footnotes-formatter

Footnotes Formatter

What This Skill Does

Takes a list of messy, inconsistent, or unnumbered notes and references and returns them correctly numbered, consistently formatted, and matched to your chosen citation style.

When To Use This Skill

• A long-form article, investigation, or documentary treatment has source notes in varying formats that need standardising before publication
• A reporter has pasted their references in a mix of formats (some Chicago, some URLs only, some bare hyperlinks) and you need them uniform
• You are preparing a grant application, fund pitch, or academic-adjacent journalism piece that requires a specific citation style
• Endnotes from a Word document have lost their numbering and need to be reconstructed

What You Need To Provide

Required:

• The raw footnotes or endnotes, in whatever state they are in (pasted as a list, one per line, or as a block of text)
• The citation style you want: choose one — Chicago (author-date or notes-bibliography), AP, MLA, APA, or "house style" (if house style, describe the format you want)

Optional:

• The text of the article or document so the assistant can check that in-text reference numbers match the notes list
• Whether these are footnotes (at the bottom of each page) or endnotes (collected at the end) — affects labelling only, not formatting
• Any special rules: e.g., "shorten URLs," "do not include access dates," "use 'ibid' for repeated consecutive sources"

How the Assistant Approaches This

1. Reads all the raw notes and identifies each distinct source, stripping duplicates and flagging any entry that is missing information required by the chosen style (e.g., a publisher name, a publication date)
2. Applies the chosen citation format consistently: order of elements, punctuation, italics conventions, and abbreviation rules for that style
3. Numbers the final list sequentially from 1 and returns the formatted block, with a brief note at the end listing any entries where required information was missing or had to be inferred