Q. Hello, I’ve hunted around for an answer to this question and haven’t quite found it. I often cite multiple editions of the same book in my work. My understanding is that footnotes for repeated citations don’t typically list the year, but this would seem to leave ambiguous which edition of the text I’m citing. How should I resolve this to ensure my footnotes are clear? Thanks!
A. If a shortened citation is ambiguous, then don’t hesitate to add info that would make it unambiguous. Assuming the title remains the same for each edition of the book you’re citing, all citations after the first can be in shortened form. For example, if you were citing multiple editions of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, you might have the following footnotes:
1. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, 1855). Except as noted otherwise, this and other editions of Leaves of Grass cited herein are from The Walt Whitman Archive, ed. Matt Cohen, Ed Folsom, and Kenneth M. Price, https://whitmanarchive.org/.
2. Leaves of Grass, 1856 ed.
3. Leaves of Grass, 1881–82 ed.
4. Leaves of Grass, 1855 ed.
A shortened note for a book with numbered editions could include the edition number alone or the edition number plus year of publication (after the title or other shortened form): “3rd ed. (1987).”
For the use of italics for the title of The Walt Whitman Archive—which we’re treating as a collected work rather than as a website, though it’s both—see CMOS 14.103. For more on shortened citations, see 13.32–39 and especially 13.37, which includes an example of a title-only citation like the ones in notes 2–4 above.