Q. In a book compiling chapters written by multiple authors, if I want to cite a chapter written by one or more authors who are also editors of the whole book, do I have to repeat their names?
A. Yes, you should repeat their names. For example, the following bibliography entry will make it clear that Gordon H. Chang is both the sole author of the chapter and one of the editors of the book.
Chang, Gordon H. “Chinese Railroad Workers and the US Transcontinental Railroad in Global Perspective.” In The Chinese and the Iron Road: Building the Transcontinental Railroad, edited by Gordon H. Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, with Hilton Obenzinger and Roland Hsu, 27–41. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019.
You might avoid repetition by using only the surname on second mention of a contributor (“edited by Chang and Shelley Fisher Fishkin”), but only if space is an issue. The additional contributors Obenzinger and Hsu appear on the title page; listing them is optional (see CMOS 14.105).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I know that CMOS and the APA manual [the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association] differ in their citation styles, but I’m curious: How do you feel about a new guideline in the seventh edition of the APA manual omitting the place of publication in book citations? Is this a style decision you would likely replicate in future editions of CMOS?
A. Several major style guides have dropped this requirement in recent editions. First it was the MLA Handbook (8th ed., Modern Language Association, 2016), then APA’s Publication Manual (7th ed., late 2019), and most recently the AMA Manual of Style (11th ed., American Medical Association, 2020).
Not requiring the place of publication in a source citation can help not only authors but also editors, who sometimes spend valuable time verifying this detail using WorldCat and other resources. And we agree that the name of the publisher and date of publication alone are usually sufficient for the purposes of finding a book.
If Chicago were to follow this trend, however, we would want to make the place of publication an optional element.
For books published by a university press, the name of the institution is tantamount to its location. It doesn’t really matter where Harvard or UC Berkeley publishes its books. So the name of the university press would be sufficient in most cases.
But for books published by independent or international publishers outside the English-language publishing nexus of New York and London, a location can provide valuable cultural context for readers assessing the scope of an author’s research.
Cole, Teju. Every Day Is for the Thief. Abuja, Nigeria: Cassava Republic Press, 2007.
And for books published before 1900, the city is usually more important than the name of the long-defunct publisher or printer. Our current recommendation—according to which you can include only the city for pre-1900 works (CMOS 14.128)—is unlikely to change.
In sum, Chicago will no doubt continue to show how to style the place of publication in a citation for a book even if it becomes an optional element. Stay tuned.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. I write scientific review articles for a company. When I use Zoterobib to cite sources in my articles, I see that scientific names for organisms in the titles that I add to my bibliography are not italicized, even though I chose “Chicago Manual of Style 17th edition” as the style. Should I italicize the scientific names in my article’s bibliography, or is Zoterobib correct?
A. You should apply any italics as they appear in the title of the source itself.
For example, if you paste the URL for a random article in the Journal of Infectious Diseases into Zoterobib (a scaled-down, browser-based version of Zotero, the popular open-source citation management program) and choose Chicago style, you’ll get the following bibliography entry:
Gruenberg, Maria, Natalie E. Hofmann, Elma Nate, Stephan Karl, Leanne J. Robinson, Kjerstin Lanke, Thomas A. Smith, Teun Bousema, and Ingrid Felger. “QRT-PCR versus IFA-Based Quantification of Male and Female Gametocytes in Low-Density Plasmodium Falciparum Infections and Their Relevance for Transmission.” The Journal of Infectious Diseases 221, no. 4 (February 3, 2020): 598–607. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiz420.
That entry features several mistakes (as you will discover when you examine the source itself):
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The “q” in “qRT-PCR” should not have been capitalized, even at the beginning of the article title.
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Not only should it be “Plasmodium falciparum” (in italics), but note also the lowercase f.
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“February 3” is the wrong date; issue no. 4 of JID was published February 15, not February 3. (The article also carries a “Published” date of August 22, 2019; that date would have been appropriate had this article been cited before the issue became available.)
Also, Chicago drops an initial “The” from the title of a periodical. Zoterobib did get one thing right: “IFA-Based”; though the title with the article itself shows “IFA-based,” a capital B follows Chicago style.
Here’s the corrected citation:
Gruenberg, Maria, Natalie E. Hofmann, Elma Nate, Stephan Karl, Leanne J. Robinson, Kjerstin Lanke, Thomas A. Smith, Teun Bousema, and Ingrid Felger. “qRT-PCR versus IFA-Based Quantification of Male and Female Gametocytes in Low-Density Plasmodium falciparum Infections and Their Relevance for Transmission.” Journal of Infectious Diseases 221, no. 4 (February 15, 2020): 598–607. https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiz420.
