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in the old days, authors wrote out their source citations from scratch, and editors checked them to make sure they were correctly formatted. now there are tools that will do this for you, from online \u201ccite\u201d buttons to full-featured citation management apps. most of these will apply chicago style automatically.<\/p>\n
this sounds good, but from an editor’s perspective it isn\u2019t quite perfect. automated source citations depend on metadata\u2014the details that identify a book or other type of work online\u2014and this metadata doesn\u2019t always lend itself to a properly styled citation.<\/p>\n
fortunately, any problems are usually easy to fix. let\u2019s put this to the test with a pair of sources: a book and a journal article.<\/p>\n
say you\u2019re editing a word manuscript for a new book on the impact of industrialization on traditional food cultures in the united states. the author did a lot of research and, as we\u2019ll soon discover, relied on software to create the citations and add them to the manuscript.<\/p>\n
one of the cited sources is upton sinclair\u2019s the jungle<\/em>, the classic 1906 novelistic expos\u00e9 of working conditions in chicago\u2019s meatpacking industry. it\u2019s cited several times. here\u2019s the first footnote, which cites page 43:<\/p>\n 1. sinclair, the jungle<\/em>, 43.<\/p>\n that\u2019s a shortened citation, which is perfectly fine in chicago style, provided the same source is listed in full in a bibliography. here\u2019s the bibliography entry:<\/p>\n sinclair, upton. the jungle<\/em>. doubleday, page & company, 1906.<\/p>\n that\u2019s mostly fine too. but chicago prefers to omit corporate identifiers like \u201cinc.\u201d and \u201cco.\u201d from publishers\u2019 names in source citations, whether these are spelled out or abbreviated (see cmos<\/em> 14.134<\/a>).<\/p>\n chicago also recommends recording the city of publication (though the trend has been toward dropping that element). that info needs to be tracked down\u2014preferably from the title page (or copyright page) in the book itself or a facsimile like this one from google books<\/a>:<\/p>\n here\u2019s the edited result:<\/p>\n sinclair, upton. the jungle<\/em>. new york: doubleday, page, 1906.<\/p>\n let\u2019s pretend that the author of our manuscript also cites a bunch of articles from academic journals. for example, here\u2019s a note that cites pages 72\u201373 in a journal article on native american food production:<\/p>\n 3. ricart, \u201ccooking food customs in the pot of self-governance,\u201d 72\u201373.<\/p>\n obviously, the all caps have to go. in ms word, you can avoid retyping the title (and potentially introducing an error) by making use of the change case feature in the font group under the home tab. select the title, click the aa icon, and then choose \u201ccapitalize each word.\u201d then go back to \u201cin,\u201d \u201cthe,\u201d and \u201cof\u201d and apply lowercase. here\u2019s the result:<\/p>\n 3. ricart, \u201ccooking food customs in the pot of self-governance,\u201d 72\u201373.<\/p>\n but that title, at eight words, doesn\u2019t quite qualify as a shortened title. in chicago style, such titles are usually no more than four words (see cmos<\/em> 14.33<\/a>):<\/p>\n 3. ricart, \u201ccooking food customs,\u201d 72\u201373.<\/p>\n now that we have a properly styled shortened citation to a journal article, let\u2019s examine the bibliography entry:<\/p>\n ricart, kate. \u201ccooking food customs in the pot of self-governance: how food sovereignty is a necessary ingredient of tribal sovereignty.\u201d american indian law review<\/em> 44, no. 2 (2019): 369\u2013402. https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/26974533.<\/p>\n good, provided you fix the caps:<\/p>\n ricart, kate. \u201ccooking food customs in the pot of self-governance: how food sovereignty is a necessary ingredient of tribal sovereignty.\u201d american indian law review<\/em> 44, no. 2 (2019): 369\u2013402. https:\/\/www.jstor.org\/stable\/26974533.<\/p>\n but let\u2019s go back to that numbered note. pages \u201c72\u201373\u201d can\u2019t be right; the page range for the article is 369\u2013402. maybe the author meant \u201c3<\/u><\/strong>72\u201373.\u201d a glance at the article itself\u2014or a query to the author\u2014should clear that up.<\/p>\n the uncorrected versions of the citations above were generated for this post automatically using zoterobib<\/a>, the free web-based citation tool from zotero<\/a>, an open-source reference manager maintained by the corporation for digital scholarship. in real life (our manuscript on food production is only hypothetical), an author would have copied and pasted these citations into the manuscript as needed.