OSCOLA Citation Generator

OSCOLA footnote examples

The same two sources appear on every CiteTools generator page, so you can compare styles side by side.

Full and short notes

Full note, journal article

Yann LeCun, Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, ‘Deep Learning’ (2015) 521 Nature 436, 438 <https://doi.org/10.1038/nature14539>.

Short note, journal article

LeCun, Bengio and Hinton (n 1) 438.

Full note, book

Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2011) 438.

Short note, book

Kahneman (n 1) 438.

How OSCOLA formats a footnote

• A full note names each author as the source prints the name, with the first name or initials first. A note ends with a full stop.
• A bibliography entry puts the surname first and the initials after it with no comma: LeCun Y, Bengio Y and Hinton G.
• Article titles go in single quotation marks with a capital on every major word. Book titles are italic.
• A journal article gives the year in round brackets, the volume, the journal name, and the first page: (2015) 521 Nature 436.
• A later note for a source gives the surnames and a cross-reference to the first note, as in LeCun, Bengio and Hinton (n 1) 438. Change the 1 to the number of that note.
• A work with more than three authors is cited as the first author and others, in the full note and in the short note.

When to use OSCOLA

OSCOLA is the Oxford University Standard for Citation of Legal Authorities, edited by the Oxford Faculty of Law. Law schools and legal journals in the UK and beyond use it. It is a footnote system: a number in the text points to a note at the foot of the page. The bibliography lists every secondary source in alphabetical order by the surname of the first author. CiteTools writes the notes and the bibliography entry for books, journal articles, chapters, and web pages. It does not cite cases or legislation, the primary sources of law. The 5th edition of 2026 drops ibid, and CiteTools never writes it.

Frequently asked questions