197. The Language of Bibliographies

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Bibliographies are associated with a special vocabulary that can at times be confusing

THE NATURE OF BIBLIOGRAPHIES

A bibliography is a written list of sources relevant to a particular topic or text. The name has Greek roots: “biblos” (= book) and “graphy” (= name-writing). The kind of bibliography that I am primarily concerned with here typically accompanies a written text that is usually positioned before it. Sometimes it just names sources that have been consulted during the writing of the text, but more often it is a list of sources that the text has explicitly mentioned.

One well-known way of matching source mentions in a text with those in a bibliography is the “Harvard System”. This requires the mentions within the text to be abbreviated and located next to the information that has come from the source, and the mentions in the bibliography to be in an expanded, much fuller form. The typical form of the abbreviated references in this system is described elsewhere in this blog in 76. Tenses of Citation Verbs.

Here, I am not planning to describe how to write a bibliography, since practices vary quite considerably in different disciplines and cultures, and can easily be read about in some depth across the Internet. Instead, I wish to focus on various confusions that less experienced English speakers can encounter regarding the language associated with bibliographies.

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ASSOCIATED LANGUAGE

1. Bibliography

The confusion that this word can cause is rather like that with the noun an elite (see 175. Tricky Word Contrasts 6, #7). The singular form refers to all of the sources listed in a bibliography. Its plural means not this but multiple lists of works. The name for a single work in a bibliography is either a reference or an entry. The first is perhaps a clearer description, but it can be confusing because it can also refer to an abbreviated in-text source mention.

Some bibliographies have the word Bibliography as their title, though many have the plural References instead. The two words often seem interchangeable. However, some university students say they are told to use the latter if they are just listing the sources that they consulted during their writing, rather than providing fuller information about abbreviated in-text references. This kind of referencing seems to be particularly expected in shorter types of writing like essays. Professional writing of a more formal kind, such as research papers, needs the more conventional matching of in-text and bibliographical references.

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2. Editor

Bibliographies sometimes include this word in abbreviated form (ed. or plural eds.). It is not to be confused with publisher (see 81. Tricky Word Contrasts 2, #11). Publishers are mostly commercial companies. Their usual role is to process and sell other people’s written texts. This makes them responsible for such areas as the format, printing, advertising, distribution and legal recognition of texts. Editors are often hired by them.

Editors, on the other hand, deal with the content of texts that authors are hoping or expecting to have published. Some examine what is said, while others, known as copy editors, check how it is said (spelling, grammar, vocabulary, etc.). Others again have a special role when a planned publication is going to contain works by different authors: they have to decide how many works to include, which ones, and in what order, and they may add some commentary.

It is this kind of editor that is sometimes mentioned in a bibliography. Where it is not mentioned, perhaps surprisingly, is in references to the most obvious kind of multi-author publication, namely repeatedly-published periodicals, such as newspapers, magazines, blogs and academic journals. Rather, it is references to an article in a multi-author book – which are fairly unusual – that need to include an editor’s name.

To put an article from a multi-author book into a bibliography, it is normal to begin with the surname of the article’s author, followed by their forename or its initial and then the article title. Next, details of the book itself are given, usually after the word in. First there is the editor’s (or editors’) name(s) – forename often first – and then the crucial bracketed abbreviation (ed.) or (eds.). The rest gives the standard information for book entries (book title, place of publication, publisher), along with the relevant page number(s).

Note finally that publisher’s names are mentioned in bibliographies only for books or articles within them, not for the content of periodicals and many websites.

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3. Edition

Confusingly, this word is as much about publishing as editing. It is mostly used of books that have been revised and published for a second or subsequent time, where it refers to a particular one of the various published forms. In bibliographies it tends to follow a number adjective (first or 1^st, second or 2^nd, etc.), but elsewhere it may follow an adjective like earlier, previous, older, later, new, recent, last, or the + publication year, e.g. the 2015 edition (see 136. Types of Description by Nouns, #3).

