Q. I am attempting to proofread and fix the style of the endnotes of a book on communications for a generally humanities audience. My problem is that the author of the book is a lawyer and has cited many law review articles that he considers governed by the Bluebook style. Should I use the general style for citing periodicals in CMOS for the legal articles? As it is, the humanities articles are in CMOS format and the law review articles are in Bluebook format. This hybrid style doesn’t seem acceptable to me. Please help.
A. I agree that only one style should prevail for journal articles. If the audience were primarily legal scholars, I would advocate following Bluebook style for all citations, journal articles and otherwise; in this case Chicago style is preferable since the intended audience is general. Following Chicago style will require a bit more research on the author’s part since Chicago recommends that the page range of the entire article be provided whereas Bluebook requires only the first page of the article.