BA Art History and BA Arts, Media, Society

Explanatory and reference notes

When you repeat another person's words in a written text, you must quote them. There are rules for quotations. Quotes must be referenced in notes. Even if you do not literally quote but, for example, refer to certain ideas or a specific opinion of an author, you must reference this in notes. These are reference notes. Additionally, there are so-called explanatory notes. In an explanatory note you can, for instance, explain a viewpoint or nuance a dating.

Quoting

Complete, quoted sentences are placed within double quotation marks. 

• If you are only quoting part of a sentence, leaving out the beginning or the end, you must show this with three periods within the quotation marks, for example: "...learned a lot from Rembrandt".

• If you leave out something in the middle of the quote, you must show this with three periods too, for example:

• “...that Louis XIV ... ordered a lot of furniture”.

• If you add something in the middle of a quote, put this in square brackets, for example:

• "He [Rembrandt] painted daily." 

Compare in both these examples the order of the quotation mark and period. In the last example, the end of the sentence coincides with the end of the quoted sentence.

If you mention a book or journal title in the body of the text, you must always italicize it. If you mention the title of an article in the body of the text, you must always place it between double quotation marks. This corresponds to the rules for the title description in a bibliography (see Title Description, page 22).

Note number, footnotes and endnotes

The note numbers must always be in superscript and placed, as much as possible, at the end of sentence, directly after the period without a space.

In the literature you will find footnotes or endnotes. Footnotes are placed at the bottom of each page. It is customary to make sure that the note is on the page where the note number is mentioned in the text. Endnotes are listed directly after the body of the text (see Format Final Paper). For your first-year paper you will use shortened footnotes!

There are two systems to create notes.

I. Notes with an abbreviated title description (short form)

In this method, usually used in papers, the notes refer, in a shortened form, to the full titles in the bibliography. In the Chicago style the shortened form consists of the author's surname plus the page number(s).

In this case notes can look like this:

• 2. Boschloo, 200.

• 4. Sluijter, 4-9.

• 8. Sluijter, 225.

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In the example above there are references to different works by the same author. One of the solutions you often encounter is the addition of the year of publication to the short note. This way the reader can look up the right source in the bibliography. The notes look like this:

• 2. Boschloo 1972, 200.

• 4. Sluijter 1993, 4-9.

• 8. Sluijter 2006, 225.

However, the above method is not really consistent with the Chicago style. In Chicago there are two ways of making shortened footnotes: author-only and author-title. The way to avoid confusion in the case of multiple works by one author is to use the author-title form of shortened footnotes. In this case you add a shortened version of the title (in general the main title) to the note. Like this:

• 2. Boschloo, "Over Bamboccianten en kikvorsen", 200.

• 4. Sluijter, De lof der schilderkunst, 4-9.

• 8. Sluijter, Rembrandt and the female nude, 225.

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Book titles are in italics and article titles between doube quotation marks. Some authors only use author-title notes for multiple works by the same author (or multiple works of different authors with the same family name) and not for other notes. They are basically using the author-only and author-title form simultaneously. Although this is allowed in Chicago it is of course more consistent to use author-title notes throughout your whole thesis for each shortened footnote.

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When using shortened footnotes a bibliography is essential and mandatory.

In the bibliography, the above works are listed as:

Boschloo, A.W.A. "Over Bamboccianten en kikvorsen." Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 23 (1972): 191-202.

The title description by the book by Sluijter is listed as:

Sluijter, E.J. De lof der schilderkunst: Over schilderijen van Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) en een traktaat van Philips Angel uit 1642. Zeven Provinciën reeks 7. Hilversum: Verloren, 1993.

Sluijter, E.J. Rembrandt and the female nude. Amsterdamse Gouden Eeuw reeks. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2006.

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II. Notes with full titles

This system includes notes in which the reader can find the full titles. The first time that a publication is mentioned, the full title is listed in the note. Every subsequent reference to the same publication can suffice with a shortened footnote (author-title)

The advantage of this method is that the notes form a comprehensive unit. A bibliography is unnecessary. Full notes are usually necessary for publications in journals.

For a journal article, a distinction must be made the first time you list the full title between the first and last page of the entire article and the page(s) to which you are referring.

For instance:

3. C.W. Fock, "Werkelijkheid of schijn: Het beeld van het Hollandse interieur in de zeventiende-eeuwse genreschilderkunst," Oud Holland 112, (1998): 187-246: 189-192.

(The entire article runs from page 187 up to and including 246 and the passage referred to can be found on pages 189 up to and including 192.)

When referring to a previous note with a complete title description a distinction must be made between a note that immediately precedes it and one that is further down than one note number from the first full note.

In the first case you use the term Ibid, which is short for ibidem, meaning 'in the same place'.

For instance:

• 3. C.W. Fock, "Werkelijkheid of schijn: Het beeld van het Hollandse interieur in de zeventiende-eeuwse genreschilderkunst," Oud Holland 112 (1998): 187-246.

• 4. Ibid., 189-192.

In the second case, you use a shortened footnote (author-title). In older literature you will often encounter the term op. cit., an abbreviation for opere citato, which means: 'in the work cited [previously]', in combination with the last name of the author and a reference to the note in which the title description was given in full for the first time. However, the longer the lists of notes the less convenient the use of op.cit., because the reader must search back for the note with the full title information with each op.cit. note. Therefore within the recent edition of the Chicago Style the use of op.cit. is not encouraged. Use the author-title form instead. 

When using full book titles in notes the place of publication: publisher and year of publication are put between brackets.

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For instance:

• 4. E.J. Sluijter, De lof der schilderkunst: Over schilderijen van Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) en een traktaat van Philips Angel uit 1642, Zeven Provinciën reeks 7. (Hilversum: Verloren, 1993), 4-9.

And then:

• 8. Sluijter, De lof der schilderkunst, 6.

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In practice, you can find note lists such as this one:

• 1. C.W. Fock, "Werkelijkheid of schijn: Het beeld van het Hollandse interieur in de zeventiende-eeuwse genreschilderkunst", Oud Holland 112 (1998): 187-246.

• 2. Ibid., 215-219.

• 3. E.J. Sluijter, De lof der schilderkunst: Over schilderijen van Gerrit Dou (1613-1675) en een traktaat van Philips Angel uit 1642, Zeven Provinciën reeks 7. (Hilversum: Verloren, 1993), 4-9.

• 4. Ibid., 6-8.

• 5. Fock, "Werkelijkheid of schijn", 189-192.

• 6. Sluijter, De lof der schilderkunst, 68.

• 7. Ibid., 92.

Never refer to the same page of the same publication in two consecutive notes, but rather combine them into one note.

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