Citation Style Hell
Why is it that some professors are so picky about citations? I can understand if students got them completely wrong or didn’t include them. However, the somewhat in my mind irrational attention to detail that some people have about them is just over the top. If I were grading I would simply check to see that all the information to find the thing again is there and let that be that. The crazy details of puncuation and capitalization remind me too much of AACR2 and typing book info on cards. Although I never typed cards myself, I had a cataloging internship that schooled me in the placement of colons and semi-colons. What a lovely legacy the little cards have left us with in our online catalogs.
To make matters worse some citations styles (particularly those in a couple library journals I can think of) by design don’t include all the necessary information to find the item again. This is just lame. Thanks for giving me the volume but I have not clue which issue number because you didn’t think that should be included in a proper citation. When I find a good article the first thing I do is look at the references to see what else I could/should be reading. Sometimes though the references don’t help me locate the darn thing. So I have to search for the item in a database to locate a complete citation.
To make matters worse, as an author, some materials are incredibly difficult to cite. It is like this big game of “what am I” when using the style manual. Once you have drifted beyond the mainstream formats it becomes a guessing game. This is true even with a citation management tool like RefWorks. Things on the web are especially difficult particularly with the variety of materials available from blogs and podcasts to e-journals. With all of this one would hope that professors would be lenient in grading bibliographies. Otherwise they should expect their students to ask them questions like “How does one cite a blog entry anyway?”
Have you looked at NISO Z39.29-2005 as a model for a blog citation? It doesn’t specifically have a format for blog, but it would fall under Electronic Information Formats section. It’s possible that you could model one after the sub-section Home Pages — Parts of Home Pages.
Whilst not addressing the problems associated with citing web resources, etc, the “my list” function on redlightgreen ( http://www.redlightgreen.com ) does a pretty good job of taking the sting out of doing all that formatting: one assembles a bibliography and RLG will format it in various ways, with, regrettably, the usual holes for different roles played by contributors under some citation systems. A spot of cutting and pasting later and… whoom! Bibliography!
RLG seems a decent way to keep a bibliography on the fly, with, perhaps a wee bit of extra functionality and library-based goodness compared to the surf-stuff-and-tag-for-later-in-del.icio.us route. Although delicious/spurl/furl and the gang do archive those web sources better. What we need is some glue to bring the two together.
For electronic references/citations, it seems that including an OpenURL link would be the most obvious solution to providing an easy way to access the source material. Assuming that a link resolver is being maintained it becomes a fairly persistent reference.
For blogs, perhaps a permalink or other PURL could be incorporated into the citation style.
There was an interesting presentation at SUNYLA about the errors in database help files regarding citation. It’d have been stronger if they’d looked at more than the present style manuals (to see if the changes were due to updates or just carelessness), and it didn’t look at whether people were actually reading the damn files to begin with, which I seriously doubt they do. The point is telling nonetheless – even those who are supposed to be guiding the process don’t get it right, style manuals are confusing to use, and even professors who insist on a particular style are really using some weird hybrid version that they expect students to use.
Frankly, I think the whole thing is ridiculous. We already have hyperlinks, and the majority of material that’s cited is available in electronic form anyway. In ten years, if resources like Google’s Scholar services and web archives develop in the logical manner, all you’ll have to do is click on a reference if you want it, making these questions of proper formatting, underlining, and location of commas irrelevant. Bye-bye, MLA, APA, Chicago, Turabian! I know I won’t miss you.