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Which Shortening Is Best? Ibid., Op. Cit., Loc. Cit., Etc.

March 1, 2012, 12:01 am

Photo by Phil Dokas

Although I have complained about the misuse of citation software, it’s not as though I believe the quaint and perhaps dying method of hand-composing citations to be a cure-all. At least the software mangles the format consistently, which allows a copy editor to put certain gaffes right by means of global searches.

In contrast, when homemade notes fail to follow a system, they fail in myriad ways, so any editor determined to impose order is faced with endless drudgery. Recently a group of academic book manuscript editors I belong to discussed one particular aspect of notes preparation: whether and how to standardize the shortening of citations after their first, full mention.

Authors rarely cite a work in full every time it appears. Sometimes they cite it fully the first time it appears in each chapter. Sometimes they give it the full treatment only the first time it’s mentioned in the book. Either way, subsequent mentions of the work are most often shortened to the author’s name, a short title, and a page number. This type of shortening is clear, concise, and difficult to botch—it’s what my group likes best.

Some writers, however, prefer to lard their notes with Latin abbreviations.

31. Fama, Overboard, 23.
32. Welch, Waiting to Forget, 13.
33. Ibid.
34. Ibid., 66; Fama, op. cit., 42; Welch, “The Holding-On Night,” 16.
35. Welch, “The Holding-On Night,” 13.
36. Idem, Waiting to Forget, 16.
37. Ibid., 14.
38. Fama, loc. cit.

Of the Latin abbreviations, ibid. (Latin abbreviation for ibidem, “in the same place”) is the only one still commonly used, and it works well enough when the user understands its somewhat annoying and arbitrary limits:

—It may be used only when the preceding note consists of a single citation. Note 35 above, for example, cannot use ibid., because note 34 consists of more than one citation.

—It takes the place of whichever elements in the preceding citation are identical to those in the current one. Thus note 37 refers to Welch, Waiting to Forget, but to a different page number.

—It may not stand for the author’s name alone—that’s what idem is for (Latin for “the same,” sometimes abbreviated id.). Note 36 could not properly be written Ibid., Waiting to Forget.

—If the use of ibid. is required on an even-numbered note, it is spelled backward, dibi., (Latin abbreviation for dibathi), which … just kidding.

I confess I don’t understand the attraction of using ibid., other than to save a few keystrokes. Knowing the author and a short title is more useful to readers, especially in footnotes. If note 37 in my example appears three pages after note 36, a reader will have to turn pages to see which work was meant. Why not just say?

Neither op. cit. nor loc. cit. is much used these days,* perhaps partly because The Chicago Manual of Style has frowned on them for generations. The instructions in the 11th edition (1949) are comically opaque (“Op. cit. is not used to repeat the title of a journal when the reference is to another author, but may be used in reference to the same author’s work in a periodical”)—and with typical charm, the 12th edition admits defeat: “To save the reader’s nerves, not to mention the editor’s, and for greater clarity, the University of Chicago Press has discarded both op. cit. and loc. cit. and in place of them has adopted the short-title form” (15.41).

The question my group of editors discussed was this: in a book with no bibliography, if the author cites a work in full only the first time it appears, is the manuscript editor obliged to create full citations the first time that work appears in every subsequent chapter? There was no consensus, other than a general wish that authors would either supply a bibliography and eliminate the problem or supply a full citation at first mention in every chapter and save us from having to decide what to do.

Although bibliographies are lately an endangered species—either authors don’t supply them, or they produce them badly—in my view, a bibliography is the best solution, since it eliminates the need for full citations in the notes, and it allows for simple author-title shortening throughout, with or without the use of ibid. (and without the flakiness caused by too much Latin shortening).

______

*Op. cit. (Latin abbreviation for opere citato, “in the work cited”) may be used anywhere in a work, as long as the source was previously cited in full, even several chapters back. Loc. cit. (loco citato, “in the place cited”) may also be used anywhere in a work to refer to a title plus page number or other locator—that is, an exact place—already cited. It can cause trouble when writers forget they’ve cited more than one work by a given author. Note 38 above is vague enough as it is, although it properly refers to the most recently cited location in Fama, Overboard, which was page 42.

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Readers with questions about academic writing, editing, and publishing may e-mail Carol at AskCarolSaller@gmail.com.

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bookishone

A bibliography is also much more useful for the readers of the book.

If you think you don’t have space for a bibliography, think again. Chicago allows the use of shortened citations throughout (not just after the first full citation) if you have a bibliography. Depending on the number of notes in your monograph, you can end up actually saving space by using entirely shortened citations with a bibliography that includes the full form of every source.
andymeg

When I was in college my housemates and I made up a joke. “What’s this?” we asked as we hopped around on the floor saying “ibid! ibid!” Answer: a frog doing a term paper. Much hilarity ensued. Just thought I’d share.

dottyeyes

You weren’t indulging in “loco” weed–I mean “loc. cit.” weed–I presume?

theatheist

I do not care if the rules permit such an animal: a scholarly book without a bibliography is practically useless. Likewise, an index.
jffoster

1 Gid rid of “Bibliographies” of works really or allegedly consulted, and replace them with

2. A List of References Cited.

3. Cite them with scientific and not humanities citing, in the text, as (Chomsky 1965:44), and use footnotes or endnotes only for explanatory or sidebar material.

