Comments on: Nota Bene

By: Henry (not the famous one)

Henry (not the famous one) — Thu, 10 May 2007 21:00:19 +0000

As for footnotes: I commend to all the first footnote in the article “The Common Law Origins of the Infield Fly Rule,” published in the University of Pennsylvania Law Review in the late 1970s. The rest of the article—and the footnotes—are pretty good too.

By: mollymooly

mollymooly — Wed, 09 May 2007 17:14:31 +0000

Publishers favour endnotes for books where most readers are never going to bother reading the notes. In that case, minimizing the clutter for the lazy majority outweighs the inconvenience for the motivated minority. Of course, as Al Franken points out wrt Ann Coulter, some authors count on readers’ not bothering to check the endnotes.

By: Eszter

Eszter — Tue, 08 May 2007 16:59:45 +0000

Oh yes, I forgot to add that I also hate it when citations and substantive comments get mixed up in either footnotes or endnotes. Maybe that’s another reason I like the Author Year style. That way you know that a footnote/endnote is not simply a citation.

By: magistra

magistra — Tue, 08 May 2007 06:40:54 +0000

Sara – evil indexing is common because subject indexing is hard and in a cost-benefit analysis possibly not worth it. I’ve just indexed a book (not my own) for the first time and it was seriously difficult work. It took me 50-60 hours of work to index a collection of historical essays of around 300 pages. (Whether or not the result is good is not for me to say, but I did index the endnotes). The problem is that I’ve made all that effort, working to a fairly tight deadline, to produce something that most readers and book reviewers will then take for granted. I could probably have written most of a new article in that time: which is the better move?

By: josh

josh — Tue, 08 May 2007 04:09:05 +0000

I’m generally, but not wholly, opposed to endnotes. They should be used, I think, only for very long notes. Some people are of course against long notes entirely; I disagree (and my practice, I fear, reflects this). Sometimes one has a great deal to add to a statement, but putting it in the text will break up the flow of the argument; yet one DOES want to say it, and somehow link it to or anchor it in the part of the text to which it’s connected. In that case, long end-notes seem to me an ideal device.
For this reason, I think the ideal would be to have BOTH footnotes—for citations—AND endnotes, for commentary/excursions that can’t be elegantly worked into the text itself. The second best solution is to go with footnotes, and try to keep commentary w/in the notes fairly short—while I think mixing citation and commentary is fine, I don’t think that it’s fine for footnotes to take up a quarter of the page or more.
One thing that should not be done is to mix footnotes and in-text citations willy-nilly (one might mix them in the same way that I’ve proposed mixing footnotes and end-notes—but I think that’s a bad idea). Unfortunately, this is precisely what was imposed on one of my own published pieces (On the other hand, the editors of the volume in question adopted the policy of referring to all works in the in-text citations by their initial publication dates—so no cases of ‘Hume 1963’, thank god).

By: Alan Bostick

Alan Bostick — Tue, 08 May 2007 03:08:14 +0000

I assume, Kieran, that your disagreement with Haspel’s point 3 is strictly about numbering, and not about distinguishing between citation from commentary.

I hate, hate, hate reading works that mix commentary and citation in endnotes. I hate having to maintain a separate bookmark for the notes and flipping back and forth just to see whether or not the author is actually saying something or just citing a reference. My sense of how things ought to be is that citations should go in the back and commentary at the bottom of the page.

By: sara

sara — Tue, 08 May 2007 02:32:21 +0000

“Those useless indexes,” sorry.

By: sara

sara — Tue, 08 May 2007 02:31:56 +0000

Have you already written a post about evil indexes?
Those useless that only collect capitalized proper names are worse than useless in a book about (e.g.—I won’t name it, as I am on good terms with the author) social history.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Tue, 08 May 2007 01:32:20 +0000

MLA and APA are incredibly lame. Footnotes rather than endnotes, preferably in Chicago/Turabian or similar. Why not author, date? One, I find parenthetical references distracting—if they only exist for academic honesty, there’s no reason for them to distract me. Historians and others use footnotes (and evil endnotes) because we actually engage with our sources—and many of our sources are not secondary. Passages quoted in original languages, or translations, go in the notes. Tangential but important references to scholarly debate go in the notes. Entire historiographies of minute points can go in the notes. This makes it possible to write something fluid and sensible without sacrificing scholarly rigour. Footnotes rule.

