This is an essay.

It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints.

Short citation cheatsheet

The main reason to use short citations is to allow the referenced page number to change from citation to citation and also to reduce the amount of source information actually embedded in the text.

Why bother?

What's a short citation? In the text there's a footnote number just as usual, but when you click on that (or hover over it, if you have that set up) instead of going to the full citation, you go to something that looks like this:

^ Kilroy 2002, p. 88.

But if you click on that you'll be taken to the complete citation, highlighted. So clicking on the short citation will take you to:

Kilroy, James (2002). My Travels. Away and Away Publishers. ISBN 0312185480.

So what's the benefit? First, the inline syntax in the article text is very simple. To produce the foregoing short citation, all you'd do is to put this in the article at the point where you want the footnote number to appear:

Now, if you have other references to that same source, but on different page numbers of the source, you just change the page number when you reinsert the code for the new text:

Once you do that, you'll get a second footnote in the Notes section but this one will say:

^ Kilroy 2002, p. 133.

But it will also take you to the same complete citation, highlighted, as above.

How about multiple references to the same page number in the same source? The short citation system handles putting them together in a single footnote automatically without having to create a reference name (like <ref name="Kilroy>) for the reference. You just enter the same sfn code every time you want to refer to that page number. So, if you put

in five different places in the same article, the system will automatically produce a footnote that looks like this:

^ ^a,b,c,d,e Kilroy 2002, p. 88.

Need a page range or multiple pages in a single note? Easy, just use "|pp=" instead of just "|p=":

or

Multiple authors? Also easy (maximum 4 authors):

produces:

^ Kilroy & Jones 2005, pp. 76-79.

Inserting the complete citation is also easy. You can just use the ProveIt plugin and then modify the code it produces slightly, see below. (Though I'm no expert, I believe that there are issues using short citations with the VE such that you can't just use VE without having to go into the code editor to modify the code produced by VE.)

How-to simplified

To use short citations, there are three components in the article (from bottom to top):

A "References" section at the bottom of the page containing a list, usually alphabetical, of the complete references, usually without page numbers, directly below the Notes section.
A "Notes" section just above the References section with nothing in it except the <references /> tag or, more commonly, the {{Reflist}} tag, just like with regular footnotes.
The short citation inline code — {{sfn}} — inline in the article text.

The references section

This is just a bulleted list of all the references in {{cite}} form, for example:

* {{Cite book |title=My Travels |last=Kilroy |first=James |publisher=Away and Away Publishers |date=Fall 2002 |isbn=0312185480|ref=harv}}

Things to know about the references:

Some Cite templates allow an "|author=" tag rather than "|last= |first=", but it doesn't work well with short references. Use last & first.
Note that unlike putting the Cite templates directly into the article text, this does not have (and cannot have) <ref>...</ref> around it.
Note the "|ref=harv" tag. That tells the system that this reference will have short citations connected with it. It must be included. There may be some obscure Cite templates which do not support the ref=harv tag or short references, but all the common ones do.
If you use ProveIt to generate the cites (and you should), you'll have to remove the opening and closing ref tags and add the ref=harv tag manually.

The notes section

The easiest thing to do here is use {{reflist|20em}}, which will generate narrow columns. If you're going to have some non-short-citation material in the notes, or some text added to a short citation, you may want to change that to 30em. Nothing goes in the Notes section except that tag.

The inline code

Here's the full basic syntax:

The only absolutely required parts of this are sfn, Last, and year. All of the rest can be simply omitted along with their preceding "|" if not needed.
Last (and Last2-Last4 if used) must exactly match what's in the equivalent field in the full citation. Multiple words in the Last field are allowed, but the Cite and the Sfn must match exactly.
Year can be the year given in the "|date=" field or the "|year=" field in the citation, with date being the preferred one. If date has a month and/or date in it, all you put in the inline tag is the year.
If you include a page number "|p=" can only be followed by a single number (Roman numbers will work). If you're going to insert multiple numbers, you must use pp= and you should not use pp if there's only going to be one number.
The "|ps=" tag allows you to specify some text to follow the short citation. Note that any spaces between the end of the = sign and the first character of the text will be stripped, causing the text to butt up against whatever's just in front of it. The colon, shown above, keeps that from happening. Note that while you can have multiple identical sfn tags with the same page number, adding a ps to one of them will cause an error. To kludge around that, add a "%nbsp;" after the page number on the tag where you include the ps. The downside to that is that it won't combine that instance into the single note with the other page numbers, but it won't cause the error.
What happens if there is no author or only an institutional author? There's a complicated official way to do and a kludgy easy way to do it which works fine. The official way uses the {{sfnref}} tag (click on that link to puzzle it out). The easy way is to just put the institution's name in the "|last=" field in the cite and don't include (or leave blank) the "|first=" field.
What happens with multiple editors? If you have two via "|last=" and "|last2=", it'll show them as "Smith & Jones" and the sfn tag must include both of them. If you have three it will be "Smith, Jones, & Howard", with four it will be "Smith et al." but you still must include all of them in the sfn tag. What if you have more than four editors? Just use four and leave the others off.
What happens with multiple publications by the same author in the same year? If one is the author alone and the other has multiple, no worries and you need not do anything special. But if it's the same exact author or authors and the same year, in the citation add a letter such as "a" to the date field for one of the two cites and do the same in the sfn tag.

Other forms of short citations

There are some other forms of short citations:

The use of nicknames for full inline citations. When you create the citation for the first time, instead of just putting <ref> in front of it, you can give it a nickname: <ref name="Kilroy">. When you want to reuse that citation, instead of copying the full citation text you can just put in <ref name="Kilroy" /> and the citation number will be repeated at that point and all the various instances will be gathered together in a single footnote. This method, however, doesn't allow the page number of the source to change from use to use without considerable kludgery which is non-intuitive to users of the encyclopedia.
Unlinked parenthetical short citations (two methods):

Both of these use a References section with the full citation just like {{sfn}} does, but do not use the "|ref=harv" tag in the Cite template. (Indeed, they don't require the Cite template to be used at all. The citations can just be typed out without any linking or formatting whatsoever.)
In-text parenthetical references. In this method (which is rarely used), there are no footnotes. The inline reference is simply typed out in parentheses:

Bob Edwards was an expert philologist.(Brown, 1982, p. 24). He was known for his studies of the word "now."(Jones, p. 36-37)

These can be made to link up with the references by use of the {{harv}} syntax {{harv|Brown|1982|p=24}}, but this leaves the text of the short footnote in the article text instead of in a footnote, which is different than usual Wikipedia practice today.

Footnoted parenthetical references. They work just like the ones above except that they have <ref>...</ref> around them to put them into footnotes and a Notes section to contain the notes.

While these are obviously simple to do and allow the page number to vary, they lack a link from the short footnote to the full reference. That's hard on the reader, but worse, it can cause ambiguities, especially as time goes on. Look at the Jones reference, just above, which has no year. What happens if there are two Jones references, especially if a second one is added long after the first one and the later editor fails to recognize that s/he is creating an ambiguity? Which one does that point to, even if the later editor puts a date on the ones s/he enters?

Harvard references through <ref>{{harvnb}}</ref> and related templates. Though syntactically different, these work almost exactly like {{sfn}} references. They appear to be a bit more flexible than sfn at the cost of additional complexity. They do not aggregate multiple entries of the same inline footnote into a single Notes entry like sfn does, however. Unless you run into a situation where you can't make sfn work, there's no particularly good reason to use harvnb.

An extensive example of {{sfn}}–style citing

The Swimming Hole