<\/p>\n zoterobib is good, but it can\u2019t do everything. for example, the all caps apparently come from the author and title metadata at jstor, which in turn reflects how that info appears in the article itself<\/a> (in the brief listing at jstor and in the pdf version of the full article).<\/p>\n jstor\u2019s recommended citation (behind a \u201ccite\u201d button that generates the results in several formats, including chicago) also has the caps:<\/p>\n for this post, we pasted the jstor link (i.e., the \u201cstable url\u201d listed next to the article) into zoterobib and got all those caps there too. again, that\u2019s because the metadata for the article appears that way. a diligent author would have fixed that glitch the moment the source was added by using zoterobib\u2019s manual editing interface. here\u2019s what that looks like:<\/p>\n there\u2019s always the chance that an author, in fixing the title caps, will introduce a typo, but zoterobib\u2019s interface is supported by spell-check, which should help.<\/p>\n note in the screenshot above the option to edit the short form for the title. that\u2019s a handy feature; even if the title weren\u2019t in all caps, shortening it would still require human input.<\/p>\n another thing that generally requires intervention by the author are the specific page numbers cited in a note. here\u2019s the zoterobib form for that (showing the adjusted short title):<\/p>\n those numbers (typed by our imaginary author) may be wrong (as we discovered earlier), but give credit to zoterobib for changing the hyphen to an en dash (which becomes more apparent in a different font).<\/p>\n as for the jungle<\/em>, we used a url from google books\u2014specifically, the one that points to the university of michigan library scan that we linked to above. the data there was pretty good, though it should be noted that google\u2019s \u201ccreate citation\u201d feature put \u201cunited states\u201d rather than \u201cnew york\u201d in the place of publication.<\/p>\n some sources list a recommended citation format in the source itself; these can be copied and pasted directly into a manuscript. those citations, which have usually been vetted by the publisher (or at least sourced directly from the publisher\u2019s metadata), tend to be accurate. but they\u2019re not necessarily in chicago style.<\/p>\n here\u2019s the recommended citation for the journal article cited above, as listed in the article:<\/p>\n kate ricart, cooking food customs in the pot of self-governance: how food sovereignty is a necessary ingredient of tribal sovereignty<\/em>, 44 am<\/span>. indian<\/span> l. rev<\/span>. 369 (2020), https:\/\/digitalcommons.law.ou.edu\/ailr\/vol44\/iss2\/6<\/p>\n great, but that\u2019s in bluebook<\/em> style (note the italics for the article title and the caps and small caps for the name of the journal), which is used by many authors and publishers who work primarily with legal citations. and though cmos<\/em> does cover elements of the bluebook<\/em> (see cmos<\/a><\/em> 14.269<\/a>), that style usually isn\u2019t appropriate for a work whose subject matter isn\u2019t primarily legal.<\/p>\n an editor encountering that citation would need to intervene to apply chicago style.<\/p>\n the results from using zoterobib and the \u201ccite\u201d options at jstor and google books were pretty good, but they weren\u2019t perfect. our advice for authors, in the spirit of cmos<\/em> 14.5<\/a>, would be as follows: use the tools, but check the citations against the sources themselves the moment you acquire them, making any necessary adjustments then and there. then double-check the results in your final manuscript.<\/p>\n this will mean less work down the line for both you and your copyeditor.<\/p>\n![\"title](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ad2buzz.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/sinclair-the-jungle-title-page00.png?resize=400%2c718\")
<\/p>\njournal article<\/span><\/h3>\n
where did these citations come from?<\/span><\/h2>\n
![\"screenshot](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ad2buzz.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/ricart-jstor-citation00.png?resize=700%2c206\")
<\/p>\n![\"the](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ad2buzz.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/detail-from-zotero00.png?resize=700%2c752\")
<\/p>\n![\"screenshot](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.ad2buzz.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/03\/detail-from-zotero01a.png?resize=525%2c244\")
<\/p>\n\u201crecommended citation format\u201d<\/span><\/h2>\n
how authors can help<\/span><\/h2>\n
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