Help:Cite

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Usage

The basic concept of the <ref> tag is that it inserts the text enclosed by the ref tags as a footnote in a designated section, which you indicate with the placeholder tag <references />.

If you forget to include <references /> in the article, the footnotes will not appear, but a red error message will be displayed at the end of the page.

This page itself uses footnotes, such as the one at the end of this sentence. If you view the source of this page by clicking "Edit this page", you can see a working example of footnotes.

Example

According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big.<ref>E. Miller, The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), 23-5.</ref>
The Moon, however, is not so big.<ref>R. Smith, "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 46 (April 1978): 44-6.</ref>

==Notes==
<references/>

Multiple uses of the same footnote

To give a footnote a unique identifier, use <ref name="name">. You can then refer to the same footnote again by using a ref tag with the same name. The text inside the second tag doesn't matter, because the text already exists in the first reference. You can either copy the whole footnote, or you can use a terminated empty ref tag that looks like this: <ref name="name" />.

In the following example, the same source is cited three times.

This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.<ref name="multiple">Remember that when you refer to the same footnote multiple times, the text from the first reference is used.</ref>

Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, if different statements come from the same source.<ref name="multiple">This text is superfluous, and won't show up anywhere. We may as well just use an empty tag.</ref>

A concise way to make multiple references is to use empty ref tags, which have a slash at the end. Although this may reduce redundant work, please be aware that if a future editor removes the first reference, this will result in the loss of all references using the empty ref tags.<ref name="multiple" />

==Notes==
<references/>

The text above gives the following result in the article (see also section below):

This is an example of multiple references to the same footnote.

Such references are particularly useful when citing sources, when different statements come from the same source.

A concise way to make multiple references is to use empty ref tags, which have a slash at the end. Although this may reduce redundant work, please be aware that if a future editor removes the first reference, this will result in the loss of all references using the empty ref tags.

<references />

Placing <references /> inserts the full text of all pending inline citations defined by <ref>, anywhere on the page. For example, based on the citations above, the code:

<references />

will yield:

Grouped references

The following example generates separate reference lists for citations and miscellaneous footnotes:

According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big <ref>E. Miller, The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), 23-5.</ref>.
In fact, it is very big <ref group="footnotes">Take their word for it. Don't look directly at the sun!</ref>.

==Notes==
<references group="footnotes"/>
==References==
<references/>

The anonymous group works as before, while the named group reference will show up as , and the references will look like this:

Separating references from text

In-text references make it easy to copy the text to another page; on the other hand, they make it hard to read. References containing a lot of data, quotes or elaborate citation templates can make up a significantly larger fraction of the source than the text that will actually be visible. To avoid this, the Cite extension allows moving some or all of the references into the <references /> section, to the place where they will actually appear to the reader. Thus,

According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big.<ref name="miller"/>
The Moon, however, is not so big.<ref name="smith"/>

==Notes==
<references>
<ref name="miller">E. Miller, The Sun, (New York: Academic Press, 2005), 23-5.</ref>
<ref name="smith">R. Smith, "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 46 (April 1978): 44-6.</ref>
</references>

will have the same output as the first example above.