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Although I have complained about the misuse of citation software, it’s not as though I believe the quaint and perhaps dying method of hand-composing citations to be a cure-all. At least the software mangles the format consistently, which allows a copyeditor to put certain gaffes right by means of global searches.
In contrast, when homemade notes fail to follow a system, they fail in myriad ways, so any editor determined to impose order is faced with endless drudgery. Recently a group of academic book manuscript editors I belong to discussed one particular aspect of notes preparation: whether and how to standardize the shortening of citations after their first, full mention.
Authors rarely cite a work in full every time it appears. Sometimes they cite it fully the first time it appears in each chapter. Sometimes they give it the full treatment only the first time it’s mentioned in the book. Either way, subsequent mentions of the work are most often shortened to the author’s name, a short title, and a page number. This type of shortening is clear, concise, and difficult to botch—it’s what my group likes best.
Some writers, however, prefer to lard their notes with Latin abbreviations.
31. Fama, Overboard, 23.
32. Welch, Waiting to Forget, 13.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 66; Fama, op. cit., 42; Welch, “The Holding-On Night,” 16.
35. Welch, “The Holding-On Night,” 13.
36. Idem, Waiting to Forget, 16.
37. Ibid., 14.
38. Fama, loc. cit.
Of the Latin abbreviations, ibid. (Latin abbreviation for ibidem, “in the same place”) is the only one still commonly used, and it works well enough when the user understands its somewhat annoying and arbitrary limits:
- Ibid. may be used only when the preceding note consists of a single citation. Note 35 above, for example, cannot use ibid., because note 34 consists of more than one citation.
- Ibid. takes the place of whichever elements in the preceding citation are identical to those in the current one. Thus note 37 refers to Welch, Waiting to Forget, but to a different page number.
- Ibid. may not stand for the author’s name alone—that’s what idem is for (Latin for “the same,” sometimes abbreviated id.). Note 36 could not properly be written Ibid., Waiting to Forget.
- When the use of ibid. is required on an even-numbered note, it is spelled backward, dibi. (Latin abbreviation for dibathi), which . . . just kidding.
I confess I don’t understand the attraction of using ibid., other than to save a few keystrokes. Knowing the author and a short title is more useful to readers, especially in footnotes. If note 37 in my example appears three pages after note 36, a reader will have to turn pages to see which work was meant. Why not just say?
Neither op. cit. nor loc. cit. is much used these days,* perhaps partly because The Chicago Manual of Style has frowned on them for generations. The instructions in the 11th edition (1949) are comically opaque (“Op. cit. is not used to repeat the title of a journal when the reference is to another author, but may be used in reference to the same author’s work in a periodical” [p. 142])—and with typical charm, the 12th edition admits defeat: “To save the reader’s nerves, not to mention the editor’s, and for greater clarity, the University of Chicago Press has discarded both op. cit. and loc. cit. and in place of them has adopted the short-title form” (15.41).**
The question my group of editors discussed was this: in a book with no bibliography, if the author cites a work in full only the first time it appears, is the manuscript editor obliged to create full citations the first time that work appears in every subsequent chapter? There was no consensus, other than a general wish that authors would either supply a bibliography and eliminate the problem or supply a full citation at first mention in every chapter and save us from having to decide what to do.
Although bibliographies are lately an endangered species—either authors don’t supply them, or they produce them badly—in my view, a bibliography is the best solution, since it eliminates the need for full citations in the notes, and it allows for simple author-title shortening throughout, with or without the use of ibid. (and without the flakiness caused by too much Latin shortening).
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*Op. cit. (Latin abbreviation for opere citato, “in the work cited”) may be used anywhere in a work, as long as the source was previously cited in full, even several chapters back. Loc. cit. (loco citato, “in the place cited”) may also be used anywhere in a work to refer to a title plus page number or other locator—that is, an exact place—already cited. It can cause trouble when writers forget they’ve cited more than one work by a given author. Note 38 above is vague enough as it is, although it properly refers to the most recently cited location in Fama, Overboard, which was page 42.
**In the 11th edition of CMOS Latin terms in notes were to be styled in italics (unlike in the notes examples above, where they are all in roman type). In the 12th edition, the style was changed to roman. In the 12th edition, the sections that treat Latin abbreviations used roman type for the Latin terms at every mention, even when the terms functioned as “words used as words.” I assume this was from a determination not to encourage any italic setting of such words.
A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on March 1, 2012. More reader comments are available there.
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