When we must cite an essay belonging to a collection of essays by the same author, the reference is similar to that of a multiauthor book, except for the fact that we omit the name of the author before the book:
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. “Ideologia come progettazione sociale.” In Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato, 193–224. Milan: Bompiani, 1968. Trans. Martha Adams et al. as “Ideology as Social Planning,” in Language as Work and Trade (South Hadley, MA: Bergin and Garvey, 1983), 83– 106.
You may have noticed that usually the title of a chapter is cited as being “in” a given book, while the article of a journal is not “in” a journal, and the name of the journal directly follows the title of the article.
The series A more perfect reference system might require the series in which a volume appears. I do not consider this an indispensable piece of information, as it is easy enough to find a book if you know its author, title, publisher, and the year of publication. But in some disciplines, the series may guarantee or indicate a specific scientific trend. In this case, the series is noted without quotation marks or parentheses after the book title, and is followed directly by the number of the volume in the series:
Rossi-Landi, Ferruccio. Il linguaggio come lavoro e come mercato. Nuovi Saggi Italiani 2. Milan: Bompiani, 1968.
Anonymous authors and pseudonyms If you are dealing with an anonymous author, begin the entry with the title and alphabetize the entry accordingly, ignoring any initial article. If the author has a pseudonym, begin the entry with the pseudonym followed by the author’s real name (if known) in brackets. After the author’s real name, place a question mark if the attribution is still a hypothesis, no matter how reliable the source. If you are dealing with an author whose identity is established by tradition, but whose historicity scholars have recently challenged, record him as “Pseudo” in the following manner:
Pseudo-Longinus. On the Sublime …
Reprints in collections or anthologies A work that originally appeared in a journal may have been reprinted in a collection of essays by the same author, or in a popular anthology. If this work is of marginal interest with respect to your thesis topic, you can cite the most convenient source. If instead your thesis specifically addresses the work, then you must cite the first publication for reasons of historical accuracy. Nothing forbids you from using the most accessible edition, but if the anthology or the collection of essays is well prepared, it should contain a reference to the work’s first edition. This information should allow you to create references such as this:
Fodor, Jerry A., and Jerold J. Katz. “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” In The Structure of
Language, ed. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerold J. Katz, 479–518. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964. Originally published as “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” Language 39 (1963): 170– 210.
When you use the author-date system for your bibliography (which I will discuss in section 5.4.3), include the date of the first publication, as follows:
Fodor, Jerry A., and Jerold J. Katz. 1963. “The Structure of a Semantic Theory.” In The Structure of Language, ed. Jerry A. Fodor and Jerold J. Katz, 479–518. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964.
Citing newspapers References to newspapers and magazines are similar to those for journals, except that it is more appropriate to put the date rather than the issue number, since it makes the source easier to find:
Nascimbeni, Giulio. “Come l’Italiano santo e navigatore è diventato bipolare” (How the Italian saint and sailor became bipolar). Corriere della Sera (Milan), June 25, 1976.
For foreign newspapers it may be useful to specify the city: Times (London).
Citing official documents or monumental works References to official documents require shortened forms and initialisms that vary from discipline to discipline, just as there are typical abbreviations for works on ancient manuscripts. Here your best source is the critical literature in the specific discipline you are studying. Bear in mind that certain abbreviations are commonly used within a discipline and you need not explain them to your audience. For a study on U.S. Senate resolutions, an American manual suggests the following reference:
S. Res. 218, 83d Cong., 2d Sess., 100 Cong. Rec. 2972 (1954).
Specialists are able to read this as, “Senate Resolution number 218 adopted at the second session of the Eighty-Third Congress, 1954, as recorded in volume 100 of the Congressional Record, beginning on page 2972.”3 Similarly, when you indicate that a text is available in PL 175.948 in a study on medieval philosophy, anyone in the field will know that you are referring to column 948 of the 175th volume of Jacques-Paul Migne’s Patrologia Latina, a classic collection of Latin texts of the Christian Middle Ages. However, if you are building a bibliography from scratch, it is not a bad idea to record on your index card the entire reference the first time you find it, because in the final bibliography it would be appropriate to give the full reference:
Patrologiae cursus completus, series latina, accurante J. P. Migne. 222 vols. Paris: Garnier, 1844– 1866 (+ Supplementum, Turnhout: Brepols, 1972).
