dem@ihwpt.ATT.COM (David E. Martin) (09/28/88)
I am looking for the standard way of referencing articles in technical papers. IU think the IEEE has published some sort of standard or guideline on where all the commas, boldface, periods, etc. go. Any help would be appreciated. David Martin Advanced Technology Laboratory AT&T Bell Laboratories dem@iexist.att.com or att!iexist!dem
roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) (09/28/88)
dem@ihwpt.ATT.COM (David E. Martin) writes: > I am looking for the standard way of referencing articles in technical > papers. IU think the IEEE has published some sort of standard or guideline > on where all the commas, boldface, periods, etc. go. Unfortunately, you are on a wild goose chase. To my constant and extreme irritation, there is no one standardized reference citation format. As part of my job (indeed, the very worst part of my job) I maintain bib (an automated reference database/formatting system) around here. That means constantly writing and re-writing the formatting macros to match each new journal or publication that somebody wants to submit a manuscript to. I can usually manage to come close, but very rarely to I get every nuance perfect. Usually I tell people not to sweat the last 2%, that's what copy editors are for. Forget the details like commas, periods, etc. Everybody wants to do it their own way, and gets all bent out of shape if you submit a manuscript with a comma where a semicolon should be. Fuck that shit. There are 4 major styles of in-text citations. One is Author-Year, which is my personal favorite, where you put (Smith, 1988) in the text. There are several flavors of this, mostly having to do with deciding when to punt on multiple authorship papers and just call it et al. The most common (that I've seen) is going to et al. on 3-author papers, i.e. (Smith, 1988), (Smith and Jones, 1988), and (Smith et al., 1988). I have seen 3 authors listed (Smith, Jones, and Brown, 1988) but 4 authors et-al-isized. Stupid details: is it "Smith and Jones" or "Smith & Jones"? Is "et al." in italics because it is latin (strictly speaking, the proper way) or in roman? Is there a comma before the date? Do you use ()'s or []'s? I've seen all of them. I've just been reminded of yet another demonic twist imposed by some journals; multi author papers are (Smith and Jones, 1988) the first time they are cited but (Smith et al., 1988) after that. I still havn't figured out how to make bib do that one. I swear there are journal editors who stay up late at night thinking of new ways to torment me. Numbers two and three are numeric, which many journals like because it saves space. The two major flavors are making reference number 1 the first used in a book/chapter/paper/section/whatever vs. making number 1 the reference which comes first in an alphabetized list. A real bitch for the author if you add/drop references and don't have an automatic formatting system like bib to renumber them for you. Details: superscript or in-line numbers? ()'s or []'s? (1,2,3,6) or (1-3,6)? Number four is the symbolic label format, common in computer science. Things like SMIT88. I've seen styles where Smith, 1988 becomes SMI88, Smith and Jones 1988 becomes SMJ88, and Smith, Jones, and Brown, 1988 becomes SJB88. Sometimes Smi88, SmJ88, and SJB88. Personally, I think it's pretty ugly, but I can see why computer jocks think it's neat; the citation labels look like hash keys. Once you've figured out how to tag the text, you have to figure out how to format the actual bibliographic citation. Step number one is to forget that garbage you learned in high school; I've never seen a technical paper with Ibid, Op Cit, Loc Cit, and all that other fun trash, nor would I even remember what they meant anymore if I ran across them. That's not to say that fields of study outside of my experience don't use them. Some fields might use footnotes instead of endnotes for references too. Anyway, the variation I've seen here is practicly endless. Most start with the authors' names. But, do you abreviate the first names? Do you put the last name first or the initial first, i.e., "R. Smith", or "Smith, R."? Some styles reverse just the first name giving "Smith, R., B. Jones, and S. Brown". Periods after Initials? Spaces between initials and name, or between first and middle initials? How to deal with non-standard (i.e. non common American) initials; Dutch names often have 3 or 4 initials, Chinese names are often hyphenated (is it H-L. Yang or H.-L. Yang?) What about van, Van, von, Von, de, der, al-, Jr., III, Sir, etc, etc. Dates; at end, after the authors? In parenthesis? Leave out the title? Put the title in quotes, or italics, or underlined, or plain? Capitalize every Major Word, or just the first word and proper nouns, or use whatever style was used in the original publication? Journal title; spell out in full or abreviate (and if so, how; I've seen "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA", "Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA", and PNAS all used; the first two having "USA" and "U.S.A." flavors). Volume? Issue number? Pages? I could do a whole book on pages. I've seen just the starting page, starting and ending pages, and compressed starting and ending pages (i.e. 184-189 becomes 184-9, 184-199 becomes 184-99, and 184-205 stays 184-205 (as does 987-1003). The last three numbers can have virtually any punctuation you care to invent: bold, underlines, colons, V/N, Vol/Num, just #, leave out the issue number completely, etc. Oh yeah, for periodicals, does the date have just the year, or the year and the month, or the year, month, and day? Let's not even talk about books, books with editors, or authors and editors, books with no listed authors (I've seen citations to catalogs), conference proceedings, technical reports, etc. Just for fun, throw in variations like "1:", vs. "1)", vs. "1.", indenting and spacing, and earth-shattering decisions like introducing the list with "References" or "Literature Cited", with or without trailing periods, underlining, capitalization, and flings of font mania. So, the short answer is, "No, there is no one standard reference format". However, you may find that if an organization publishes many journals (like the IEEE or the ASM), they may use a standard format for all of them. Even this rule does't hold, however; Annual Reviews seems to let each individual series (i.e. Annual Review of Computer Science, etc.) pick their own style. Just to keep you entertained, here are some samples of styles, all of which are in common use here, to satisfy the requirements of various journals. This is edited nroff output; I apologize to those of you whose news readers or terminals can't hack backspace-underscore underlining. ---------------- 1. Alizon, M., S. Wain-Hobson, L. Montagnier, and P. Sonigo. 