Time for Citations to Move into the Cyber Age

[Wahoo Redux]

Do you not use a citation management program like Zotero or Endnote?

No.  I'm a little leery of citation programs having received endless incorrectly formatted papers from students who then complained that they "did it online!" on some inaccurate citation machine.

I will check them out.  Thank you.   

In this particular case I am editing a manuscript which is to be published this summer and incorporating a number of teeny-tiny charges based on the house style (essentially UK Chicago) emailed to me in a 40 page PDF.

Garbage in, garbage out. These programs can only output information that has been put in the right categories. You have to know what it's supposed to generate to know the difference between, say, "year" and "date" fields.

Sure. 

But my point was that we don't need all that in the first place.  Author.  Title.  Name of publication (optional in many instances). 

Then on to Google.

All done.

[overthejordan]

Do you not use a citation management program like Zotero or Endnote?

No.  I'm a little leery of citation programs having received endless incorrectly formatted papers from students who then complained that they "did it online!" on some inaccurate citation machine.

I will check them out.  Thank you.   

In this particular case I am editing a manuscript which is to be published this summer and incorporating a number of teeny-tiny charges based on the house style (essentially UK Chicago) emailed to me in a 40 page PDF.

Garbage in, garbage out. These programs can only output information that has been put in the right categories. You have to know what it's supposed to generate to know the difference between, say, "year" and "date" fields.

Sure. 

But my point was that we don't need all that in the first place.  Author.  Title.  Name of publication (optional in many instances). 

Then on to Google.

All done.

But that's a naive oversimplification. It would work in many cases in some fields. But it could be a disaster in others. What about if you're writing about the evolution of a text across multiple editions? Or the appropriateness of different editions for different contexts? What about if you're writing about a film adaptation of a literary work and the literary work itself? What if you're writing about a film that has been screened with different aspect ratios? What if you're writing about a fictional book that a character in a video game is reading? What if you're citing a screenshot of a snapchat that has been tweeted and then photoshopped and then tweeted in a different context?

We need subtle style guides now more than ever precisely because we are in the Cyber Age.

[mamselle]

Yeah, I was trying to imagine how that would work, too.

And as a fan of the physical "book," fast becoming a four-letter-word in some folks' eyes, I like being reminded of the individual objects those titles represent, or used to represent--the quiddity of them, perhaps.

I see the movement towards scorning paper copies (kinder as it was supposed to be to the trees, which I do favor) as a product of a misinformed antimaterialistic dualism, and possibly a result of a deep self-loathing on the part of embodied humans embarrassed by the "this-ness" of their own bodies.

There are theological ramifications as well, based on an unwanted gnostic suspicion of the inherent good of material creation, but I won't go there (I know, I just did...).

Anyway, if the medieval scriptoria hadn't produced physical books that have perdured into the present, I'd have a very hard time doing about half of my work (try explaining THAT in French to a 《fonctionnaire de la bibliotheque 》who is not a true 《bibliothecaire》and thinks I should be able to be bought off with scintillating digital access...)

Ok [/rant]

But some part of that is pertinent....

M.

[Wahoo Redux]

But that's a naive oversimplification. It would work in many cases in some fields. But it could be a disaster in others.

Um, don't wanna get the new fora off on the wrong foot, but bite me, junior.  I've probably published as much as most peeps on this board (in a number of venues), and I have taught undergrads citation and documentation for 19 years, including IEEE to engineers.

So let me help you: you've made up a number of ridiculous citation scenarios, but if one or two of those should occur, use footnotes or endnotes to explain confusing circumstances (such as movies formatted to fit the screens of televisions pre-wide-screen; explain in the text itself that you are referring to Jaws as first screened in the theater vs. Jaws first shone on broadcast TV; designate editions via year----information can be found in Google) rather than attempt some byzantine citation farrago.  Cut-and-paste the images from snap-chat into the document and caption it.  Multiple citations in any of the spurious situations you fabricated would be much more confusing.  If one is not a writer who is good enough to explain circumstances to hu's readers, please don't write.

Find one scholar who has cited "a fictional book that a character in a video game is reading?"  I dare you.  (The is actually a simple method for citing quotations from a tertiary source, BTW----did you know that?)