Zoterobib and especially Zotero excel at collecting and organizing source citations; no author should be without such tools. But the automated style rules that programs like these apply aren’t perfect. And the metadata (the structured bibliographic data collected by these programs from publishers’ and booksellers’ websites) isn’t either. You’ll almost always need to edit the info—preferably the moment you collect it, so you don’t have to return to the source later on.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Bibliographical citations of books with more than two editors look weird to me. The following citation, at a glance, appears to have four editors, as there are four items separated by commas: Cypess, Rebecca, Beth L. Glixon, and Nathan Link, editors. Word, Image, and Song, Volume 1: Essays on Early Modern Italy. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013. Is there a way to improve this citation and make it clear that there are three editors, Rebecca Cypess being just one person?
A. Yes, there is (aside from using semicolons, which we would not recommend; source citations are complicated enough as it is). Simply change the word order (and note that Chicago treats a volume number separately from the title; see CMOS 14.119):
Rebecca Cypess, Beth L. Glixon, and Nathan Link, eds. Word, Image, and Song. Vol. 1, Essays on Early Modern Italy. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2013.
There: it no longer looks like a book by four editors, the first two of whom happen to be mononymous. But if you plan to include the citation in an alphabetical list, change it back to how it was; otherwise, the reason for doing this will become evident when you get to the letter R (at which point inverted names should start to seem normal).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. When citing a book in a bibliography, endnotes, etc., one does not include the name of the library that holds the volume consulted. Why, then, must we continue to include the URL of books we’ve consulted online that have been scanned by Google Books, HathiTrust, or the Internet Archive, to name a few such providers? Isn’t the internet as common a place a researcher would go to find a book these days as is a library or bookstore? Why is it necessary any longer to give internet sources “credit” for “possessing” a copy of a book when physical holders have always gone “uncredited”?
A. Do it for your readers. Most of them will have access to the three databases you mention. And each of those databases provides full access to many books in the public domain, which in the US has long included works published before 1923 (see table 4.1 in CMOS for a summary of the rules; note that, as of January 1, 2019, according to the ninety-five-year rule, works published in 1923 have also entered the public domain, in a process that will be repeated at the beginning of each new year). Providing a URL for one of those books is as good as handing it to your readers to examine for themselves. Let’s say you cite the first edition of Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, published anonymously in 1811. Readers would have to do some digging to find that edition without a link. So why not provide one?
Austen, Jane [as “A Lady”]. Sense and Sensibility. 3 vols. London, 1811. https://archive.org/details/sensesensibility131aust/.
That way readers will see what you see, and if you publish your work, you’ll be prepared to link to the source however you want. For example,
Austen, Jane [as “A Lady”]. Sense and Sensibility. 3 vols. London, 1811. Internet Archive.
A link to a database has some additional advantages. For example, readers will learn from the Internet Archive’s record for Sense and Sensibility that it was contributed by Duke University Libraries. A bit more research will lead you to the physical copy at Duke’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. But you don’t have to add that to your source citation.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hi there. I’m wondering if you can resolve what seems to me to be a contradiction in the Manual. I’ve got short-form notes and a bibliography that include names with lowercased particles (e.g., du). CMOS 8.5 says the particle is “always capitalized when beginning a sentence or a note.” But CMOS 14.21 says, “A bibliography entry starts with a capital letter unless the first word would normally be lowercased (as in a last name that begins with a lowercase particle; see 8.5).” Sorry if I’m missing something, but aren’t these two sections contradicting each other? Or are short-form notes and bibliography entries really supposed to treat such names differently?
A. You’re not missing anything. In Chicago style, bibliography entries are listed alphabetically by author, and the name of the first-listed author for each source is inverted and styled exactly like entries in a Chicago-style index. Chicago’s preference is for index entries that begin lowercase, so particles like “du” in a name like Daphne du Maurier remain lowercase.
du Maurier, Daphne. The Scapegoat. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957.
Numbered notes, on the other hand, are treated like sentences and capitalized and punctuated accordingly. The first letter of the note is capitalized, and the facts of publication are separated by commas instead of periods (or placed within parentheses):
1. Daphne du Maurier, The Scapegoat (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957), 33.
Shortened notes are treated in the same way, so the “du” gets a capital D:
2. Du Maurier, Scapegoat, 121–22.
This treatment ensures that all notes—including discursive notes—will be consistent with each other (and with the text to which they refer):
3. Du Maurier’s other novels . . .
4. In 1938, du Maurier . . .
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hello, I was told by an editor that “footnotes should appear at the end of sentences, never in the middle.” This goes contrary to other style manuals, which state that the number should be as near as possible to whatever it refers to. Could you please tell me what your official policy regarding this issue is? The requirement of the editor simply seems illogical to me and I would like to have your view on this matter, since he said the journal in question was using your style manual. Thank you very much.
