Q. How do you cite a photograph of a piece of art that is in a book chapter with two authors and the book has several editors? Do you need all of the creators—photographer, artist, authors, and editors? Thank you!
A. We get a lot of questions like yours. They generally go something like this: “How do I cite a picture / drawing / marginal annotation / coffee mug stain / whatever that I found in a book?” The answer is generally the same: describe the object in your text; then cite the book accordingly.
So in your text you would describe the artwork as needed—for example, what it is and who created it and when; assuming you’ve done that, there’s usually no need to give additional details in a note. Nor would you need to name the photographer as credited in the book, a redundant move that would amount to citing another source’s cited sources.
Then you would simply cite the book as a whole and provide a page number where the image may be found. If the chapter itself is relevant to the artwork or to your discussion, you will want to cite the book in terms of the chapter. Here’s the format you would use:
1. Author One and Author Two, “Title of Chapter,” in Title of Book, ed. Editor One, Editor Two, and Editor Three (City: Publisher, 2020), 147.
If, however, the artwork is central to your discussion—or you’re a student and your instructor requires it—you may want to cite the artwork itself. In that case, it would be best to track down its location in a gallery or online and to confirm the relevant details there rather than relying on the secondary source information in the book (though the book should give you a head start on finding the artwork and the information about it that you will need). Examples may be found at CMOS 14.235.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. Which comes first in a bibliography, edition number or editor? What would the sequence be if there is an author, an editor, an edition number, and a specific page range of the chapter one is citing?
A. List the edition followed by the editor, according to the following pattern:
Surname, First Name. “Chapter Title.” In Book Title, 3rd ed., edited by First Name Surname, 26–42. City: Publisher, 2020.
It’s important to list the edition immediately after the title of the book, because in some cases a subsequent edition will have been edited by someone other than the editor(s) of previous editions. Few books fit this pattern neatly, but you can adapt the entry as needed. For example, here’s how you would cite a chapter in the 2019 paperback version of a 2008 second edition of a collection of novels edited by B. P. Reardon and published by the University of California Press:
Xenophon of Ephesus. An Ephesian Tale. Translated by Graham Anderson. In Collected Ancient Greek Novels, 2nd ed., edited by B. P. Reardon, 145–97. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019.
The title of the chapter is in italics in this case because the chapter reproduces a novel—though a short one (see CMOS 8.178). For citing authors like Xenophon of Ephesus who are known primarily by a given name, see CMOS 14.83.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. If it becomes necessary to use two editions of the same title, do both editions need to be included in the bibliography?
A. If you cite both editions or rely on both editions for data, then yes, they should both be listed in your bibliography. If the two editions have different authors or different titles, or both, it’s best to list them separately:
Fowler, H. W. A Dictionary of Modern English Usage. 2nd ed. Revised and edited by Sir Ernest Gowers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965.
———. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage. 4th ed. Edited by Jeremy Butterfield. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
If the details are substantially the same for both editions, you may list them under a single entry:
University of Chicago Press. The Chicago Manual of Style. 16th and 17th eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010 and 2017.
For a detailed discussion of the 3-em dash in the second example above, including some caveats, see CMOS 14.67–71.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. When citing an article from a news website like Vox or BBC News, would you cite it as a newspaper article or as website content?
A. The distinction between a website for a news organization like Vox Media or BBC News, on the one hand, and a website for a traditional newspaper like the New York Times or the Guardian, on the other, has all but disappeared. In source citations, Chicago treats them the same, styling the name of the news website in italics as if it were a traditional newspaper:
1. Terry Nguyen, “Colleges Say Campuses Can Reopen Safely. Students and Faculty Aren’t Convinced,” Vox, June 26, 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/21303102/college-reopening-fall-coronavirus-students-faculty-worry.
2. “Coronavirus: US Hits Record High in Daily Cases,” BBC News, June 26, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-53191287.
3. Jack Schneider, “Pass-Fail Raises the Question: What’s the Point of Grades?,” New York Times, June 25, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/25/opinion/coronavirus-school-grades.html.
Related mentions of Vox and BBC News in the text would also be italicized, though this choice may depend on context. As in the opening sentence of this answer, regular text would be appropriate when referring to a news organization as a company rather than as a publisher—a stylistic distinction that would also extend to the New York Times Company (see also CMOS 8.172). Regular text should also be preferred for news services such as Reuters and the Associated Press (see CMOS 14.200).
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
Q. How do I cite text within an image? In a case where an etching or a poster contains text, how do I cite the text within the picture? I can’t find anything about this. Please help!
A. You might as well ask how to cite the text on page 302 of a novel. You’d cite the novel, not the text, and the principle is the same for artwork. If you consulted the etching or poster in a book, you would give details about the image in your text but cite the book; if you consulted it at a museum’s website, you would cite the website. In sum, quote from a source and describe it as needed; then cite the item that you consulted. For example,
The print, which features an atomic icon refashioned into a skull, carries a blunt warning: “Radioactive waste from nuclear power plants stays radioactive and deadly for hundreds of thousands of years.”1
__________
1. Mirko Ilic and Daniel Young, Radioactive Waste, 2010, screen print, 30 1/8 × 22 3/16 in. (76.5 × 56.4 cm), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/2017.299.
For more examples, see CMOS 14.235.
[This answer relies on the 17th edition of CMOS (2017) unless otherwise noted.]
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.]