citation styles

[calimac]

Recently I've been plunged in up to the neck in comparing scholarly bibliographic citation styles. I have five different editions of two style manuals, up to 1000 pages long, most of them from various local libraries, on my desk.

Three of them are The Chicago Manual of Style, and a more badly organized, awkward to use, and inconsistent between editions reference manual it would be hard to find. The other two are the MLA Style Manual, and that's easier to use but vastly misunderstood.

About fifteen years ago I had a scholarly paper published which included a lot of quotations, and many of those quotations were heavily abridged. As a result, it had a lot of ellipses in it. The editor of the journal surrounded all those ellipses with brackets, so that they looked like this: "Three rings for the Elven kings under the sky [...] One for the Dark Lord on his dark throne."

This practice was, then, entirely new to me, and I thought it was the ugliest thing I'd ever seen. Obviously it was to distinguish my supplied ellipses from any that happened to be in the original (not that the editor asked me if any were), but since original ellipses are rare, this seemed to me a bass-ackwards way of making the distinction; if an ellipsis is in the original, that could be noted in the citation.

Subsequently I started seeing it more and more, and I've been told, even quite recently, that this is MLA style. It wasn't MLA style when I learned it years ago, but apparently it was added, and anybody following MLA style, well, that's what they gotta do, like it or not.

But here's the thing. It isn't MLA style. Not any more, and not for several years now. It is indeed in the 2nd edition of the manual (1998), which came out just before my paper was mutilated. But they took it out of the 3rd edition (2008). Perhaps there had been complaints. Now all it says is that "some publishers prefer" the brackets on supplied ellipses, and it's an option to distinguish supplied ellipses from original ones in the rare case where a quotation contains both; the other option, surprise surprise, is to note in the citation the presence of original ellipses.

There are other things in MLA3 that aren't in MLA2 that I've never seen applied in scholarly papers either, so I have to conclude that nobody's ever read MLA3.

Another weird thing I've occasionally come across is bitter complaints by humanities scholars against the author-date citation system, whereby books you cite are identified in text references by the author's name and the year of publication. This kind of makes sense in science, where the age of the source material is often crucial, but it's particularly insane when dealing with a posthumously prolific author like Tolkien. It's unfortunate, to say the least, for a paper to distinguish between, say, The Book of Lost Tales, which was written during WW1, from the Grey Annals of Beleriand, which were written in the 1950s, by citing them as "Tolkien 1983" and "Tolkien 1994" respectively, because that's when the books they're in happened to be published. But I've seen journals that insist on exactly that.

What's weird is that the people who complain about this say it's MLA style. But it isn't. It's Chicago science style, which Chicago used to (14th ed., 1993) claim was growing in popularity in the humanities as well, but more recent editions (15th, 2003; 16th, 2010) have given up on that, offering as an alternative the antiquated footnotes style ("17. Ibid.") that MLA gave up on back in the 1970s, I think. MLA uses a shortened author/keyword inline style, thus:

Bilbo tells the dwarves their entire adventure is "silly" (Tolkien, Hobbit 247)

and if you want to know the full title and which edition is being cited, consult the bibliography. That's MLA style, and it makes sense. (And if you're citing just one work by an author, you don't even need the keyword.)

A little more of this sanity to go around the table, please.

Comments

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

My shelf of style guides includes the American Chemical Society style guide (choice of name/date and numbered), the Associated Press style guide (no guidance, unsurprisingly I guess), the MLA, the American Psychological Association (widely used in the social sciences, name/date, and the most incredibly, narrowly prescriptive approach you could dream of in your worst nightmares), the U.S. Government Printing Office (refers you to Chicago), and Chicago. I have to deal with this stuff a lot; not only are there all the different manuals, but every journal has its own style, and most of them are incredibly prescriptive about every little comma and italicization. Cleaning up the references is the Augean stables of a typical edit.

I primarily edit scientific publications, and so I'm used to name/date and comfortable with it. But it does cause problems in historical fields, where you may be citing a work that has a date of original publication and a date of the edition cited—and in some cases also a date of first publication of the English translation. Listing the work by the date of the edition cited produces exactly the kind of false sense of historical sequence you refer to; listing it by the date of original publication doesn't help anyone find the version you used, which may be needed to make the page numbers meaningful. And some authors get sloppy and go back and forth between the two in a single list!

I've been seeing [. . .] in some quotations in recent edits. I don't like it; the . . . makes the point well enough. Though one of my pet bugbears is the use of the ellipsis character built into Word, which has three dots with no spaces, instead of three dots with nonbreaking spaces.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

It's in Unicode, and I use it… a lot. On Mac OS X with the U.S. Extended keyboard (layout) it's on Option-;.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I find MLA (in its current incarnation) one of the more congenial for my kind of work. That business of "Tolkien 1983" is truly horrible for anyone trying to write on literature in its historical context.