1986. Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients. Cell 46:63-74. ---------------- Alizon, M., Wain-Hobson, S., Montagnier, L., and Sonigo, P. (1986). Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients. Cell. _4_6, 63-74. ---------------- 1. M. Alizon, S. Wain-Hobson, L. Montagnier and P. Sonigo, _C_e_l_l, 1986, 46, 63-74. ---------------- 1. Alizon, M., S. Wain-Hobson, L. Montagnier, and P. Sonigo. 1986. _G_e_n_e_t_i_c _v_a_r_i_a_b_i_l_i_t_y _o_f _t_h_e _A_I_D_S _v_i_r_u_s: _n_u_c_l_e_o_t_i_d_e _s_e_q_u_e_n_c_e _a_n_a_l_y_s_i_s _o_f _t_w_o _i_s_o_l_a_t_e_s _f_r_o_m _A_f_r_i_c_a_n _p_a_t_i_e_n_t_s. Cell 46:63-74. ---------------- 1. Alizon, M., S. Wain-Hobson, L. Montagnier, and P. Sonigo, Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients, Cell 46:63-74 (1986). ---------------- Alizon, M., Wain-Hobson, S., Montagnier, L. and Sonigo, P.: Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients. Cell 46 (1986) 63-74. ---------------- Alizon, M., S. Wain-Hobson, L. Montagnier, and P. Sonigo. 1986. Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients. Cell 46:63-74. ---------------- 1. Alizon, M., S. Wain-Hobson, L. Montagnier, and P. Sonigo. 1986. Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients. Cell 46:63-74. ---------------- Alizon, M., Wain-Hobson, S., Montagnier, L., & Sonigo, P. (1986). _C_e_l_l, 46, 63-74. ---------------- Alizon M, Wain-Hobson S, Montagnier L, Sonigo P (1986) Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients. Cell _4_6:63-74 ---------------- 4. Alizon, M., Wain-Hobson, S., Montagnier, L. and Sonigo, P. (1986) Cell 46, 63-74. ---------------- Alizon, M., Wain-Hobson, S., Montagnier, L., and Sonigo, P. (1986). Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients. Cell. _4_6, 63-74. ---------------- 1. Alizon, M., S. Wain-Hobson, L. Montagnier, and P. Sonigo. (1986) Cell 46:63-74. ---------------- Alizon, M., Wain-Hobson, S., Montagnier, L., and Sonigo, P. (1986). Genetic variability of the AIDS virus: nucleotide sequence analysis of two isolates from African patients. Cell. _4_6, 63-74. ---------------- 4. Alizon, M., Wain-Hobson, S., Montagnier, L. and Sonigo, P. (1986) _C_e_l_l 46, 63-74. ---------------- -- Roy Smith, System Administrator Public Health Research Institute {allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net "The connector is the network"
dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) (09/28/88)
In article <3515@phri.UUCP>, roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes: > dem@ihwpt.ATT.COM (David E. Martin) writes: > > I am looking for the standard way of referencing articles in technical > > papers. IU think the IEEE has published some sort of standard or guideline > > on where all the commas, boldface, periods, etc. go. > > Unfortunately, you are on a wild goose chase. To my constant and > extreme irritation, there is no one standardized reference citation format. > [ excellent elaboration deleted ] Ah, accidents and essence. The technical professional's job is difficult enough already without the enormous accidental complexity that is our literature. When a technical professional must squander chunks of his/her fleeting productive lifespan grappling with accidents, the cost of research results goes up. Non-cooperation on the part of the keepers of the sacred knowledge of our tribe(s) constitutes outright wealth destruction. Science is no longer the leisurely pastime of landed gentry. The problems threating our existence know no disciplinary bounds. Technical professionals need a transparent system that allows them to focus their energies on problems, instead of attempting to communicate with each other. The time has come for us to overhaul our system of recording and disseminating results. The present system is essentially the same as the one that served Isaac Newton. It is hopelessly inadequate in an age of rapid advancements and burgeoning knowledge. We now have the technology to encode hundreds of journals on a single optical disk at a cost under $10. We are building networks that can cut our time-to-publication from months and years to hours and days. We must remove any institutional and accidental barriers that compromise our effectiveness, our careers, and our ability to serve the public. The technical community must assume responsibility for its knowledge resources. We must demand and get a system that serves us. We need detailed and universal standards for preparing and citing written works. We must agree upon a way to create technical documents so we can all access them electronically. We need to insure that every non-proprietary result is immediately available to any technical professional who needs it, at the lowest possible cost. I know I'm not the first to open my yap on this question. However, we must recognize that when disorganization in our community makes our jobs harder, we are robbing ourselves. Because computer display quality is still rather inadequate (at realistic prices), paper still has a role to play in the final presentation of information. However, our reliance on paper as an information storage and distribution medium is now unnecessary and even harmful. Dan Mocsny