Variants for Chicago Manual of Style, 18th edition

CSL Usage
1

The 18th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style provides eight options to allow for their new recommendations alongside traditional practices, which some publishers will inevitably require. I would appreciate advice on how best to accommodate them in the new CSL styles for Chicago. I am interpreting each as a necessary or optional variant:

  • 13.6, necessary: URLs may be omitted in the published version, with the title instead linked.
  • 13.37, optional: Three variants are allowed in subsequent citations of the same work:
    • they may be shortened to Ibid. (from earlier editions of CMOS);
    • an author alone may be used in successive citations (previously the recommended form in the 17th edition);
    • a title alone may be used in successive citations.
  • 13.68, optional: Annotated bibliography.
  • 13.73, optional: Chicago now ‘recommends repeating authors’ names rather than using 3-em dashes’ but still dedicates an entire section to allow their previous approach.
  • 14.8, optional (or rely on user input): Page numbers are not ‘required’ for chapters but can seemingly still be included if desired (as for example in 14.13).
  • 14.30–31, necessary: The place of publication is omitted, but only for post-1900 books, which CSL cannot achieve; the option given here that it can correctly achieve is to include both the place of publication and publisher.

Most of these only require a change to one or two lines, meaning that it is straightforward to generate a range of variants using a script. The question is how to prevent the combinations of variants proliferating unnecessarily across the full-note, note, and author–date styles.

The goals, I believe should be to provide just enough flexibility that writers will be able to work with the 18th edition rather than revert to the 16th/17th style definitions. This will soon become a much more serious support issue as Zotero finally starts to support more CSL fields, since the older styles have poor support for these. In addition, providing the right variants will allow the styles repository to accommodate more publishers through dependent styles.

1. Necessary variants

My reading is that two of the above choices always need to be accommodated to produce correct published output, but probably should not be the default:

  • 13.6 commends omitting URLs in the published version, but advises authors to submit copy with the URL in the text. My assumption is that the default version should be for author preparation, but that any style could also be used to generate the published version, meaning that a variant without URLs always needs to be provided. (In any event I am aware of a number of journals that ask authors to omit URLs in submissions, and many examples in CMOS omit DOIs and URLs.)
  • 14.30–31 means that the only correct way for a CSL user citing anything pre-1900 is to provide the place of publication in all circumstances. It’s hard to judge whether this should be the default or a variant – about a quarter of the books I cite are pre-twentieth-century, but I doubt whether I am typical. My approach so far is to make the place of publication always available as a variant.

With this approach, I am assuming that the typical user will wish to receive the forms in the Citation Quick Guide, even if they are not correct when any pre-1900 books are cited and do not represent Chicago’s ideal recommendation for a published citation.

2. Optional variants

I can see three approaches to accommodating these:

  1. Based on CSL’s past practice, provide individual styles with single variants.
  2. In combination with the above, provide classic variants that combine the options still allowable from the 16th (and earlier) and 17th editions.
  3. Take a hard line and not provide any options as CSL variant styles.

2.1. Individual variants

To review, CSL provides these optional variants for the 17th edition:

  • with Ibid.: available on full note and note
  • short title subsequent: available on the full-note style only, now the default
  • annotated bibliography, an option still available in 13.68 though probably not widely used, currently for note only
  • no em dash in bibliography: available for the full-note and author–date styles, now the default

If we were to continue with this approach, we could interpret CMOS as follows:

  • 13.37, continue to provide two variants only: an Ibid. variant for full note and note, since this reaches back to many earlier editions. Omit the options for providing an author or title only in this position, since the author-only approach was only in the 17th edition. Practically, however, I suspect that publishers still using the Ibid. option will also require the other options dating to the 16th edition.
  • 13.68, one variant: annotated bibliography with full notes.
  • 13.73, one variant: since the example provided is only for a bibliography with notes, I think CSL can omit this option from author–date, unlike the current doubled variant without dashes.

The best approach to chapter page numbers in 14.8 is less straightforward, which I take as a practical provision related to the difficulty of finding chapter page numbers for some electronic books. This is further complicated by the fact that Zotero does not expose the replacement chapter-number variable. I see two possible approaches:

  1. Interpret CMOS as meaning that it is not an error if the user leaves out page numbers from the citation. One could then rely on user input, and in the style omit the chapter page numbers only if chapter-number is present.
  2. Interpret 14.8 as meaning that chapter page numbers should be omitted by actively filtering out all page numbers if the type is chapter.

With the latter approach, some publishers will probably expect another variant that provides chapter page numbers. If we decided that chapter page numbers should be actively removed, however, the most convenient place to allow this as an option might be through classic variants that combine these options.

2.2. Combined ‘classic’ variants

Practically, a writer wanting to keep 3-em dashes or use Ibid. will also want the other options, and I am thinking of two ‘classic’ variants for each of the full-note/note/author–date styles:

  • Classic, enabling 13.6, 13.73, 14.8, and 14.30–31 – essentially all the allowable options for practices from the 16th and 17th editions.
  • Classic (Ibid.), enabling the above plus Ibid.

This approach would allow for fewer overall variants, though they would need to be named carefully to ensure that users know what to expect. One could also call them ‘legacy’ or ‘traditional’ variants, but ‘classic’ seems a less judgemental term to me.