Forms of notes

Editors disagree about which form of notes is most useful to the reader, and different forms are considered more suitable for different scholarly disciplines.

• Footnotes are the most traditional. They appear at the bottom of the page on which they are cited, and have the advantage of immediacy; that is, the reader need not page back and forth searching for a source. Footnotes are easily inserted when using a word processor. When using a typewriter, footnotes appear in numerical order, indented, in smaller type than the text (usually 10-point), single-spaced, under a short ruled line drawn three centimeters from the lower left-hand margin of the page.
• Endnotes are organized in the same way as footnotes, but appear in a list at the end of an article, book, or chapter. They appear in numerical order, single-spaced and indented. Endnotes are becoming more common in scholarly writing because they do not “interrupt” the reader. In other words, they do not affect the appearance of the text by chopping it up with different typefaces, and the reader is free to decide which notes are worth looking up.
• Parenthetical references and reference lists are preferred by some fields of scholarship, such as the natural and social sciences. Authors writing about Christian education or history may occasionally use this style. A more complete description of this form of notes is in Section 4.

Bogoslovskie razmyshleniia/Theological Reflections prefers footnotes. Standard treatment for footnotes, endnotes, and parenthetical references is given below.