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I believe that they are used for supplemental information that might add to the point you are making in the text. For example, in the results section of my MSc dissertation my supervisor suggested that I could use a footnote to detail some extra analyses I had carried out (which were insignificant and therefore not THAT relevant). However, I must say I am yet to use a footnote in any other essays or papers I have written as I am unsure when they are appropriate! Are you studying Psychology? If so you might check the APA manual and see what advice they have on footnotes.

Anyone else have any ideas/guidelines concerning footnote use? :-)

I use masses of endnotes. (footnotes are not used now in education so much, they are considered a bit old hat!) I use them to enlarge on a point, for example to explain in more detail why being paid for working a certain number of hours, and being paid a sum for the completion of a job lead to different dynamics, or to forestall a possible question that could arise, without upping my word count with a lengthy explanation. They are also useful to expand on something, for example I have put at one point 'although working alone was possible' and the endnote gives an example or two, a farmer could mill his own wheat to produce bread, a potter might collect his own clay. The material in the body of the text contains enough information for a reader to follow the argument, the endnote provides futher information for those who want more detail. My supervisors like them too! What they shouldn't do though is bring in a whole new idea, that is the material in them should not be essential to the main text, it should just expand upon what is there. At least that is my idea of their use.

I'm in humanities and coming to the end of my first year. I absolutely LOVE footnotes. They can be little digressions, expansions of important(!) info, or simply references to important works.

At this drafting stage of chapter 2 I just use them for going off on tangents. Better to have too much than too little.

My PhD thesis was in the humanities too, and I had nearly 600 footnotes. I'd use them to include references (we don't have in-text references in my field, as in sciences, but put them in footnotes), and to expand on points that aren't strictly central to my argument. Basically if it had to be read it went in the main text. If it could be skipped, but was still somewhat important, it went into the footnote. And the footnotes all counted towards my final word count in the end.

I love footnotes when reading articles etc and always read them (hence I find them preferable to endnotes which require flipping back and forth). I think your question has already been adequately answered, but I would like to echo that they're very useful for lots of additional, helpful-but-not-essential bits of information (i.e. elaborating on an assumption/distinction etc you've made for readers who may require extra justification/clarification, illustrative examples which might be deemed superfluous to some readers but useful to others, or referring the reader to other research that you haven't necessarily drawn on but could be of interest if delving deeper into a particular minor point made).

It's just a matter of asking yourself whether the information you're providing in your footnote is necessary. If it is, it doesn't belong there; it belongs in the main body. If it's neither necessary, helpful nor interesting then it probably doesn't belong in your work at all (but I'm guessing you already know that :-) )

I'd echo what Bleebles said. I love footnotes and HATE endnotes (esp in books). Some journals and book publishers in some disciplines won't publish with them (I know becuase my Head of Dep has finished a book and is trying to find a publisher and won't approach a couple of the top ones in the field as they don't use footnotes and apparently the footnotes are essential to his work (social science)

I prefer footnotes too really, but they are just not accepted so easily in education, endnotes are the thing! They don't count for my word count thank goodness, they run to about 4000 words per chapter so far! :$