In which I have strong feelings about citation
I might have complained about MLA citation. I do think it’s clunky, with the parenthetical citations at the end of every other sentence, and student never know whether to put the end punctuation before or after. For my own writing, I found footnotes less cluttery. Not endnotes – I like all the relevant information to be on one page, so I can see at a glance whether more details are available without flipping to the back of the book, losing my place, only to find page numbers.
Footnotes, technically, are Chicago style citation, which was the required form for the article I submitted today. I had to look up Chicago style to make sure I was being consistent… and I ended up spending another hour tweaking my notes. Ridiculously, there are two separate styles for full citations in the footnotes and in the bibliography. They had enough minute differences (order of first and last time, abbreviation or not of the word “editor”, location of page numbers) that my eyes crossed trying to keep them straight. The first in-text citation gets the long version; each subsequent in-text citation gets Surname, Title, Page Number listed as opposed to the tidier (last name, page number) format of MLA. All the extra words put me several hundred over the 8,000 word limit for this article.
This is dumb. “Citation has a purpose,” I used to soothe my composition students. “If anyone wanted to use your work as a reference. . .” But since the collection is requiring endnotes for my article, anyone who wants to read it will have to keep one finger in the back of the book, flipping to and fro at each of my sixty endnotes to see if I’ve included a pithy remark or only and overlong source reference.
When I get some intellectual leverage in the world, I am going to invent a new citation strategy called Sara style. It will be sleek, informative, and easy to use… like Wikipedia, but with more reliable citation.
The use of MS Word format for article submissions is a blight– I don’t know if you’re forced to do this, or if you can submit in PDF. If you *can* submit in PDF, there are far better ways to write papers!
I’m fortunate in that for CS, the vast majority of conferences, workshops, and journals require PDFs, which means you can easily use LaTeX, which happily just deals with these issues so you don’t have to. The rules for citations and so on are indeed miserable, but consistent enough that they can be dealt with programmatically.
Huh! I didn’t consider .pdfs. I’m not sure if the collection accepts them. Next time I have the opportunity I will look into that.
I’ve always just typed my bibliographies out – usually when I start taking notes from a source, so that I don’t have to go back and do it later – and it never occurred to me that Word would have a function to facilitate that (if indeed facilitate would be the right word). I use a 2002 edition of Word on my laptop, which I don’t think has these functions, but I was polishing up the paper on Word 2007 at campus and started poking at the reference functions so that I could make my endnotes appear before the bibliography (which was also a requirement). And Word promised it would arrange my bibliography for me, but I didn’t trust it and just created a new section instead.
Ugh.
I don’t feel too bad for not being hip to the technology – no one in my discipline is. I’m (laughably) in charge of the website for our graduate journal but it also became my job to fix the endnotes that had gotten all fucked up in transition from whatever the authors used and our Word programs. Hot mess.
Also check out: http://www.endnote.com/
When using LaTeX (which is actually a typesetting system), you use BibTeX, but the idea is similar: you use another system to manage your library of potential references, and it takes care of formatting them according whatever style you’re using. This is pretty handy in CS, since each of the major organizations (in my case, ACM, IEEE, and AAAI) have their own specif styles, and they also each offer latex and bibtex templates. Various people you know can tell you more about LaTeX if you’re interested.
And one more!
This is pretty freaking cool if you’re already using something like bibtex or endnote: http://www.aigaion.nl/
Nice way to keep ‘em organized if you have a webserver available.
Thanks, Fritz! We actually have Endnote on our school computers, but I’m always reluctant to try it, worried that it will be just one more thing that will get screwy when I move my work from a school computer to my laptop. But I’ll take your word for it and try it out when I have an office and a computer for regular use next year, and if it seems to save time I will download it for cheap from my university.