By: eszter

eszter — Mon, 07 May 2007 20:40:17 +0000

[Tried to comment earlier as #11, but my PDA lost the note.]

I like Author Year in text, I find it very helpful. It is true that if there are too many in one sentence and inserted in several locations within one sentence that can make text hard to follow. But that is rare. Otherwise, I find that format helpful, because often if you’re reading something in a field with which you are familiar then simply glancing at the Author Year tells you that you already know the citation and don’t have to go searching for it. It’s annoying to search for a citation only to find that you already know that particular paper/book.

By: stm

stm — Mon, 07 May 2007 19:19:04 +0000

Yeah, endnotes are awful. They must add an extra 15% or so to my reading time for works that I want to pay attention to the citations for.

One virtue of the author-in-text citation is that it makes a bibliography obligatory. Yes, they are clunkier to read through and harder to ignore than footnote numbers. And, yes, when poorly deployed, they’ll give you cites like (Descartes 2005). But they provide the gist of the citations without necessitating eye-jumps to the bottom of the page (or god forbid to the back of the book!), and for the reader who wants to track down references, they provide a handy bibliography.

I’m a social scientist who also reads a lot of history, as well as a decent amount of philosophy and literary theory, so I regularly work from author-in-text citations and footnotes. I find that the former, while imperfect, provide a better balance of unobtrusieness and ease of use.

By: nick s

nick s — Mon, 07 May 2007 16:53:50 +0000

what I really need are some tips on getting nice footnote citations with BibTeX

I managed to wangle something around jurabib that worked pretty well: it also allowed for old-style footnote numbers and new-style footnote markers. It does involve a bit of Plain TeX for redefinitions, though: drop me a line [nick at nonspace dot org] and I’ll send you the .tex file I worked from.

[Kieran: what was the general style package you used for no-nonsense MS-submission LaTeXing? My search of the archives is failing me.]

For my thesis, I used a long-form citation for the first reference, and a short-form for future references. I’m more confined by house style right now, but I do like the idea of separating citations from ‘asides’.

That said, the trend in EngLit monographs appears to be towards demoting as much lit-review to the back-matter as possible, especially w/r/t contemporary readings: you use endnotes to cite modern scholars X, Y and Z on author A or topic B, while devoting a few sentences to why they’re [worthy but flawed | clueless hacks | taking the piss].

As for author-date, it’s generally worse than useless in the humanities when dealing with long-form works, or for primary sources that are non-discrete (i.e. existing in a number of editions or forms) or more than a hundred years old. Best practice, it seems, is to state up front which editions you’ll be working from, and then use standard scholarly references: lines for poems, act/scene for plays, chapter/section for philosophical texts.

Having proofed my wife’s dissertation, I feel increasingly certain that APA style is a form of psychological torture.

By: Outside The Beltway | OTB

Outside The Beltway | OTB — Mon, 07 May 2007 14:15:54 +0000

Academic Citation: Footnotes, Endnotes, Parenthetical…

Aaron Haspel has a longish essay railing against the use of endnote — and especially poorly formatted endnotes — in serious books, arguing for the revival of footnotes in most cases. Kieran Healy takes up the cause as well, giving parenthe…

By: joseph hill

joseph hill — Mon, 07 May 2007 14:10:16 +0000

all notes are for the insecure…do not use them. Ever.

By: Tim O'Keefe

Tim O'Keefe — Mon, 07 May 2007 13:54:21 +0000

Re: comment 15. Yeah, people need to use the standard scholarly reference system (if one exists) when dealing with historical figures like Kant, not author (date)—especially as their works come in lots of different translations and editions. So Euthyphro 10a, not Plato (1997) 9, which (unfortunately) I’ve seen. But doing so still allows you to use author (date) when referring to books by Daniel Dennett and the like.