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Citations include not only materials which you have quoted in your paper (and which are covered in a different section of this site) but footnotes, endnotes, and appendices as well. Most often the type of information that is included within footnotes, endnotes, or appendices is information which would be of interest to your reader and which supports your thesis, but, for whatever reason, cannot or should not be included in the main body of your text.
Rather than use footnotes or endnotes, MLA style calls for the use of parenthetical documentation within the text. Within the parentheses, list the author's last name (or the name of the person who begins the works cited entry-editor, translator, speaker, etc.) and a page reference to identify the source and location of the borrowed material. Because of its relative ease in both writing and reading, parenthetical documentation (in-line citations, the style and formatting of which are covered in the "Quoting Resources" section of this site) is preferred by most instructors. However, for writers in some disciplines - especially in some of the humanities disciplines such as music, art, religion, theology, and history, as well as highly technical ones such as chemistry, physics, engineering, and medicine - footnotes, endnotes and appendices are widely used.
It is actually kind of ironic that the use of footnotes began to be phased out just at the beginning of the era of the word processor, which of course made creating footnotes and end notes so much easier then it had been in the era of the typewriter. However, now that the use of computers and word processing programs has become so widespread, they are being used more often in papers.
A wise student should check with his or her instructor to see whether parenthetical documentation or footnotes/endnotes are preferred as a method of citing resources.