It’s easier on the writer, the copy editor, and especially for the reader.

Then you don’t need any of that Latin crap.

theatheist

Last time I checked, Literature was a cornerstone of the Humanities, and we use in-text citations (MLA format).

jffoster

Good for you. Maybe it’s influence from Linguistics.

http://palimpsest.typepad.com/frogsandravens Rana

That doesn’t work for history, which often cites multiple works, in multiple formats, at a whack, combined with discussion. A parenthetical citation is useless when you are dealing with ten primary sources (five of them in unusual formats and three of them in languages other than English), two secondary sources, and an explanation of what the original text said before translation into English.

Plus, honestly, I find a small reference number much less distracting to the narrative than a parenthetical citation.

(For all that, I too hate “that Latin crap”; a) it doesn’t work with a note like the above, and b) it’s hell if the author decides partway through the writing process to rearrange some sections and takes the notes with them, as all those abbreviations depend on strict locational relationships to work.)

midevilprof

You said it, Rana!

midevilprof

No. In-text citations constitute a hideous distraction that takes away from the prose. And there’s no reason for them not to use Latin abbreviations. They simply don’t as a matter of convention.

Unless the prose of scientists, social scientists, and literary critics is hideous anyway, in which case a further monstrosity can cause no serious harm.

Footnotes, on the other hand, are easy for readers to glance at as they wish, as they move through the paragraph or at the end of each sentence concerned, without clouding up the main text with endless interruptions.

Endotes are a distant second place, because to consult them, readers must flip to the end and then back to the main text. But at least they don’t mar the article itself with jumbles of author names and numerals, as in-text citations do.

Latin abbreviations are confusing, even when readers know what they stand for and what they mean, because it’s just a hassle to track down the original citation to get the information. But, I suppose, if a book or article is read from beginning to end with due diligence paid to citation, as it may have been done in the old days, it would be less an inconvenience. But please, please do not encourage people to use the ugly and no more helpful in-text citation method.
http://twitter.com/HemmensBen Ben Hemmens

I’d go further and use a straight number system. Sources are numbered in order of citation, the full references are at the end of the book, end of story. There’s no need to clutter up the text with authors’ names or years.
What also drives me bonkers is a book written not as a series of autonomous articles but as a unit having separate lists of references after chapters or, even worse, after groups of chapters.

jffoster

I join your 2nd pgf in by that bonkers driven being.

And I’ve seen what you propose in 1st pgf actually done, somewhere. In fact, I think it was done in a book I contributed a chapter to, but I’d have to check to make sure. It works, although I find the author (and date if more than one by same author) in – text citation a little easier to remember.

http://nathaniel-campbell.blogspot.com/ Nathaniel M. Campbell

Yet, scholars must still be trained to use the ibid. / idem / op. cit. / loc. cit. apparatus, as older scholarship (especially German; the French long ago decided they were sufficiently superior to all other scholars that they needn’t bother with most citations at all) is replete with the Latin abbreviations.

But then, there seems a movement afoot to disregard any scholarship from before the 1970′s or in any language not English. So maybe we won’t need to know our way around older books anymore.

dank48

Learning the Latin terms and abbreviations is a bit like learning Fraktur: you may well need to be able to understand it when you encounter it, but no one should expect you to use it yourself in your own publication.

nilbogboh

I like using latin abbreviations. No justification. I just like them.
http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

Where I work, we use only endnotes and repeat the full citation at the first mention in a chapter, with the reasoning that readers do not necessarily read chapters (especially in edited volumes) in order.

But I have to admit that I’d prefer bibliographies or works cited lists rather than just endnotes alone. As an editor, it can be hard to keep track of which citations have already been mentioned and can thus be shortened and what those short forms are. Readers can have similar difficulties flipping back to find the full form.
chrislance

(Slightly off-topic) I have a theory that one of these Latin abbreviations was responsible for the famous crux in the first two lines of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 146:
Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, My sinful earth these rebel powers that thee arrayI believe that in the author’s manuscript the second like read “Amid these rebel powers…”, but that the printer misread “Amid” as “Ibid.”
mbelvadi

Another reason to have a bibliography/list of references all in one place in a book – to make it reasonably possible to include those citations in any compilation of “cited references”. Humanities folks complain bitterly that the world that tracks scholarly citations ignores their preferred publishing medium, the book, and yet are determined to cling to a citation method that makes their inclusion a literally extraordinary labor in comparison with the social and natural sciences.
NCSmith

OK. I give up. What is the meaning of the illustration?

NCSmith

And now that I have read the title to this piece, I feel like a doofus.

Carry on.

Maureen O’Brien

If it’s going to become an ebook, you’re going to want it to be more susceptible to searching, not less.
alan_kors

Sigh. I’m getting old.