Citations and bibliographies in a printed book
In a word processor your citations mostly look after themselves. A field goes in the text, a list builds itself at the end, and the apparatus is something you manage rather than something you design.
On paper it is pages. A reference list is typeset, occupies a measurable number of them, adds to the count that sets your spine, and is scanned by readers who arrive holding a surname and nothing else. That changes what matters about it.
Three systems, and the field chooses
Notes and bibliography. A number in the text; the citation itself at the foot of that page or in a notes section at the back; a bibliography behind it listing every work cited. Usual in history, literature, philosophy and the arts.
Author-date. A short parenthetical in the running text — a surname and a year — with full details in a reference list at the back. Usual across the sciences and most social sciences.
Numeric. A bracketed number in the text pointing at a numbered list, ordered by first appearance rather than alphabetically. Usual in medicine, engineering and much of the physical sciences.
The choice is not a matter of taste, and it is not yours. It belongs to the field you are publishing into: the journals your readers already read, the books that will sit next to yours, the course that might assign it. A history monograph using bracketed numbers reads as written by somebody from outside the discipline, whatever the argument does.
So find the convention of your field and follow the manual it currently uses, in the edition it currently uses. This guide does not reproduce any manual's rules: they differ between manuals and change between editions, and secondhand rules picked up from a blog are how a book ends up with an apparatus that is wrong in the way a reviewer notices first. If the book is a dissertation on its way to becoming a monograph, the apparatus is only one of the things that has to change: Publishing a thesis or an academic book covers the rest.
What a reference list looks like set in type
Hanging indent. The first line sits flush left and every line after it is indented, so the surnames run down the left edge in a clean column and the eye scans the list instead of reading it. This one feature does more than anything else to make a reference list look like a published book. Without it, forty entries are forty paragraphs and finding a name means reading.
A point smaller than body text, with the leading brought down to match. A bibliography is reference material, not narrative, and setting it a size down says so — and over a dozen pages of entries the saving in pages is real.
Alphabetical by surname, and nothing else in the ordering. Not chronological, not grouped by importance, not divided into books, then articles, then online sources unless your field specifically calls for that. The reader arrives with a name; it is the only key they have, and every other arrangement makes them hunt.
Where one author has several works they are ordered among themselves by date, and some systems replace the repeated name with a long dash. Whether yours does is your manual's call.
In the Interior Formatter. A .docx comes in as structure — chapter starts, italics, bold, scene breaks — rather than as the layout you applied in Word, so plan your reference list as a section to be typeset, not as indents you have already set by hand in the file. Start your interior → · about the Interior Formatter
Foot of the page or back of the book
This is a real decision with a real cost on both sides. A footnote is read: the eye drops an inch and comes back. An endnote mostly is not, because the reader has to leave the page entirely.
But a footnote constrains pagination. The note must sit on the page carrying its reference, so the text block shortens wherever notes land, a long note breaks across pages, and a note-heavy book runs longer than the same manuscript with its notes at the back. Footnotes, endnotes and the reader's patience goes through the trade in full, including what happens to notes in an ebook.
Keep one distinction clear whichever you choose: a note that comments and a note that cites are different jobs. A reader checking a source should not have to read your asides to find a page range, and a reader enjoying your asides should not wade through page ranges.
URLs on paper
A printed URL cannot be clicked, and a long one sets badly. It is an unbreakable string, so a justified line either opens huge word gaps to accommodate it or breaks it somewhere arbitrary. Do not let a hyphen be added at that break: the reader cannot tell whether it belongs to the address.
Keep addresses short — a publisher's landing page rather than a forty-character deep link. Prefer a stable identifier where your field has one, because an identifier survives a site redesign and a link does not. And where a source exists in print, cite the print form and let the address be secondary; a reader typing by hand from a page will take the shortest one you give them.
Cross-references, if there will also be an ebook
Point at a chapter and a section, not at a page.
"See page 214" is fine in a printed book and meaningless in a reflowable file, which has no fixed pages at all — the page is whatever the device makes of the text at the size the reader picked. See Page numbers in an ebook, and why there are none. A print page reference also has to be resolved after composition and re-checked every time an edit moves the text.
"See chapter 7" survives both editions, survives a reset at a different trim size, and survives a second edition. If your book is print-only and always will be, page references are defensible. If it will ever be an ebook, they are a rewrite you have scheduled for later. EPUB and print PDF are two different books covers what else moves between the two.
The back of the book, in order
Notes come first, then the bibliography or reference list, then the index if you are making one. The index is built last, because it is keyed to final pages and nothing about those pages is final until the apparatus in front of it has stopped moving — see Does your nonfiction book need an index?.
Typeset your book
The Interior Formatter is free to use: name your book, bring your manuscript, and it sets real pages you can read before you commit to anything. You only pay when you want the files without the preview watermark.
Next: Footnotes, endnotes and the reader's patience · Also in this guide: Does your nonfiction book need an index? · The back of the book is where your next sale is · Quoting other people's work in your book