What's the most common/default citation style at journals?

In our July "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I have two related questions regarding citation styles. Nowadays, most journals do not require a specific style when you submit a manuscript, but you need to follow their styles when your paper is accepted. First, do we have a sense of the most common style of philosophy journals? (Is there a survey or summary about this?) Second, since one probably needs to send a paper to a few different journals (not at once, of course), what "default" style do people use when you write your drafts before knowing where to send them?

Good questions. I've spent way too much time reformatting citations, and would love to cut down the time I spend on them. My sense, anecdotally, is that in-text citations (APA format) may be the most common, which I find a bit frustrating, as it may be my least favorite format (I just don't like the aesthetics of how it breaks up the flow of a manuscript, particularly since my work tends to be very citation heavy). My default style is to give name/date/p. # in footnotes with a reference list at the end, though to be frank I don't even know what style this is called. I just think it looks best, but again, I have to change it a lot after acceptance.

Anyway, these are just my thoughts. What do you all think?

Comments

[eddy]

In the leading philosophy of science journals the Chicago style is quite common - (Salmon 1988, 76). That sort of thing. It is a widely used style, probably stemming from the fact that the University of Chicago Press used to publish Philosophy of Science.

[Andrew Richmond]

Mendeley, and most citation managers with Word plug-ins, will automatically change your citation format for you. Usually, I don't have to do anything more than click a drop-down menu and select "IEEE" or "MLA 8th edition" or whatever else. So I just write in whatever author-date style is comfortable.

[Andre]

I use Zotero’s addin/plugin on my MacOffice. In seconds it changes whatever style journals want. I found that most journals prefer APA but few use Chicago Style.

[Antony Eagle]

Almost any citation style you can think of can be found in citation style repository, such as Zotero’s: https://www.zotero.org/styles. I’d encourage authors to set up the manuscript using some citation manager that supports CSL (Zotero, Mendeley, BibTeX+Pandoc citeproc – note Endnote does not offer CSL support). Then meeting journal requirements is as easy as choosing the style and applying it (though the product will only be as good as the quality of your citation metadata so you may still have some copy editing to do.)

[Noah]

I know this doesn't answer the question, but I am wondering why the OP is worried about this. Changing citation formatting is something you have to do only when finalizing an accepted paper. It takes at most a couple hours to do manually (on a paper with many citations). I would have to be publishing at least > 5 papers a year to find this task a nuisance. I am, of course, not publishing this many papers. Personally I rather like the ceremony of all the trivial tasks you must do once a paper is accepted, but that's just a quirk. This comment is not helpful, but just my two cents.

[Hermias]

Bumping for Mendeley

[Citation]

@Noah: I was castigated by a journal recently for submitting a paper for review that didn’t already conform to their referencing guidelines. They said they would still send it out for review nonetheless, but they didn’t seem happy. So I think the citation style might be an issue in some venues.

[Trystan]

On the original topic, from what I've seen I suspect that philosophy journals are more likely than other disciplines to have idiosyncratic citation styles. More than one that I've published or edited with has required various house style changes. This is probably for a mix of historical reasons (since philosophy journals are often quite old) and the tendency for philosophers to be very picky about small details. But most resemble Chicago author-date or footnotes, depending on the journal's preferences. American Psychological Association style seems like a secondary preference. Certainly, I've never seen the MLA style used.

As for citation managers, I recommend Zotero, which is free-of-charge and open-source. It also doesn't mine your data or support Elsevier like Mendeley does.