CMS Citation in Footnote

[caorongjin]

I am following the Chicago Manual of Style and when a reference is made within a footnote, instead of the standard format:

John Doe, My Book (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), 41.

the citation is suppose to be enclosed in another set of parentheses:

(John Doe, My Book [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970], 41.)

Is this possible with Mellel-Bookends?

[Jon]

Hi,

There are two difference I see. One is that the whole footnote is enclosed in parentheses. That's easy -- you place the temporary citation in parentheses when you enter it.

The other is that the publisher and date are enclosed in brackets. Bookends can certainly do this, but it can't know the context of the citation. You'd have to create a new Type that output the data this way and assign that Type to the reference in question. But that's not a good solution, of course. In this case, I think you'll have to post-process the citation and enter the [] your self.

Jon
Sonny Software

[caorongjin]

Hmm.. that's what I was afraid of. My thesis advisor is a Chicago grad and stickler for CMS -- any minor error and he knocks off a point or two. The unfortunate thing about the Mellel-Bookends combo is if I modify something, post-process, and then add another citation later on -- it all gets undone.

[Jon]

I'd tell him to lighten up (but that's easy for me to say).

An alternative is to cite the reference with a ! after the curly bracket (or, in Mellel, check the "exclude from final document"). That makes sure it gets into the bibliography, but the citation will be removed after a scan. Then, next to it, enter the final citation the way you want it as text, NOT a citation option. Bookends can help with that by using the Copy Formatted menu, then adding the square brackets by hand.

Now you can scan as many times as you want.

Jon
Sonny Software

[WillK]

I notice that these posts are from 2007. Has anything been developed to deal with this issue since then? This is something that my fellow PhD students and I run into all the time.

[Jon]

If I understand the op correctly, it my be possible to do this with a reference metatype (metatypes were introduced in Bookends 11). You'd set up a relationship between the two references (parent/child), and when the child is cited information from the parent will be included (see the user guide for a full explanation). But maybe I'm misunderstanding. If you think metatypes won't solve the problem, please post in more detail what you're citing and what you want the output to be.

Jon
Sonny Software

[WillK]

I've just looked at the user guide, and I'm not sure if metatype will work, but it's new to me, so it might.

The problem is this. In SBL, for example, if you quote a source in a footnote, you put the citation in parentheses after the quotation. This means that the parentheses in the citation itself, such as the ones around the date in a journal citation, should now be square brackets. E.g., "I'm incredible" (Joe Bloggs, "Awesome Article," Journal of Amazingness [2011], 33). This requires you to go through your entire document after a scan and find all the citations within parentheses and change the parentheses within them to square brackets. You could use the workaround you mentioned in 2007 but you would run into problems if you added a new citation BEFORE one you had put in manually if it's the first citation, because then it wouldn't be the first citation anymore, and should be shortened. I know this may be impossible, but it's something I run into all the time, as do others I know, so it would be a great help to have a way to deal with it automatically.

Thanks!

[Jon]

Metatypes won't help here. They're used when you want to combine reference metadata from two related references (e.g. a book and a chapter it contains) into one footnote.

It seems to me that in your example it's the context that matters (whether or not the citation comes after a quote), and of course Bookends can't know what the context is, only you do. The only way I can think of to handle this (mostly) automatically is to define a new Type (quoted source, say) and assign it to the reference being cited. You could duplicate the reference in Bookends and keep one as the real Type (e.g. Journal Article) and the other as Quoted Source, then insert a temp citation from whichever is appropriate (cite by author, date, unique ID to make sure the citation is not ambiguous). This solution seems feasible to me, although it takes a bit of extra work to duplicate the reference and assign the new Type.

Does this help?

Jon
Sonny Software

[WillK]

Jon,

I see what you're saying, but I'm not sure it would make for less work than simply manually changing all my citations right before I submit. It might also get confusing to differentiate between the source in its normal form and in the "quoted source" form, e.g., in Mellel they would both show up exactly the same in the bibliography list, except for a different unique number, wouldn't they?

So, there's no way for Bookends to recognize that the character in the document right before the citation is an open parenthesis? That would be ideal because then the format for the type could be set up to change the parentheses into brackets. I'm no programmer, so I don't know how difficult that would be to set up, but it would solve the most common complaint I hear about Bookends. Otherwise, let me say, it's a great product that I couldn't live without!

Best,
Will

[Jon]

Hi,

Yes, they'd appear the same in the Mellel document except for the unique id -- you can suppress the appearance of the second one in the bibliography, though, by preceding it with $.

Bookends doesn't know what text precedes the citation because it knows nothing about the text in a Mellel document. Bookends and Mellel have a distinct division of labor: Mellel handles all text, Bookends handles all citation and bibliographic data. They don't know anything about the other.

Jon
Sonny Software

[WillK]

OK. Another idea I had would be to add another option in Mellel when you click on the citation under Exclude from final document, Don't enclose formatted citation, and Suppress superscript, that says "Adjust for in-text citation" or something like that. Would that work?

Thanks,
Will

[Jon]

This would have to implemented by RedleX, and I think it's too specific to be made a prominent feature (replace date in parens with square brackets). I think the solution I offered before (creating a duplicate of type Quoted Source) is what I would do. That's why we have Types, so that references can be configured differently depending on source or context.

Jon
Sonny Software

[Jon]

I did have a thought, though, that might be feasible. It's possible that I could add a metacharacter at the start of the citation (such as [) that told Bookends to replace internal parentheses with square brackets. Please tell me exactly what you're after, in detail (the parens surrounding the citation can be entered in the text, so this wouldn't apply to them).

Jon
Sonny Software

[WillK]

Jon,

That sounds like it would work. Here's what I'm after. Parentheses are in almost every bibliographical reference in SBL and many other formats, whether around the date in a journal reference or around the publishing info in a book reference. What I would like is a way to tell bookends that a particular citation is already within parentheses, e.g., because it follows a quotation in a footnote, so that when bookends produces the final citation the parentheses are automatically changed to square brackets.

So, if I have a footnote that says, with the temporary citation:
1. Gerhard von Rad also noted, “It is particularly surprising to note how Job, too, even with regard to details, adopts the style and the subject-matter of the psalms of lament” ({von Rad, 1993, #51836@209}).

which would normally turn into:
1. Gerhard von Rad also noted, “It is particularly surprising to note how Job, too, even with regard to details, adopts the style and the subject-matter of the psalms of lament” (Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel (trans. James D. Martin.; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993); trans. of Weisheit in Israel (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1970), 209).

it would instead become:
1. Gerhard von Rad also noted, “It is particularly surprising to note how Job, too, even with regard to details, adopts the style and the subject-matter of the psalms of lament” (Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel [trans. James D. Martin.; Harrisburg, Pa.: Trinity Press International, 1993]; trans. of Weisheit in Israel [Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1970], 209).

Thanks for looking into this. I hope it makes a great product even better.

Best,
Will

[Jon]

I'll try this and see how it goes: if a citation begins with [, all parentheses in the citation will be change to their corresponding square brackets (this will apply to all citations in the group, although I expect there will usually be only one).

Jon
Sonny Software