Oxford Citation

Oxford referencing marks each source with a superscript number in the sentence and puts the citation in a footnote at the foot of the same page. The numbers are Arabic, run consecutively through the essay or chapter, and normally sit after the punctuation. The first note for a source carries its full details; later notes for the same source shrink to author surname, short title and page. Because the note carries the detail, the sentence itself stays clean — there is no (Author, year) for the reader to read around, which is part of why history, classics, theology and some philosophy courses prefer it. A bibliography at the end lists every source alphabetically by author surname.

No. OSCOLA is the Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities, published by the Faculty of Law at Oxford. The fifth edition appeared in March 2026 and covers international law sources within the manual itself; many units still work from the fourth edition (2012), so check which one your course sets. Both styles use footnotes, which is why students mix them up, but they are not interchangeable. OSCOLA strips full stops out of abbreviations and cites cases by neutral citation and law report. Where a case is named in full in the text, the footnote drops the case name but still carries the citation; where an Act is named in full in the text, no footnote citation is needed at all. The two editions also part company on repeat citations: the fourth edition allowed ibid, while the fifth tells you not to use it and asks instead for a short form with a bracketed cross-reference to the footnote holding the full citation. For longer work — a thesis or a book — OSCOLA asks for a list of abbreviations and then tables of cases and legislation in the preliminary pages, with a bibliography of secondary sources after the main text; a shorter essay needs only footnotes unless your unit asks for more. If you are on a law unit, work from OSCOLA — see law assignment support.

A first footnote gives the full citation; every later note for the same work is a shortened form. The common book pattern is the author's name in normal order, the title in italics, publication details in brackets, then the page, usually with p. or pp. before the number, commas between elements and a full stop at the end. Article titles go in single quotation marks, following British practice, and the journal is italicised. English-language titles are usually given in title case, with the main words capitalised, though some guides prefer minimal capitalisation. The bibliography repeats the same information and punctuation but inverts the author's name so the list can be alphabetised, and drops the pinpoint page. Punctuation details vary between institutional guides, so match the one your course links to.

Ibid. stands in for the note immediately before it, and nothing else. If note 12 cites the same source and the same page as note 11, note 12 is simply ibid.; if only the page differs, it is ibid., p. 52. It cannot reach back past an intervening note, and it does not work when the preceding note cites more than one source — in both cases use the short-title form instead. Many current guides have dropped op. cit. and loc. cit., because a short title is easier for a reader to follow, so check whether yours still permits them. Some also ask for short titles everywhere and keep ibid. for consecutive notes only. This is Oxford note style rather than OSCOLA, where the fifth edition asks you not to use ibid at all.

Online sources take the same note structure with an address added and, in most Oxford guides, a date of access. Where an article has a DOI, most guides now prefer it to a database URL, given as a full https://doi.org/ link at the end of the note after the page reference; some then drop the access date. For a web page, give the author or organisation, the page title in single quotation marks, the site name, any publication date, the URL, and 'accessed' plus the date. For multiple authors, notes commonly name up to three and shorten longer lists to the first author plus et al., with the full list kept in the bibliography — though institutional guides set that cut-off differently.

Support is built around your own draft and your own course guide. In practice that means reading your footnotes against the guide your unit links to, flagging notes that are incomplete or short forms that do not match their first full citation, checking that ibid. only appears where it is allowed to, and making sure every source in the notes has a bibliography entry and every entry is actually cited. We also build worked examples from the source types giving you trouble — an edited collection, a government report, an archival item, a translated text — so you can apply the pattern yourself in the rest of the draft. If your course uses a different style, compare referencing styles or browse all services.