Unlike the readings file, the bibliography file must also contain index cards for all the books you must find, not only for the ones you have already located and read. It would even be possible for a bibliography file to contain ten thousand titles and a readings file a mere ten, although this would clearly illustrate a thesis that began extraordinarily well but ended very badly. In any case, you should take your bibliography file with you every time you go to a library. Its index cards contain only a book’s essential information, and the libraries and call numbers under which the book can be found. At most, you can annotate “very important according to author X,” “absolutely must find,” “so-and-so says this is a worthless work,” or even “buy this.” But any further annotation should be left for the readings file. An entry in the readings file can absorb multiple index cards (one book may generate many notes), whereas each item in the bibliography file comprises one and only one index card.
Finally, construct your bibliography file with care. Do not hastily scribble down titles in stenographic characters, a process prone to error. The better you make your bibliography file, the easier it will be to preserve and supplement for future research. It will also be more valuable to lend or even sell, and therefore it is worth ensuring that it is legible and well organized. Most importantly, the bibliography file will provide the foundation for the final bibliography, provided that it contains thorough documentation on the books you have found, read, and archived in the readings file.
For this reason, in the following section I will provide documentation guidelines, the instructions to correctly document your sources so that others can easily find them. Use these guidelines for each of the following:
1. The bibliography file,
2. The readings file,
3. References in notes,
4. The final bibliography.
Although I will return to these guidelines in the chapters in which I discuss these four different stages in preparing the thesis, I will establish them definitively in the following section. These guidelines are of the utmost importance, and you must have the patience to become familiar with them. You will realize that they are primarily functional guidelines, because they allow you and your reader to identify the exact book to which you are referring. But they are also rules, so to speak, of erudite etiquette. Their observance reveals a scholar who is familiar with the discipline, and their violation betrays the academic parvenu, and sometimes casts a shadow of discredit on an otherwise rigorous work.
These rules of etiquette matter, and they should not be disparaged as a formalist’s weakness. There is a similar dynamic in sports, stamp collecting, billiards, and political life. If a participant misuses key expressions, he raises suspicion, like an outsider who is not “one of us.” Thus, you must heed the rules of the company you want to join. As the Italian proverb goes, “If in company you don’t pee, a spy or a thief you may be.” And if you wish to violate or oppose rules, you must first know them well enough to expose their inconsistencies or repressive functions. So, for example, before you can declare that it is unnecessary to italicize a book’s title, you must first know that this is in fact the convention, and you must understand the reasons for this convention.
3.2.3 Documentation Guidelines
Books Here is an example of an incorrect reference:
Wilson, J. “Philosophy and religion.” Oxford, 1961.
This reference is incorrect for the following reasons:
1. It provides only the initial of the author’s first name. The first initial isnot enough, first of all, because readers may want to know the full name; and second of all, because there can be two authors with the same last name and first initial. If I read that the author of the book Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language is P. Rossi, I cannot determine whether the author is the philosopher Paolo Rossi of the University of Florence or the philosopher Pietro Rossi of the University of Turin. And who is J. Cohen? Is he the French critic and aesthetician Jean Cohen or the English philosopher Jonathan Cohen?
2. The book title is in quotation marks. However you choose to format areference, never use quotation marks for book titles, because this is the method used almost universally to refer to journal articles or book chapters. Also, in the title in question the word “Religion” should also be capitalized. English titles capitalize nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs; but not articles, particles, and prepositions (unless they are the last word of the title, as in The Logical Use of It).
3. It is hideous to say where the book has been published and not by whom. Suppose you find an Italian book that seems important, and that you would like to purchase, but the only publication information in the reference is “Milan, 1975.” Which press published this book? Mondadori, Rizzoli, Rusconi, Bompiani, Feltrinelli, or Vallardi? How can the bookseller help you? And if you find “Paris, 1976,” to whom do you address your letter of inquiry? And if the book has been published in “Cambridge,” which Cambridge is it, the one in England or the one in the United States? In fact, many important authors cite books this way. Know that, except when they are writing an encyclopedia entry (where brevity is a virtue that saves space), these authors are snobs who despise their audience. References like these are sufficient only in the case of books published before 1900 (“Amsterdam, 1678”) that you will only find in a library, or in a limited number of antique booksellers.
4. Despite what this reference would lead you to believe, this book wasnot published in Oxford. As noted on the title page, the book was published by Oxford University Press, and this press has locations in London, New York, and Toronto. What’s more, it was printed in Glasgow. The reference should indicate where the book was published, not where it was printed. (Here again we make an exception in the case of very old books: because printers were also publishers and booksellers, books then were published, printed, and sold in the same location.) I once encountered a reference in a thesis for a particular book that included “Farigliano: Bompiani.” Knowing that Bompiani is in Milan, I turned to the copyright page (usually located directly after the title page) and learned that by chance the book was printed at a printer located in the town of Farigliano. The person concocting such references gives the impression that he has never seen a book in his life. To be safe, never look for the publishing information only on the title page, but also on the copyright page, where you will find the real place of publication, as well as the date and number of the edition.
If you only look briefly on the title page, you may incur other pathetic mistakes, such as leading your readers to believe that the quaint beach town of Cattolica on the Adriatic Sea is the place of publication for a book published by the prestigious Università Cattolica in Milan. It would be as if an Italian student found books published by Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, or Cornell University Press and indicated that they were published in Yale, Harvard, or Cornell. These are of course not names of places, but the proper nouns of those famous private universities, located in the cities of New Haven, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and Ithaca respectively.
5. As for the date, it is correct only by chance. The date marked on thetitle page is not always the actual date of the book’s first publication. It can be that of the latest edition. Only on the copyright page will you find the date of the first edition (and you may even discover that the first edition was published by another press). Sometimes the difference between these dates is very important. Suppose for example that you find the following reference:
Searle, J. Speech Acts. Cambridge, 1974.
On top of the other inaccuracies, by checking the copyright page you discover that the date of the first edition is 1969. Now, the point of your thesis may be to establish whether Searle talked about these “speech acts” before or after other authors, and so the date of the first edition is fundamental. Besides, if you thoroughly read the book’s preface, you discover that he presented this fundamental thesis as his PhD dissertation in Oxford in 1959 (ten years earlier than the book’s first publication), and that during that ten-year period various parts of the book appeared in a number of philosophical journals. And nobody would ever think to cite Herman Melville’s nineteenth-century classic as follows, simply because he is holding a recent edition that was published in Indianapolis:
Melville, Herman. Moby Dick, or, The Whale. Indianapolis, 1976.
Whether you are studying Searle or Melville, you must never spread wrong ideas about an author’s work. If you worked on a later, revised, or augmented edition by Melville, Searle, Wilson, you must specify both the date of the first publication and that of the edition you quote.
Now that we have seen how not to cite a book, I will show you five ways to correctly cite these works by Searle
