Journal citation styles vs. authorial sensibilities & accessibility

In our newest "how can we help you?" thread, a postdoc writes:

Something I've recently encountered is editors and copy editors insisting that footnote citations be moved to the main text. This offends my aesthetic sensibilities and strikes me as unduly infringing on author style: other things equal, I strongly prefer philosophy papers with main text that is just doing philosophy over those that go back and forth between philosophy and scholarship throughout the main text. I also listen to a lot of philosophy papers and much prefer listening to ones that confine citations to footnotes. (After hearing one or two citations, I tend to get distracted and have to go back or miss parts of the paper. I can avoid this problem when citations are in footnotes by skipping the footnotes. In contrast, I don't know of any easy way not to listen to citations that are in the main text.) It occurred to me that it might be easier to persuade editors and copy editors not to insist on moving citations to the main text if there were a discussion to point to in the profession that acknowledges confine-citations-to-footnotes as a legitimate writing style with accessibility advantages.

I'm curious to hear what readers think. An editor submitted the following reply:

The issue you raise, as I understand it, is not one of author style - it is one of journal style. Journals and book book publishers have house styles, and they want all the pieces in an issue or a volume to have the same style. So the price an author pays to be published in these issues or volumes is to cite according to the journal or publisher style. I think it is reasonable, but I work for Dark side - I am a journal edited and the editor of a few edited volumes with CUP.

And Malcom submitted the following:

On footnote citations: it sounds like what "a postdoc" is talking about is a preference for author-date style over notes and bibliography, as CMOS distinguishes the systems (see chapter 14 for detail). The editors and copyeditors enforcing these citation styles are probably not in a position to change the requirement for a single author contributing to a journal, since the house style has been set already. Books are a different matter, and there often can be some flexibility there. Part of copyediting involves enforcing consistency, which is why a single citation style is (typically) preserved across issues of a journal. Author style is something that should be respected, however, citation style isn't typically considered part of this. The other points are more substantive and perhaps controversial: the distinction between "doing philosophy" and "scholarship" in this context isn't one I agree with. Citations are part of how we give evidence for claims, for instance, and so are not easily partitioned off from "doing philosophy." To the point about listening to audio of papers: in discussions of endnotes over footnotes, some have made a similar criticism, that footnotes interrupt the reading (since they are read between pages, often interrupting sentences). I think the points about accessibility are ones that we should consider in the profession--however, for those who want to hear the citations immediately (because they want to know the sources for claims, etc.), wouldn't moving citations to the end impact their accessibility negatively? It seems like the solution may be more technological, allowing hearers to access the text in the ways they prefer, than about uniformly enforcing notes and bibliography over author-date.

I have to confess that I'm a bit sympathetic with the OP. As an author and reader, I much prefer footnote citations to in-text citations or endnotes. I also have to confess that changing citation formats is one of my biggest pet peeves, as I've never learned how to use a citation program that enables one to switch formats easily (though I've heard that ChatGPT can make these kinds of changes swiftly, so I'm curious to try that). I understand that journals and book publishers have house styles, but I'm curious to hear what readers think about this.

Should publishers be more flexible with authors in this regard, letting authors choose their favored citation format? And what about accessibility concerns? What do you all think? 

Comments

[Who cares as long as the info is there]

Calling it part of the "house style" avoids the issue. Many things could be labeled part of the "house style" and nonetheless infringe on author style, e.g., a journal coule adopt the policy that no sentence be longer than two lines. The issue is whether what is house style should be.

[Bill Vanderburgh]

After reading The Historical and Critical Dictionary (well, parts of it, to be fair: It is millions of words long) in Tom Lennon's Pierre Bayle seminar in grad school, I truly came to LOVE footnotes (and Bayle's footnotes to footnotes! the original hypertext!). I'm all about an aside, too (as you can tell from all these parenthetical remarks). That ship has sailed*, though: In broader publishing, and therefore in philosophy, publishers have turned away from footnotes (and parenthetical remarks), especially discursive ones. Something about costs of typesetting, ease of reading, blah, blah, blah. Whatever: We can't do anything about it now. Just like we are all forced to deal with trade books with endnotes _that aren't even anchored to a particular sentence in the text!_ (These are endnotes for lawyers, rather than scholars. Grr.)

