Endnotes and footnotes can include far more than just bare-bones citations. To point to extra sources, scholars use signal phrases and abbreviations, but they are not all interchangeable. These quick guidelines will help you mean what you say and say what you mean.
see: Use this to suggest your reader take a look at a source for a point or fact that you have not already attributed to another source and that does not require a citation (i.e., is not a quotation or paraphrase).
77. See Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
see also: This is conventionally used in indexes, but it has a place in citations as well. Just be sure to use it in a way distinct from your use of see, for instance:
22. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 2008), 33. See also Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010).
In the following example, see is preferable because also would be redundant: the introductory phrase already includes the word further.
14. For further analysis, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Women and Human Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
cf.: This abbreviation is not synonymous with see or see also. Instead, it means “compare” or “see, by way of comparison.” You may, for instance, want to indicate that the source does not agree with your in-text point. Or you may want to reference differing opinions on the matter at hand. Often, though, cf. just indicates that the source does not precisely agree with aforementioned sources or your in-text argument.
45. This is far from an undisputed fact; cf. Paul Krugman, The Return of Depression Economics (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000).
Now you can cross-reference with confidence and, more importantly, consistency. But remember: These signal terms are never italicized when used in notes. Complete publication information is included when the source has not yet been mentioned in notes. And remember: TWEED offers citation management services.
