Notes-bibliography system
Also called: note system, footnote system
A citation system where the full citation lives in a footnote or endnote and the text carries only a superscript number.
Chicago notes-bibliography, Turabian, OSCOLA, Bluebook, and AGLC all work this way. The advantage is room: a note can cite a source, gloss it, compare it with another, and add an aside, none of which fits in brackets. That suits history, law, and the humanities, where the provenance of a claim is often part of the argument.
The first note for a source is full; later ones are shortened. Some note styles have no bibliography at all — Bluebook, for instance, does everything in footnotes, which is why a Bluebook reference list is not a thing.
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See also
FootnoteA note printed at the bottom of the page, keyed to a superscript number in the text, that carries either a citation or a comment too tangential for the body.Shortened noteThe abbreviated footnote used for a source you have already cited in full: author surname, a short title, and the page.Ibid.A note-style abbreviation meaning “in the same place”, used to repeat the source cited in the immediately preceding note.BibliographyA list of sources at the end of a work that may include material you consulted but never cited.