Citations

Basic <ref> tag

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 />. The <references /> tag inserts the text of all the citations which have defined in <ref> tags up to that point in the page.

Basic <ref> Example

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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 />	The Sun is pretty big. The Moon, however, is not so big. Notes

Grouped References

Generates separate reference lists for citations and miscellaneous footnotes

Grouped References Example

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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 />	According to scientists, the Sun is pretty big. In fact, it is very big 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" />.

Pushing Details to References Section

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, recent versions of the extension allow moving some or all of the references into the <code><references /></code> section, to the place where they will actually appear to the reader.

Citing different parts of the same source

When several parts from the same work are used as references in an article, you can cluster them in the reference section. This gives readers a way to identify which references originate from the same source. It also allows you to cite different parts of the same source without repeating the entire source every time.