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Topos Uranos
English

Citing in the humanities

Summary

This lesson teaches citation by notes, the tradition of philosophy, history, law and philology. It explains its logic, a first note with the full reference and short notes afterwards, with the Latin abbreviations ibidem, opere citato, loco citato and idem; it goes through the styles of biblatex's verbose family, which automate it, and shows what each one prints in English; it teaches how to use \autocite with them and how to place the note number after or before the punctuation mark, as the language of the text requires; it briefly presents the styles of biblatex-philosophy; it explains how classical sources are cited by their canonical references (the Stephanus pages in Plato, the Bekker numbers in Aristotle, the Academy pagination and the A and B editions in Kant, chapter and verse in the Bible), with abbreviations of one's own and their list; it shows how translations and the original edition are recorded; and it ends by separating the sources from the secondary literature.

Learning objectives

  1. Explain the logic of citation by notes and the meaning of ibidem, opere citato, loco citato and idem.
  2. Choose among the verbose, verbose-ibid, verbose-note and verbose-trad styles, and predict what each one prints in a sequence of citations.
  3. Use \autocite with the note styles so that the note number falls after the punctuation mark, as English requires, or before it, as Spanish, French or Russian require.
  4. Cite a classical work by its canonical reference, without biblatex prefixing a page abbreviation that does not belong there, and declare abbreviations with their list.
  5. Record a translation with its translator and with the data of the original edition, knowing which fields the standard styles print.
  6. Separate the sources and the secondary literature into two lists by means of keywords.

Citation by notes

The previous lesson showed that a citation can go in the text, as in the author–date or numeric systems, or in a footnote. The humanities prefer the note for a substantive reason: their text argues with other texts, and a parenthetical citation in every line interrupts that argument. The note takes the reference out of the body, as was seen for notes in general in the lesson on notes, quotations and verse, and leaves the text clean.

Now, if every note repeated the full reference, the foot of the page would fill up with repeated publication data. The tradition solved the problem with a rule of economy: the first time a work is cited, the note gives the full reference (author, title, translator, publisher, place and year); the subsequent times, a short form enough to identify it, usually the author's surname and a short title. Repeated notes are abbreviated even further with four Latin expressions:

  • ibidem, “in the same place”: the same work as in the immediately preceding note;
  • opere citato, “in the work cited”: the work by that author already cited earlier, though not in the preceding note;
  • loco citato, “in the place cited”: the same work and, in addition, the same passage;
  • idem, “the same”: the same author as in the preceding note, with another work.

It follows that a short note makes sense only in relation to the preceding ones: “ibid.” says nothing by itself, only “the same as above”. Therefore whoever writes these notes by hand must redo them every time a citation is added, deleted or moved, because the first appearance of a work may change place and an “ibid.” may end up below a note that is no longer the one it referred to. This is exactly the kind of work best left to the machine.