Past vs. present tense: too much of a stickler?

[Parasaurolophus]

Different journals or university presses will have policies for all sorts of ways of setting things out. But if a a policy is not rationally required, and is just a conventional choice, I expect that different people will go different ways. I can't think of any convention that is universally accepted by all journals in a field, though I'd be interested to hear examples.

Citing one's sources?

Writing one's own work (i.e. not plagiarizing)?

Not re-publishing work published elsewhere?

These are all principles in most, if not all, academic disciplines. How they are applied, however, is often different even within the same discipline.

For example, citing sources? I have seen some books by really good and recognized historians that do not have any footnotes or citations, and instead just have a bibliographic essay at the end. These are usually in books aimed at undergraduates or non-historians (such as published by Hill and Wang). Then there are books that only cite primary sources. And then there are some journals (especially the American Historical Review) that cite anything that could conceivably be cited. I have received readers' reports asking for more footnotes, and readers reports requesting the footnotes be trimmed--for the same article. My point is, what "cite your sources" means varies within the same discipline.

Sure. They're all still conventions, though.

(The point was just to offer downer some counterexamples, since their claim seemed too strong.)

[Caracal]

For example, citing sources? I have seen some books by really good and recognized historians that do not have any footnotes or citations, and instead just have a bibliographic essay at the end. These are usually in books aimed at undergraduates or non-historians (such as published by Hill and Wang).

Usually, those have hidden citations. No footnotes, but there are references at the end ordered by page number. Although, perhaps not in all cases.

Conventions don't need to be universal to be broadly accepted, and the details can vary, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. I do think its silly to worry about things where there isn't really a standard convention. For example, the practice of including the publisher in the citation seems to be fading. Some journals and publishers might require it, others don't. I give students a standard format just to keep things simple, but it would be silly to worry about whether they include the publisher.

[mamselle]

Except when you're trying to find a really out-of-the-way resource and the publisher has changed or been bought out several times, in which case the habit of including all publishers might mean that one hard-to-find one will be there when it's needed.

I also decry the lack of credits for book cover and frontispiece materials, and the slung-on captions and credits that do not name the title of an artwork, its maker, date, school, country of origin, and current location (museum or other) if known.

Those of us who work from visual materials NEED to be able to find such resources. They're not just cute 'illustrations,' they signify as much as verbal texts do in iconographic and other imagaic studies.

It has taken me 50 years to track down an image I saw as an undergraduate; it just popped up online (thankfully, correctly credited, finally) the other day.

M.