Deliberately misciting an article

[Santommaso]

I run into this problem occasionally: I want to cite an excellent journal article, but it has a ridiculous title followed by an entirely appropriate and meaningful subtitle. I publish in a fairly conservative discipline, where ridiculous titles are almost unheard of, and I don't want to give the appearance of citing odd or unserious research literature from related fields. So, today I'm thinking about just citing an article by the subtitle alone, entirely ignoring the main title. Think of an article that is titled something like this: "Frolicking Jigs Amidst the Petunias: Gold Price Fluctuation in Belgian Secondary Markets, 1950-1965." I'll just omit the first part. Thoughts?

[dr_codex]

Don't.

[Hegemony]

No. It will be utterly confusing to anyone who tries to follow it up. And it will look as if you just made a stupid mistake, instead of deliberately leaving out half the information needed to find the reference.

[Caracal]

Agree with everything said. If I followed your citation and came up with the actual article title, I might think that you had cited some different version of an article from the same author. Your responsibility to your readers is to provide them the actual title of the article.

I also think you're worrying too much about this. I can't imagine anybody is really going to care that you cite something with a silly title. You didn't come up with the title.

[Ruralguy]

No one really cares about the title of the article (well, its the journals responsibility to keep it professional, but if they allow frivolity, so be it).  It its in a decent journal and the content is legit, people will take it seriously.

[Parasaurolophus]

I wouldn't. But.

You could probably get away with omitting the silly part for the review process, and adding the proper title once it's approved.


I think that's kind of dodgy, but not so dodgy as to be unacceptable if I was really worried about it.

[ab_grp]

I wouldn't even do it for the review stage.  As a reviewer, I tend to look up some references if I need more background info or become interested in following up on a particular claim.  As was previously mentioned, it may look like a simple copy-paste error, and it could be an annoyance.  But what if it's the reviewer's article?  Agreed that it would be unlikely that anyone would blame you given that it's not your title.

[Cheerful]

I run into this problem occasionally: I want to cite an excellent journal article, but it has a ridiculous title followed by an entirely appropriate and meaningful subtitle.

I have never heard of such a problem.

Many article titles are too long, inaccurate, misleading, or poorly phrased.  My dislike of a given title doesn't mean I should alter it in the bibliography.

I would not judge an author based on the title of someone else's article listed in the bib.

[brixton]

I don't even get this.  It is something someone else wrote.  Presumably it was peer reviewed.  Presumably your citing articles to help center your article's argument.  If this is an article that centers your argument, why would you change the title?  If you're talking about the gold standard, and think petunias are irrelevant, find a better article that suits your purpose.

[Vkw10]

I run into this problem occasionally: I want to cite an excellent journal article, but it has a ridiculous title followed by an entirely appropriate and meaningful subtitle. I publish in a fairly conservative discipline, where ridiculous titles are almost unheard of, and I don't want to give the appearance of citing odd or unserious research literature from related fields. So, today I'm thinking about just citing an article by the subtitle alone, entirely ignoring the main title. Think of an article that is titled something like this: "Frolicking Jigs Amidst the Petunias: Gold Price Fluctuation in Belgian Secondary Markets, 1950-1965." I'll just omit the first part. Thoughts?

Don't.

Sloppy citation makes it harder for other scholars to see who influenced you. Deliberately omitting information is disrespectful to the scholars you're citing, because it makes it harder to trace the impact of their work. I'm probably not the only reviewer who spot checks citations and gets annoyed by sloppy citations.

[secundem_artem]

Editor here:

Don't.

[Santommaso]

OP here. Thanks everyone. Good advice. But I'm still annoyed at silly titles in serious articles!

[jerseyjay]

I also do not really see the original problem. I wouldn't reject an article because it cites another article whose title I dislike. I am in history, and most of our citations are in footnotes; sometimes I read articles in other disciplines that use MLA style or something else, but usually it is the just the name and date with the full title in the works cited. So I don't get why the titles would be a problem.

The only exception I see is if the title is itself obscene or uses an ethnic slur I don't want to use, but I think that is rare. (Once I cited a master's thesis that had the N-word in a quote in its title, which I found offensive, so I just replaced most of the word with dashes, but ethnic and racial slurs are actually one of the few words that I find so distasteful--and in any case, I didn't drop the title.)

By dropping the main title, you run the risk of looking sloppy. If you cannot take good enough notes to get the title correct, how can I trust that you actually got the information correct, too?