One thing I've noticed in recent versions of the MLA is that they've dropped the requirement for including the URL for websites. I can see why, I suppose - URLs aren't all very stable - but I think it's a mistake. Simply referring to sites by their names ("The Tolkien Lover's Site" or whatever) isn't sufficiently precise, to my mind.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

MLA3 says: "In the past, [we] recommended incuding URLs .... Includsion of URLs has proved to have limited value, however, for they often change, can be specific to a subscriber or a session of use, and can be so long and complex that typing them into a browser is cumbersome and prone to transcription errors. Readers are now more likely to find resources on the Web by searching for titles and authors' names than by typing URLs. You should include a URL as supplementary information only when the reader probably cannot locate the source without it or when your publisher requires it." (6.7.1., p. 212)

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I do see the problems with URLs, but typing search terms into Google and hoping for the best doesn't strike me as a satisfactory alternative!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

See the last sentence quoted. Most of the scholarly web citations these days are going to databases like JSTOR or Project Muse, for both of which specific URLs are impossible, but every scholar should know where these databases are and how to access them, the same way that every scholar should know how to interpret and find a print journal citation.

I have to agree with MLA's principles. The problem of link rot in web citations in legal decisions is now so acute that a consortium of law libraries have established a web archive, now in beta testing (here's an article about it; there's not much to see at the archive's home page), to establish permanent URLs for cited material by copying it to a URL that won't change.

I approve; various test projects of this kind were already under way a decade ago when I was a law cataloger, and one of my jobs was to maintain the URLs in our catalog database. Once a month I'd run a URL-checker on the entire database, and then hunt down the new addresses for the ones that had changed. This work, which only large law libraries could attempt to undertake at all, was rapidly growing impossibly time-consuming already.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

I certainly acknowledge that the unstable nature of URLs is a major problem, and I applaud iniatives like the law one you mention.

As far as JSTOR and Project Muse (and the like) are concerned, I would actually go even further, and simply list the volume, part and page numbers, just as if I'd consulted a paper copy in a library - which is what those databases effectively are. I see no particular advantage there in citing either URLs or the fact that it came from a JSTOR scan rather than Bristol Central Library - except that it offers those enterprises a bit of free advertising.

Where I have a problem is with the many citations that are not to scholarly articles, or at least not to ones held on those databases (whose number is likely to be swelled in future years in this country thanks to Open Access requirements, for reasons I went into here). In many cases there are now slightly different versions of the same article floating around - one in JSTOR perhaps, but another on the author's university's research repository. Without a URL, how can a reader know which is meant?

With non-scholarly sites the problem is even worse, as they tend to be less stable, may lack "proper" titles and authors, etc. A URL plus date of access is not much help, but it at least gives the reader a snapshot of where the writer was looking. "Harry Potter Website" and the like is no use to anyone.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The second sentence of your third paragraph negates the objection that forms your second paragraph. List the web source for your citation, whether it be JSTOR or a university database. These things are not merely repositories, as libraries are, but publishers, and the possibility of variance is the main reason they must be considered so.

With that information given in the bib ref ("JSTOR, Web, [date]"), a full URL is unnecessary to know which of them is meant, and this information may be clearer, in fact, than a long string of httpese. I even know databases which, while they have specific (and very long) URLs for the articles they contain, if you copy and paste that URL into a browser afresh, the site dumps you back to the main search page, so the URL did you no help and only wasted your time.

As for your final paragraph, see, again, the last sentence quoted from the MLA rules.

The only other advantage I can see for quoting a URL from fugitive fan sites is that, if they disappear, archive.org requires a URL to search for them.

[steepholm.livejournal.com]

The second sentence of your third paragraph negates the objection that forms your second paragraph.

I don't think so. If I cite something as coming from, say, English Literary History, I mean that I am citing the version published by Johns Hopkins University Press in the journal of that name, which I may consult in paper form or on JSTOR (between which two versions there will be no difference, because one is simply a scan of the other). The fact that other versions of the same article may exist elsewhere (e.g. on the author's university site) doesn't introduce ambiguity, because those other versions are not ELH articles.

If, however, one did wish to mention that one had read the article in JSTOR (and I don't object to that, I just think it otiose), then I agree that a URL should be unnecessary - just as it would be unnecessary to mention which shelf my physical library keeps their copy on.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

"one is simply a scan of the other"

In some cases of online databases. Definitely not others. Some provide only HTML versions, not PDFs, and some even neglect to include the print version's pagination.

Also, PDFs and print may differ, even as two printings of the same book may differ.

It may be convenient, in fact it usually is, when citing a repository version of an article also published in a journal, to indicate in the bibliography that it exists in both forms, since the journal is the "official" form. And the convenient way to do that? MLA style.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Here's an argument that users really are giving up on URLs and are just searching on Google. I query how widespread this is, and doubt its implications, but there it is.

[cmcmck.livejournal.com]

Most of the US Unis I write for use Chicago and I'm not overly impressed (but then I'm not overly impressed seeing my English spelling translated into US spelling either).

[oursin.livejournal.com]

Is it MLA that assumes everything is a book or journal article? Anyway, there is one widely used set of conventions that, although orientated towards the humanities, is absolutely hopeless not just for citing archival and manuscript material butalso pretty useless for supplying a meaningful yet not cumbersome form of citation to material from 1940s women's magazines I was using in a chapter of a volume for which it was the standard.

Also, I literally have seen (Plato, 2000) given as a cite.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Both MLA and CMS prescribe that a magazine article, i.e. not from a scholarly journal, be cited with the information: author, article title, magazine title, issue date, pages; and the only difference between them is the punctuation of these elements. Possibly what you've encountered is attempts to use the journal citation style, with volume numbers and all, on magazines. This used to be common, and possibly required, but being ridiculous was eventually dropped.