# mla weirdness

**URL:** <https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mla-weirdness/171>\
**Category:** CSL Development\
**Created:** [August 4, 2006, 8:26pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mla-weirdness/171 "2006-08-04T20:26:57Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 4\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [August 4, 2006, 8:26pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mla-weirdness/171/1 "2006-08-04T20:26:57Z")

</div>

Sure enough, as I start to do the MLA style, I’m faced with a design  
problem (Harvard was no real problem, although the labels on locators  
are a little funky).

See:

```
<http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/>

```

… in particular this discussion of the citation style:

```
<http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/02/>

```

So this is a non-standard “author-date” style. It in fact doesn’t use  
dates in the citations.

I’m actually a little confused about the exact rules.

It seems to be that the bibliography is sorted by author-date, but  
there is no disambiguation rule I can see for the years. It seems that  
they instead use (short) titles in the citation to achieve the same  
effect.

To be honest, I haven’t run across this before, and it’s not accounted  
for in CSL.

Any suggestions?

Off the top of the head, it seems to me I may need to explicitly model  
the disambiguation rules, and maybe assume the standard (1999a, 1999b)  
stuff is standard. Not quite sure how to do this, but maybe in the  
citation it’d be something like:

That would then be saying “if there is more than one reference from the  
author, then add this field.”

I could see more than one way to handle a standard author-date  
citation, but one of them would be:

Feels a bit awkward, in part because the logics of the two are not  
really the same. In the first case, you are looking only at the author,  
while in the second (and the common case) you are looking at both  
author AND year.

Tricky …

Any opinions?

Bruce

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [August 4, 2006, 9:51pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mla-weirdness/171/2 "2006-08-04T21:51:49Z")

</div>

Hmm … I guess a better way to approach this to say to that MLA is not  
an author-date citation style, but rather another kind of in-text  
style.

Right now, the disambiguation rules for author-date styles are  
implicit; it is assumed if you have a class=“author-date” attribute on  
the root that you will sort and group by author and year, and that you  
disambiguate by adding a year suffix. It is not configurable.

We could call this another class – maybe “author-title”? – and also  
have included the expected disambiguation behavior?

Bruce

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![James\_Howison](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/ac8455/32.png) [@James\_Howison](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/James_Howison)\
**Post date:** [August 6, 2006, 3:31am UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mla-weirdness/171/3 "2006-08-06T03:31:44Z")

</div>

So classes have characteristic disambiguation rules? That makes  
intuitive sense to me.

–J

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/4bbf92/32.png) [@Bruce\_D\_Arcus1](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/u/Bruce_D_Arcus1)\
**Post date:** [August 6, 2006, 12:55pm UTC](https://discourse.citationstyles.org/t/mla-weirdness/171/4 "2006-08-06T12:55:05Z")

</div>

Yes. Author-date class always does the year-suffix thing.

One wrinkle with this is that one needs to specify the formatting for  
the disambiguation title (in MLA, for example). So it’s not as  
straightforward as author-date, where you really don’t need to  
explicitly define it.

Bruce