When you reference a book in your footnotes, start with the name of the author or authors.
The golden rule is: you write their name the way they write the name.
Look at my top example. Here, I’m referencing a book by Philip Cooke, so I’ve written
Philip Cooke. If the front cover of the book called him PK Cooke, then I’d call him PK
Cooke. It’s that simple.
Names work a little differently in the bibliography, so do watch the bibliography video to learn
more. In this video, I’m only talking about footnotes.
After the author’s name I’ve written the name of the book in italics. I’ve given
the important words initial capital letters. Any little, unimportant words like ‘of’
‘and’ ‘with’ don’t get an initial capital letter.
I’ve then got three bits of information in the brackets. Firstly, the edition of the
book. Look how I’ve shortened the word edition to edn. If there is no edition given on the
front of the book, then you just start the brackets with the name of the publisher. I’ve
then got the year that the book was published. If it’s a book that’s had lots of editions,
we need the year that your edition was published in. Look the book up on LibrarySearch and
see what year it says on there, if you can’t decide which date to use.
My top example closes the brackets and then ends, whereas my second example says 58 at
the end.
This is an example of pinpointing. I can draw the reader’s attention to a particular page
or range of pages, for example because I’m quoting from it.
Just think about what’s most helpful for your reader. If they need to look at a particular
page or page range to find the information you’re using then tell that information.
Before we look at a footnote for a journal article, I want to spend a moment looking
at how journals work. Nowadays, we usually read journal articles online so we’re less
familiar with the structure of journals. But understanding the structure does help us with
our referencing.
You can think of journals like Russian dolls. Every year there is one volume. Each volume
consists of multiple issues - there might be one issue per month, or one every couple
of months. Typically, page numbers run continuously throughout the volume. So each issue won’t
necessarily start at page 1.
Although we’re often told the issue number when we look at an article online, we actually
don’t need to include it in our footnote. The three important numbers we need to include
are the year, the volume number and the page the article starts on.
Let’s see this in practice.
Just like I did with books, I’ve got two examples here. The top one is me referencing
a whole journal article. The second one is me pinpointing an individual page in a journal
article, for example because I’ve quoted from it.
Let’s look at the top example. Just like with books, I write the authors names the
way they write their names. Here there are two authors.
I’ve then got the title of the journal article in single quotation marks. Look at how I’ve
given the important words initial capital letters, but the little words like ‘and’
‘for’ and ‘of’ don’t have capitals.
I then have the year in brackets.
Next I have what I call the sandwich, because it goes number-text-number. 50 is the volume
number, and 75 is the page the article starts on. In between those is the title of the journal.
I may know the page the article ends on, but OSCOLA doesn’t ask for that information,
it only wants the start page.
Look at the second example where I’ve pinpointed page 81, maybe because I’m quoting from
page 81. This catches so many students out! You still need to tell your reader what page
your article starts on, in addition to your pinpoint. It looks a bit odd with the two
numbers at the end - but this is correct. Honest.
You can now watch any of the other OSCOLA videos in this series and also find good-quality
OSCOLA advice and guidance on the library website.
And do get in touch with me if you’re still stuck or confused.