Upshot: Follow house style. If you don't like it, don't publish in that venue. Or maybe start your own journal with a retro house style?

*This saying is a reference to the days of tall ships, which used the outgoing tide to leave harbor. Once anchors were up, there was no turning back. Time and tide wait for no man, as they also said. Go ahead, now try to find your place in the main text above!

[Laurence B. McCullough]

The author of a paper is a humble, rag-shirt, bare-foot supplicant and the editor the high priest or priestess, an immutable relationship that began with the invention of the printing press (and probably in monasteries for the scribes copying holy books under the direction of the unblinking librarian). The high priest or priestess will also demonstrate an idiopathic, acute hearing loss when it comes to the complaints of authors about house style. I endured this for 45 years, so my advice is to get used to being the supplicant but do celebrate when your work appears in the scholarly world. That experience makes the irritation, also acute (lasting from first to final submission and page proofs), fade rapidly away.

[Too old for this]

It's one thing requiring significant style changes in this way after a paper has been accepted for publication, but some journals require them to be changed even before peer review, for instance the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. It hardly seems worth it to spend hours and hours of work for a minuscule change of publication.

[academic migrant]

Personally a huge fan of in-text citations, as it shows how recent the items cited are (and thus exposes those who refuse to follow recent literature). Prefer footnotes to endnotes.

Some software can make things slightly easier. Zotero, for example, has a switch style function. It's far from perfect of course, for instance, when in-text citations are in the middle of the sentence--it will create a footnote in the middle of the sentence which then requires manual relocation--but it's better than complete manual labour.

Also due to the use of Zotero, personally have a strong dislike towards in-house style that has minor variations from the big citation styles, e.g. using [year] instead of (year) or requiring full names of authors in the bibliography instead of just the initials. This also creates a lot of manual work.

All that being said, I would happily change anything after acceptance, and believe that one should rethink one's life if one requires in-house style upon submission.

[R]

The first reply Marcus listed (from "An editor") gets at the heart of the issue. The reason why OP has these issues is because journals enforce a house style. But I for one would like to hear a justification for why they do this. There seems to be no benefit to readers since, firstly, who reads multiple articles from the same journal issue anyway, and secondly, we're all used to differences in citation formats *across* journals, I'm sure we could handle differences *within* a journal. So why not just let authors use whichever style of scholarly apparatus they prefer, as long as it's used consistently? That's what I tell my students to do as well.

[random JAPA publisher]

I don't think it's true that J-APA requires many changes before peer review (e.g. the footnote removal)--just anecdotally I had a paper recently accepted there with plenty of footnotes in it, and they just asked me to move them after acceptance, and I have a friend who had something similar (the copy editor moved them in his case I think). And I can't see anything on their website that strongly suggests that you have to do this pre-submission, though I didn't look super carefully.

[Michel]

R: "So long as they're used consistently." is the problem.

I've done a fair bit of academic editing. Academics are terrible at doing this. Really, just abominably bad; you have no idea. If you have a house style, then it's infinitely easier (and faster) for the copy editor to fix the problems.

[Printer's son]

In defense of a house style, if anyone has worked for a journal or edited a volume, it is very taxing to properly proofread a lot of articles (which editors have to do) when you are moving between many different styles. And, the high ranked book publishers hire extra people to proof read manuscripts in production - they need a standard to do the job effectively. I also think it looks elegant when an issue or a volume is one style - but I am from a printing family.

[too old for this]

Hi random JAPA publisher - that's really strange, since I just had a paper sent back from them pre-review for the footnotes thing a few weeks ago.

[random JAPA publisher]

Huh, weird--I bet they've just gotten stricter very recently about this (there was a recent change in editors). That's too bad.