Citation, Documentation of Sources

Q. I believe there is an errant dash in the example citation at CMOS 14.119, following “1992”: Armstrong, Tenisha, ed. To Save the Soul of America, January 1961–August 1962. Vol. 7 of The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., edited by Clayborne Carson. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992–. Huge fan of CMOS!!

Q. I’m trying to help my high school students cite primary sources found online for history research papers using notes-bibliography formatting. How would you cite this document, a 1970 memo from Kissinger to Nixon, found on a State Department website: https://​history​.state​.gov​/historical​documents​/frus1969​-76v21​/d190.

I put the website into a citation generator and here is what it produced:

State.gov. “Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969–1976, Volume XXI, Chile, 1969–1973—Office of the Historian,” 2024. https://​history​.state​.gov/historical​documents​/frus1969​-76v21​/d190.

I don’t think this is correct because (a) “State.gov” is not an author’s name, (b) “Foreign Relations of the United States” is not the title of the document but the title of the collection, and (c) there should be a period, not a comma, after the title. How should this document be cited?

Q. Hi there! CMOS defines a website as a set of publicly available pages. I need to cite a site that is restricted to users but is not private communication. How would one go about this? Do we need to signify to our readers that the URL is blocked to users only? Thanks!

Q. How does one cite a footnote on a page that is numbered with roman numerals? For example, a reference to a footnote 1 on page xxii, adapting the example citation in CMOS 14.147, would look rather clunky this way: Jerome Kagan, “Introduction to the Tenth-Anniversary Edition,” in The Nature of the Child (New York: Basic Books, 1994), xxiin1.

Q. Hello. In a book for publication in the US, we are citing a British-published book with single quotes in the title: Julie Hankey, A Passion for Egypt: Arthur Weigall, Tutankhamun and the ‘Curse of the Pharaohs.’ Do we change them to double quotes, per US usage? My instinct is to leave it alone, but I want to follow CMOS guidance.

Q. Hello! How does one cite a pamphlet included with a DVD? The pamphlet contains a short essay which has an author but no title. Thank you!

Q. I coordinate blind peer review for an academic journal that deals with the humanities and the sciences. Often reviewers recommend to the authors a clearer way to phrase the authors’ ideas. Some authors worry that adopting the reviewers’ exact wording would be plagiarism, but when these authors try a brand-new phrasing, I find it has the very problems the reviewer wants fixed. I’m inclined to think that, if something is published in a peer-reviewed journal, one should assume that matters like phrasing (and discovery of sources and objections) will include some contributions from reviewers, but what advice should I give scrupulous authors? Thank you.

Q. Hello, I use old-style figures in the text of my document. Do you have any recommendations for whether they should then be used also for footnote markers in the body text and/or the footer?

Q. Have we abandoned altogether the rule to put note reference numbers (and only one per sentence, please) at the end of the sentence? I’ve prepared indexes for a number of academic monographs lately where note reference numbers are sprinkled willy-nilly throughout the text.

Q. In a collection of (some previously published) essays all by one writer, does one cite the author as the editor too? CMOS 14.104 and 14.106 seem to come close, but they don’t address this exact situation. In the source I’m working with, the title page does not credit the author as editor, but some of the essays were previously published. Thanks!