Citing Book Reviews
Chicago-style source citations are designed to be both concise and informative. Ideally, readers should be able to tell what a citation refers to despite its abbreviated nature.
Chicago-style source citations are designed to be both concise and informative. Ideally, readers should be able to tell what a citation refers to despite its abbreviated nature.
If you’ve ever written or edited an article or book on a scholarly subject, you probably know your e.g. from your i.e. and ibid. But especially if you spend time with older sources, you’re likely to encounter some abbreviations that haven’t entered the vernacular.
From the perspective of writers and editors, URLs do their best work behind the scenes or just off the page, in a browser’s address bar. In that role—as an internet address that will take you to a specific page online—it doesn’t matter all that much what a URL looks like so long as it works.
An epigraph is a brief quotation placed at the beginning of a book or at the head of a chapter, article, story, or other work. Most epigraphs are ornamental, helping to set the tone or mood of a work but going unmentioned in the text.
CMOS supports two systems of source citation. Notes and bibliography, covered in a previous workout, consists of numbered footnotes or endnotes and, usually, a bibliography. Author-date, the subject of this workout, relies on parenthetical references in the text and a corresponding reference list.
To some people, “Chicago style” is synonymous with a conventional system of numbered notes supported by a bibliography. That’s the subject of chapter 14, the longest chapter in CMOS. (Chapter 15, on the author-date system, will be covered in a future quiz.)
Chicago’s main system for citing sources—and the subject of chapter 14 of CMOS—consists of numbered notes in the text and a corresponding list of sources in a bibliography.
An epigraph is a short quotation at the beginning of a book or chapter or article that sets the tone for what’s to come. It’s often from a famous source, but it doesn’t have to be. The source of an epigraph is usually given on a line
Although it seems simple enough to include the author’s name as the first element of a citation, CMOS users have questions about how to do it. Here are a few pointers from paragraphs 14.73–74 of the Manual.
What is “style,” and what does it have to do with Chicago? And which book or website is the official source for someone required to use Chicago style in their work?