A. Chicago provides guidelines for placing note reference numbers at any appropriate point in the text—including in the middle of a sentence (see CMOS 14.26). These guidelines show where to put the number relative to punctuation marks. But they’re not meant to take the place of the house style for a journal or other publisher. If, for example, the International Journal of Middle East Studies, published by Cambridge University Press, follows Chicago style (it does, though it should consider updating to the 17th edition) but wants footnote reference numbers to appear only at the ends of sentences, that’s the journal’s prerogative. IJMES’s editors no doubt have their reasons for this preference; maybe they want to encourage authors to consolidate multiple references, or perhaps they find midsentence note numbers to be distracting. Our advice would be to read the publisher’s guidelines for authors and follow them to the letter.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. In my work I encounter many European authors who, in academic texts, insist on using “pp.” when subsequently using an “ff.” notation (writing, for instance, “pp. 173ff.”). Setting aside the advisability of using “ff.” as opposed to giving readers a specific page range, I feel quite certain that the abbreviation should be “p.” rather than “pp.” It does, after all, mean “and the following pages.” And one would never say “pages 173 and the following pages.” Yet I can’t find any explicit style-guide help to back me up here so as to silence the protests claiming that “pp.” is proper since multiple pages are being cited. Your thoughts?
A. Either choice is defensible, but we would side with your authors’ preference for “pp.”
The first eleven editions of the Manual (1906 through 1949) included a pair of examples that back up this usage (these examples are from the eleventh edition; the examples in the first ten editions included an equals sign after each opening parenthesis):
pp. 5 f. (page 5 and the following page)
pp. 5 ff. (page 5 and the following pages)
(Note the thin spaces between the numeral and “f.” or “ff.”—recommended in the first eleven editions and represented here with Unicode character number 2009; Chicago now omits that space.)
You’re right that “ff.” is typically interpreted as meaning “and the following pages,” but it’s Latin (it stands for a plural form of the word that survives in English as “folio”), and besides, it’s just a shorthand. If it helps, you can think of “pp. 173ff.” as equivalent to an indeterminate range expressed as “pp. 173–.”
CMOS 17 allows “ff.” in certain cases (though not in an index), but we discourage the singular “f.” because it’s always more helpful simply to include the following page (e.g., 173–74, not 173f.). See CMOS 14.149. And though CMOS no longer includes an example of these abbreviations with “pp.” (our primary recommendation omits “p.” and “pp.” with page numbers in source citations), we defer to the usage established by the earlier editions of the Manual.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Hi, I need to format an in-text citation for a book coauthored by the Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. I would normally write (Author, year, p.), but how do I handle these unusual names? Thanks.
A. Assuming you are citing The Book of Joy, the reference list entry would look like this (using author-date format):
Dalai Lama [Tenzin Gyatso] and Desmond Tutu. 2016. The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World. With Douglas Abrams. New York: Avery.
“His Holiness the Dalai Lama” is the first-listed name on the title page, but you should cite the name under “Dalai Lama” (a descriptive name that is not inverted; see CMOS 14.80); however, you need to identify which Dalai Lama, and putting the fourteenth Dalai Lama’s religious name in square brackets accomplishes this (brackets signal an editorial addition). Spelling this name as it is commonly known in English will make it easy for readers to understand the reference, or if you prefer, you could record the name as Bstan-ʼdzin-rgya-mtsho, the transliterated form catalogued by the Library of Congress.
The name of the South African cleric, on the other hand, can be treated according to the usual convention for given names and surnames (see CMOS 14.76).
Finally, the name of coauthor Douglas Abrams is optional (see CMOS 14.105).
In-text references would refer simply to “(Dalai Lama and Tutu 2016),” with any page reference separated from the year by a comma. APA style would include a comma before the year and, unlike Chicago, add “p.” (or “pp.”) before a page number—as your question shows.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. How do I cite a YouTube video in Chicago style?
A. Most content on YouTube is created not by YouTube but by someone else, so the key to citing a YouTube video is to provide details for the item itself (by doing additional research if necessary). Then you can fill in the details related to YouTube (at the very least by including a URL). For example, you could cite the 2019 State of the City address by the mayor of New York City as follows:
Note:
1. Bill de Blasio, “Mayor de Blasio Delivers State of the City Address,” NYC Mayor’s Office, streamed live on January 10, 2019, YouTube video, 1:22:40, https://youtu.be/aZZYlpfZ-iA.
Bibliography:
de Blasio, Bill. “Mayor de Blasio Delivers State of the City Address.” NYC Mayor’s Office. Streamed live on January 10, 2019. YouTube video, 1:22:40. https://youtu.be/aZZYlpfZ-iA.
The details of the citation will vary depending on the type of source and the focus of your research. For more advice on citing multimedia content, including examples, see CMOS 14.261–68.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]