And here's the kicker: I am 40K+ words into a monograph on a text which was published in 5 different authoritative texts across a decade, some significantly different, some not, and numerous pirated versions.  I designate them by edition or year; it is not that difficult.

:mod edit:: Do not out other users by suspected past monikers, or any other identifying feature.

[eigen]

Wow, so soon after moving to a new forum.

I think this discussion might need a bit of a break if it's getting this heated.

Also, if you suspect a post is close to the line enough that you feel a need to state it in the opening portion of the post... Maybe it's too close to the line to post, and taking a break and coming back to it later would be a better option.

[mamselle]

Hmmm... the information itself is helpful, but maybe taking a step back, looking at the post on the Preview screen, and editing out the high bilirubin count phrases would work?

One of the issues that brings up is the movement away from foot- and end-noting overall. People are coming through now who have always, only, ever been taught to use online citations, so the use of foot- and/or end-notes isn't something they have a concept for.

Frustration with this is understandable, indeed.

But maybe we don't have to vent it on the hapless souls who are its victims, not its perpetrators?

M.

[bibliothecula]

I will evangelize for Zotero all day long. It's super easy to use and can switch format styles with a single click. All of the complicated examples given below? Easy.

[ciao_yall]

I will evangelize for Zotero all day long. It's super easy to use and can switch format styles with a single click. All of the complicated examples given below? Easy.

Zotero made my dissertation feel like springtime skipping along the beach or a meadow of flowers.

[namazu]

[Zotero is] super easy to use and can switch format styles with a single click. All of the complicated examples given below? Easy.

That's true of other citation management software as well. 
When Zotero first came out, I was excited to adopt it over the institutional RefWorks account I'd been using. Unfortunately, at that time (ca. 2007, when it existed only as a Firefox add-on) I didn't find it very usable or accessible, and ended up switching to EndNote (the cost of which was, thankfully, covered by a grant).  It sounds like Zotero's improved quite a bit since then, which is good to hear.


In any case, I've found that having some kind of citation manager is indispensable. 


There are some quaint bits of certain citation styles that I think we could probably safely jettison, but on the reader's end, I'd still rather have too much information than too little.  The assumption that everything is easily and uniquely Google-able doesn't hold for some of the lit reviews I've done.

[mamselle]

I'm editing an article with a citation inclusion I've never seen before (and hope never to encounter again...).

Instead of a simple (open parens, author, date, p. no., close parens), there's a kind of "radio box" with the info that can't be eradicated except by knocking out the whole thing (which I'm doing, after re-typing the pertinent contents myself, since it won't let me cut and paste them from the box, either).

GGGGRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

What IS this thing and where did it come from?

I need to let the author know not to use it again, but what is it I tell them not to use??

Exasperating. Thankfully it's a short article....

M.

[namazu]

I'm editing an article with a citation inclusion I've never seen before (and hope never to encounter again...).

Instead of a simple (open parens, author, date, p. no., close parens), there's a kind of "radio box" with the info that can't be eradicated except by knocking out the whole thing (which I'm doing, after re-typing the pertinent contents myself, since it won't let me cut and paste them from the box, either).

GGGGRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!!!

What IS this thing and where did it come from?

I need to let the author know not to use it again, but what is it I tell them not to use??

Exasperating. Thankfully it's a short article....

M.

Sounds like it could be auto-generated by a citation management program. 
Maybe you could mention that there is some citation formatting problem and it would be helpful, if they use such software, to make sure that they send you a clean version without the markup.



I know it's conventional in many fields, but I strongly dislike in-text author-date references -- as a reader, I find that they interrupt the flow of the paper.  Numbered superscripts are where it's at!  (The trade-off with numbered references is increased need to flip to the references section, and a bear of a time formatting if you don't use reference management software that renumbers automatically when you have to edit the thing.)

[mamselle]

Yes, traditional numbered superscript footnote/endnote-like thingys would be my preference as well.

But our graphic designer has a hard time formatting our columns for footnotes/endnotes, so we've gone to (date)/bib. formatting.

Which is fine, we don't have so many, but I'd never seen that before.

So, yes, thanks, now I'll know what to tell them NOT to do again!

M.