Documentation
Q. In a reference list I’m editing, page ranges don’t seem to be provided for chapters in edited volumes. Should I query the author for page numbers? Answer »
Q. I have a question about in-text citations. In my reference list I have website sources that do not have a date of creation or a last modified date. How would I cite these references in the text? Would I use n.d. or the access date following the author in the parentheses? Answer »
Q. Hi—I’m editing a MS where the author has included the page reference for a quotation as follows: Answer »
Q. At one time, the location of a publisher could be used to get a phone number via directory assistance. This is no longer how anyone would do it, and publishers have frequently moved, been acquired, and so forth, so the location is often highly ambiguous. Authors spend tens of thousands of hours annually looking up or making up publisher locations. I’m staring now at a copy editor’s request that I identify the location of Cambridge University Press—and the editor says it is because you insist on it. Can you give me any sane reason for this collective expenditure of effort and print in 2012? It would make me feel better, as it feels like an empty ritual of no contemporary value, engaged in by a field that is unaware of the digital era. Insistence on archaic rules brings to mind the replicant lament in Blade Runner, “Then we’re stupid and we’ll die.” Answer »
Q. How do I acknowledge that a quotation is a translation made by myself? (I’m writing in Dutch; all sources are in English.) Answer »
Q. Our group has chosen The Chicago Manual of Style as a reference for our university translation project (textbook on international trade). What I’d like to know is whether, since we have chosen CMoS, it now supersedes the capitalization rules used by the publishing agencies of works cited in the text. For example, would it be “Customs—Trade Partnership Against Terrorism” as it appears on their website or “Customs—Trade Partnership against Terrorism,” following CMoS rules for lowercasing prepositions? Answer »
Q. How do you recover from a real proofreading blooper—the kind that has everyone in gales and is terribly embarrassing? Answer »
Q. Sometimes a journal is not published during its cover year, and sometimes there is a considerable gap between the cover date and the actual publication, and it is important to include both dates—the cover date so that the article can be found, and the publication date so that its up-to-dateness upon publication can be assessed. Should the date be given as 1989 [1992], or as 1992 [1989]? Answer »
Q. I want to cite a newspaper article contained within a microfilm edition that has been scanned into a PDF and is available online at a (US) state archive. I am inclined to cite it as a newspaper article and include the online database tag at the end of the citation, ignoring the microfilm finding aids that still define the PDF of the page (reel no., image no., etc.). Is my inclination correct? And if not, how would I go about citing this article? Answer »
Q. A student of mine has quoted two different popular periodical articles by the same author, written in the same year. We are stumped as to how the in-text citation and the reference list entry should look. It seems simple with books (e.g., 2009a, 2009b). But with periodicals, date information beyond the year is given in the works cited list, right? Any suggestions? Answer »
Q. We are using the author-date form of citation. One author cited appears in the reference list with four items for a single year (Author 2003a, 2003b, 2003c, 2003d). However, in the last entry, the person is the editor, rather than the author, of the work. Thus, the entry is Author, J. Q., ed. 2003d. But this entry currently occurs after entries dated to 2004, 2005, and 2006. This makes the entry difficult to find, though the author clearly is attempting to follow the rule that “edited entries follow those of which the person cited is the author.” What would CMOS do? Answer »
Q. I’m preparing a bibliography for an edited volume, which means merging the bibliographies from ten chapters. One of the authors seems to be a German speaker, and though his writing is in English, the titles in his bibliography are in German. Must I translate these? Is there a difference if he read them in German or English? And if I do not need to translate the titles of the works, should I still translate words like “editor” and “volume?” Answer »
Q. When I reference an author within the body of my text, do I then repeat the author’s name in the footnote? Answer »
Q. Sometimes a work will cite a series of annual publications: The Annual Report on Stuff for 1993–1997, 1999, and 2001–2004, say. Does the bibliography or reference list need a separate entry for each year’s volume, or is there an appropriate way to combine them into one entry? If they can be combined, how can breaks in the sequence be handled? Sometimes I feel silly putting eleven basically identical entries in a reference list, but if eleven volumes of the report were consulted . . . ? Answer »
Q. When using a pseudonym to hide the real name of an organization, how do you cite that organization’s website in the references? Answer »
Q. I am writing a paper on Chinese literature in English. I am having a lot of trouble in citing Chinese sources. Since I am familiar with both Chinese and English, I prefer to present pinyin as well as English translations. However, I am confused whether to use ( ) or [ ] and I am confused on the general rules. Answer »
Q. How should I cite a work I’ve already cited in a previous chapter: in full each time I cite it or with formal direction to the previous citation? Answer »
Q. Should I use footnotes to simply list the reference information or are they for adding additional information mainly? Answer »
Q. In a footnote I have a quote that, in the original, itself has a footnote. The latter footnote (i.e., the original author’s footnote) is salient to the discussion, and I’d like to include it in my footnote. What are the mechanics to handle such a situation? Currently I have this: Answer »
Q. I have been asked by my professor to cite in my reference list all newspaper articles that I have used. The articles do not have authors. They do include the date and all other information. What is the correct way to cite this? The manual does not go into detail on this area of citation. Answer »
Q. Should a Russian journal title appearing in an English-language bibliography be Latinized? Or should both the Russian and transliterated versions of the journal’s title be listed? Is it correct to transliterate names of journals? Answer »
Q. I have been told it is not a good idea to document every sentence within a paper. But one of my professors does not accept a single footnote at the end of each paragraph as a proper citation. My question is this: If I write a paraphrased paragraph for a paper based on one source only, how many sentences in an average-sized paragraph are cited individually as opposed to being cited only once at the end of the paragraph? Answer »
Q. When an author refers to his own book, how should it be capitalized and/or punctuated? E.g., According to the list in Appendix C . . . ; in the Glossary . . . ; discussed more fully in Chapter 25 . . . Answer »
Q. If you have tables in your manuscript containing six or so columns of tabulations, do you in your text discussion of the table go into detail about what calculation is in each column of the table? For instance, in the text, “Table 1 shows, in column 4, the sphere’s true volume percentage change from the initial 10-unit radius sphere. Column 5 shows . . . Column 6 tabulates the . . .” Or do you do a generic, nondescriptive text statement like “For changes in a sphere’s radius of up to 10%, table 1 details the level of error introduced by . . .” Do you leave it to the reader to figure out the details of each column? Answer »
Q. Sometimes articles in periodicals—particularly in magazines—skip several pages. Typically, most of the article is contained on several adjacent pages, but then it finishes somewhere toward the back of the periodical. When citing such an article, how should the page numbers be listed? Should the very first and the very last pages displaying the article be shown, as in 25–62? Or should only the actual pages be indicated, as in 25–32, 62, 65, 66? Answer »
Previous Page | Next Page