Nota Bene

I liked the style used in _The Courtier and the Heretic_, where a page number is given and a brief quote of the text under discussion, then any discussion. At least that is what I remember, and though the book is downstairs, I will not get up to crack it open to verify my memory. I very much like number 1, and find the practice of putting endnotes in by chapter title or number very aggravating. I guess I prefer footnotes too, and yes, the in text citation used mostly in APA but Chicago too (Spinoza, 1677; H. Thompson, 1975; T. Leary, 1968; G. Steinem, 1975) is so jerky and ugly. Alas, I have gotten so used to it in social science texts that my eyes just glaze over.

I love the analytic table of contents, and I really cannot think why it ever went away (except that it’s more work for the author & publisher). It’s a huge pleasure to read those massive Victorian travelogues partly because of this feature. Bravo for reviving it.

On notes, IMHO, footnotes, or even sidebars, are the way of righteousness: I hate using a book the way you have to use it if you actually pay attention to the endnotes; I can think of few things more disruptive to the act of reading. And really, is it so useful to have all the notes together in one place – if you have to know the page number of the citation anyway?

I like [Author YYYY] myself – it’s compact and unobtrusive. Works for me in non-academic books like Dennett, and I was very annoyed when he went for a different system in Breaking the Spell.

And any actual notes on the text should be numbered footnotes on the pages themselves. Numbered endnotes, where at least you can keep up because you can see the little superscript numbers in the text, are allowable but annoying; unnumbered notes not even mentioned in the text are insanely annoying. It’s what Douglas Hofstadter’s doing in his new book, and I could kill him – especially when some of his notes are discursive anecdotes or elaborations of stuff in the main body, and others are just citations. Madness!

Author and date makes little sense, IMNSHO.

Okay, so you know an author, and, of all things, a year (aside from referencing author’s mulitple works, it seems to promote a strange bias that more recent years are “better” cites), and you get to know it right there in the middle of the text you are supposedly reading.

You still, however, don’t know the title or the gist of the work cited, its format, where to find it, or where it was published. If a statement piques your interest, a small, unobtrusive number should send you directly to the bottom of the page, where you can read the statement’s citation. If not, then you read on, uninterrupted.

Author, year citations are the flotsam of the APA.

My ideal solution, which would only work on a computer, would be: (Author, Date), but with a fully expanded cite that appears if you run a mouse over it. Captures the primary benefits of author-date (a minimal amount of info that doesn’t require you to look anywhere else, and which may be sufficient if you already know the reference) and footnotes (minimal amount of effort to get the rest of the info if you want it).

Endnotes are just insane: even if large numbers of footnotes are ugly, that’s nothing compared to the inconvenience of flicking back and forth to look up endnotes.

Kieran, anything which makes scholarly work more readable is a work of grace. I keep hitting sentences which have more references than ideas, and just can’t continue. It’s like a road which consists of 90% craters.

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.

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.

[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.

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.

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.

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?

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.