: Where to put a reference to a figure or literature I am writing a master thesis and got confused by the location of the reference details. Example 1 : Should the reference be before the dot

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Should the reference be before the dot or after a dot in this case?

The reference is semantically part of the first sentence, hence it should typographically be part of it as well, i.e., it should be before the full stop that ends the sentence. When reading the variant with the reference after the dot, my brain wraps up the sentence when I read the dot and gets confused when it continues reading something in brackets that presumably refers to this sentence.

I have read papers from several disciplines and I am not aware of any style that treats such references differently.

Also, is there any particular case where the citation is put after a sentence (after a dot)?

In rare cases, if you have a reference to add to more than one sentence (usually a whole paragraph), you can give it in a standalone, parenthesed sentence. Note that in this case, the entire sentence should be in parentheses and start with a capital letter (at least in all languages that I am aware of). For example:

Adding bananas to the discombobulator activates the transmogrification procedure. To initiate the metaposyxion process, a small amount of unobtainium is injected via the abtromyfier at this point. If, after twenty minutes, there is no indication of either metaposyxion or procomsugnation, the abtromyfication is repeated. This is at most done eleven times. (For a detailied schematic of this procedure, see Appendix Q.)

Finally, for the sake of completeness, note that some styles using superscript numbers for citations place those after the full stop, if they occur at the end of a sentence:

Using Numbercrusher’s test⁶, we obtained results challenging the theory of discombobulated transmogrification.⁷

Personally, I find this quite irritating.

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