What do we know about footnotes? Opinions and data

Background: There is a scattered literature on various aspects of the design, use and information conveyed by foot-notes in academic text that can be considered under the three headings of sociological, psychological and typographical matters. Aims: The aims of this paper are: (i) to review this literature and (ii) to report the results from a small-scale enquiry into academics’ attitudes to footnotes and endnotes and their positioning in text. Method: In this enquiry, an eleven-item Likert-type scale was completed by two groups of academics. Group 1 (N = 52) typically reads journal articles with footnotes and Group 2 (N = 57) typically reads articles without them. Results: The result suggested that, despite wide variations, there were commonalties between these two groups of academics. Most people in both groups were positive towards footnotes and many thought that they could be easily ignored. In addition, most readers preferred footnotes, endnotes and references to be at the ends of the chapters to which they referred, rather than at the end of the book.