# Introductions and other supplementary material

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/introductions-and-other-supplementary-material/1573>\
**Category:** CSL Evolution\
**Created:** [November 5, 2019, 4:42pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/introductions-and-other-supplementary-material/1573 "2019-11-05T16:42:17Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 16

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![bwiernik](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex029/user_avatar/discourse.citationstyles.org/bwiernik/32/438_2.png) [@bwiernik](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/bwiernik)\
**Post date:** [May 4, 2020, 9:59pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/introductions-and-other-supplementary-material/1573/16 "2020-05-04T21:59:41Z")

</div>

This particular rule seems fairly asinine, honestly. Why not format this as a chapter titled “Introduction”? (APA also has stupid, different, rules about introductions.) Thinking carefully about this one, it seems too fiddly to bother with–it would require a `to` term as well as the empty-`title`, `genre` data entry structure.

Beyond this case, I support adopting `genre` and `medium` more generally in styles as a substitute for missing `title`. That’s the most reasonable approach to avoiding style-specific markup being entered into the `title` field (e.g., for the [Photograph of William James] example above). Like a lot of CSL best practices, I think these sorts of conventions can be reasonably incorporated into the major style guide styles (e.g., APA, Chicago, MLA, Vancouver), then gradually into more specific styles based on user demand.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/introductions-and-other-supplementary-material/1573)._