Q. Please help. I need to cite a few lines from a poem, but there are no page numbers in the book of poems. Do I make page numbers
up? Do I use poem 1, poem 2? My cites are to be author/date style. For example, after my quote I need to reference it, as
in (Grimes 1999, ???). No page numbers!
A. If you’ve already mentioned the poem’s title or number in the text, you can write
(Grimes 1999, n.p.), which indicates that there are no page numbers. If you haven’t mentioned a title
or number, you can add it to the citation: (Grimes 1999, “Something Will Happen”).
“N.p.” is optional in any case.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. What is the best way to give a concise citation within a text based on the bibliography at the end?
A. Chicago style puts the author’s name and the date in parentheses (Brown 2001). You can also add a page
reference or whatever else is relevant (Singer 1985, 155, table 6.1).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Is it okay to use and cite a draft of an article even if the article isn’t forthcoming in a journal?
A. Sure. Cite it as a manuscript or working paper, and give whatever information you have (author, title, date). Please see CMOS 14.218 for examples.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I am copyediting a scholarly journal with an introduction and essays by multiple authors. I asked an author to provide a citation for a quote from a newspaper article. He replied that no citation was necessary since the quoted material appears in the introduction, not an essay. I can’t find anything in CMOS that exempts authors of introductions from documenting their sources. Who’s right?
A. Introductions are not exempt from source citation. The only element that we consider exempt is an epigraph. If your author gives the newspaper name and date in the text, however, that’s sufficient.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. The university I work for produces a magazine and I am charged with organizing our faculty scholarship and honors into Chicago
style. Unfortunately, it seems that every faculty member uses a different style and I spend days trying to get journal articles,
books, and papers that they have written into a clear format as well as speeches, talks, honors, and awards. Do you have
any advice with regard to tackling this? It seems I can never get everything in the correct style format.
A. Welcome to the world of copyediting. It does often seem overwhelming, and the kind of project you describe, where items have
been styled by many different people, can be time-consuming to edit. It takes patience and organization. Keep a style sheet
with examples of each type of citation, and follow it each time you come to a similar item. If this is a huge project that
will never end, you might consider developing a form for faculty to update once a year, where the fields for author, title,
and so forth are arranged in the order you prefer. Better yet, if you have the resources, organize it online, so others do
the typing for you. Finally, let me assure you that in time the most common formats (books, chapters, journal articles) will
become familiar, and you won’t have to think so much about how to do what.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. In a published work, we often come across various end-of-chapter material such as “References,” “Bibliography,” etc. What is the exact difference between “References” and “Bibliography”? What do the terms really stand for?
A. When a writer uses the author-date (or parenthetical) method to refer to books or articles (Jones 1999), she puts the full citations of those works (author, date, title of the work, publisher, etc.) in an alphabetical list called a reference list, or list of works cited, at the back of the book. It must include every work cited. Another method is the notes/bibliography system, in which citations are relegated to footnotes or endnotes. The bibliography at the back consists of full citations of the works that the author researched in order to write the book, but may also include titles for further reading that are not referred to in the book. Bibliographies may also omit works that are tangential to the topic, even if they are cited. Scholars in the humanities tend to use the notes/bibliography system, and scholars in the social sciences tend to use the author-date in-text citation method. Please see CMOS 14.1–5 and 15.1–4 for overviews of both systems. You can find samples of these types of citation at this site in the “Chicago-Style Citation Quick Guide.”
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I am a graduate student in history, and many of my primary sources were printed in Massachusetts during the seventeenth century.
During this time, Cambridge and Boston were part of many entities (Massachusetts Bay Colony, Dominion of New England, et cetera).
How do I cite the city of publication for these documents? Clearly, I cannot use “Cambridge, MA”
since the state did not exist yet! However, I need to distinguish between the two Cambridges, and I don’t
want to be anachronistic. A similar problem exists for publications from English cities before the official advent of the
“UK.”
A. It’s conventional to cite the place as it is printed on the title page of a work. If you want to clarify,
add an explanation at the end of the citation. You can also write a general note in your introduction or a headnote to the
notes section explaining this difficulty and your plan for addressing it.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I’m an editor in an academic publishing house. I’ve been advised by our best-selling
author to use “eadem” (fem.) in place of “idem,”
where appropriate. Recently I had an instance in which I needed to use “idem”
(within the same note) in reference to two male authors. The masculine plural is “eidem.”
Then I realized we might potentially need the feminine plural form some day! Yikes! Do we really want to go down this road?
A. More to the point, how would authors and editors determine the gender of every author in a bibliography? “Idem”
is the standard term, and to attempt further clarification invites inaccuracy and possible offense (not to mention restraining
orders).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hello. When the author uses the same source for five consecutive notations, should I give each a number and list it five times consecutively in the notes, or should I put only one number at the beginning (or end) of the paragraph, thereby listing it only once in the notes? Also, if the notations are apart from one another, I would have to give the source multiple numbers, I’m sure, but then do I re-reference the source, or can I say, for example, “113. See note 72,” or some such? Thanks!
A. Within a single paragraph, one note number will do. In subsequent paragraphs, use “ibid.” to refer to the work most recently cited. You can read about how to use the Latin abbreviation “ibid.” (from ibidem, “in the same place”) in CMOS 14.29 [16th ed.].
[Update: Chicago now prefers shortened citations in favor of ibid. For examples, see CMOS 14.34.]
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I cite a number of works that were written long ago, such as Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. The straightforward way to cite such a work is by the date of the edition employed (Locke, 1987: 201). I find this ugly and uninformative, however. Is there a permissible way to indicate the date of original publication, such as (Locke, 1689 [1987]: 201)? Thank you for your assistance.
A. Yes, you can do that. Please see CMOS 15.40. Chicago style puts the original date in brackets and omits the comma after the author’s name. The first date determines placement in the reference list.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]