Citing classic works For the citation of classic works, there are fairly universal conventions that indicate the title-book-chapter, sectionparagraph, or canto-line. Some works have been subdivided according to criteria dating back to antiquity, and when modern editors superimpose new subdivisions, they generally also preserve the traditional line or paragraph marks. Therefore, if you wanted to quote the definition of the principle of noncontradiction from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, the reference will be “Met. 4.3.1005b18.” An excerpt from Charles S. Peirce’s Collected Papers is cited as “CP 2.127.” A passage from the Bible is cited instead as “1 Sam. 14:6–9.” References to classical (and modern) comedies and tragedies are comprised of act, scene, and if necessary the line or lines in Arabic numerals: “Shrew, 4.2.50–51.” Naturally your reader must know that “Shrew” refers to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew. If your thesis is on Elizabethan drama, there is no problem in using this short citation. If instead a mention of Shakespeare intervenes as an elegant and erudite digression in a psychology thesis, you should use a more extended reference.
In references to classic works, the first criterion should be that of practicality and intelligibility. If I refer to a Dantean line as “2.27.40,” it is reasonable to guess that I am talking about the 40th line of the 27th canto of the second canticle of the Divine Comedy. But a Dante scholar would rather write “Purg. XXVII.40.” It is best to follow disciplinary conventions; these are a second but no less important criterion. Naturally you must pay attention to ambiguous cases. For example, references to Pascal’s Pensées (Thoughts) will differ depending on the edition from which you cite; Brunschvicg’s popular edition is ordered differently from other editions. You can only learn these types of things by reading the critical literature on your topic.
Citing unpublished works and private documents Specify a thesis, a manuscript, and a private document as such. Here are two examples:
La Porta, Andrea. “Aspetti di una teoria dell’esecuzione nel linguaggio naturale” (Aspects of a performance theory in natural language). Laurea thesis. University of Bologna, 1975–1976.
Valesio, Paolo. “Novantiqua: Rhetorics as a Contemporary Linguistic Theory.” Unpublished manuscript, courtesy of the author.
Cite private letters and personal communications similarly. If they are of marginal importance it is sufficient to mention them in a note, but if they are of decisive importance for your thesis, include them in the final bibliography:
Smith, John, personal letter to author, January 5, 1976.
As we shall see in section 5.3.1, for this kind of citation it is polite to ask permission from the person who originated the personal communication and, if it is oral, to submit our transcription for his approval.
Originals and translations Ideally you should always consult and cite a book in its original language. If you write a thesis on Molière, it would be a serious mistake to read your author in English. But in some cases it is fine to read some books in translation. If your thesis is on romantic literature, it is acceptable to have read The Romantic Agony, the English translation published by Oxford University Press of Mario Praz’s La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. You can cite the book in English with a good conscience, but for your reference to be useful also to those who wish to go back to the original edition, a double reference would be appropriate. The same is true if you read the book in Italian. It is correct to cite the book in Italian, but why not aid readers who wish to know if there is an English translation and, if so, who published it? Therefore, in either case, the best choice is the following:
Praz, Mario. La carne, la morte e il diavolo nella letteratura romantica. Milan and Rome: La Cultura, 1930. Trans. Angus Davidson as The Romantic Agony (London: Oxford University Press, 1933).
Are there exceptions? Some. For example, if you cite Plato’s Republic in a thesis on a topic other than ancient Greek (in a thesis on law, for example), it is sufficient that you cite an English translation, provided that you specify the exact edition you used. Similarly, let us say your thesis deals with literary studies, and that you must cite the following book:
Lotman, Yu. M., G. Permyakov, P. G. Bogatyrev, and V. N. Toporov. General Semiotics. Ed. Lawrence Michael O’Toole and Ann Shukman.