Despite the -tion ending, edition cannot be used as an “action” noun: it is only a countable noun expressing an “action outcome” (see 280. Alternative Meanings of “Action” Nouns). The main means of referring in a noun-like way to the process of editing a book is with the gerund editing: either the editing of the book or simply editing the book (see 70. Gerunds). The action noun that means “creating an edition” is publication.

To include a book with multiple editions in a bibliography, it is customary to highlight the one that was actually consulted, writing a phrase like third (or 3^rd) edition immediately after the title (the abbreviation ed. may be allowed too). This is done even though the publication date in a reference is already a clue to which edition is being referred to.

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4. Copy, Issue, Number and Volume

Academic and professional journals are a type of periodical: their title refers not to a single publication, but to a multiplicity with different content but the same overall title, editor(s) and general format, published repeatedly after time intervals of the same length. The interval may be as long as one or two years, or as short as a week, but is typically two to four months. A common name for a version of a journal that has been published at one particular time is an issue. A physical form of an issue, as kept for example in a library, is a copy.

Most journals give each new issue a new number in a sequence, and this number generally needs to be mentioned in a bibliography. The numbering system is not always the same. Issues with a year or more in between are likely to be simply marked with a single number that increases by one each time. In a bibliography, this number is very often written by itself near the end of an entry, just after the journal title.

On the other hand, when there are multiple issues of a journal in a single year, two numbers are often used. The first increases by one whenever an issue is the first of a new calendar year, but stays the same otherwise; the second increases by one with every issue in the same calendar year, but starts again at one in a new year. Thus, in year A, the issue numbers might run from 25, 1 to 25, 4 and those in year A+1 might start at 26, 1. The first of these numbers is usually called the volume, the second the number, words that a bibliography will sometimes include in abbreviated form: vol. 25, no. 2. Bibliographies do not use the word issue.

It is not just in bibliographies that knowledge of such terminology is useful. Here is a text that was not fully comprehended by participants in one of my past reading seminars:

(a) (The debate) came to a head during the 1994 UN international conference on population and development in Cairo, but the debate there tended to center on urban issues. In this number of Ceres, contributors broaden the focus, examining the courses and causes of fertility decline through history.

The readers’ unfamiliarity with academic journals meant that they did not recognise the bibliographical meaning of number, and hence could not deduce that Ceres was the name of a journal. For more about deduction in reading, see 177. How to Guess Meanings in a Text.

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5. Title

In itself the word title is not very problematic (though see 178. How to Write a Heading). In the context of bibliographies, however, confusion can be caused by the fact that a reference to an article in a book or journal needs to mention two titles: the article title and the book/journal title.

The difference between these two title types is usually highlighted by their format: article titles in ordinary lettering (often without any capital letters except at the very start), book/journal titles in italics (with capital letters starting the main words, as in headings).

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6. Bibliography-Related Abbreviations

The following abbreviations commonly refer to or appear within bibliographies. For an explanation of those marked *, see 130. Formal Abbreviations.

ed. = editor / edition

eds. = editors

*ff.

*et. al.

*ibid.

no. = number

*op. cit.

p. or pg. = page

pp. = pages

*qv.

vol. = volume

196. Saying what is inside Things

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The concept of “inside something” is variable and hence expressed by variable language

NAMING INSIDES IN PROFESSIONAL WRITING

Saying what is inside things is another of those common professional writing features that reflect a fundamental professional activity, in this case analysis. Like descriptions of physical properties (see 163. Ways of Naming Properties) and of processes (see 210. Process Descriptions), naming the insides of things seems at first sight to be a special concern of the physical sciences, but is in fact common in most other disciplines too, including literature studies (e.g. critical appreciation), marketing (e.g. characteristics of advertisements), catering (e.g. food recipes) and linguistics (sentence analysis).

The language associated with inside-naming is very wide-ranging, and has some areas that can cause uncertainty and error among less experienced English writers, which of course is why I am writing about it here. One of the main reasons for the variety is that there are different kinds of inside, sometimes together in the same thing. What I aim to do here is explore the difference between such near synonyms as aspects, components, constituents, content, contents, divisions, ingredients, parts and types, and to show how these differences can explain differences between such verbs as COMPRISE, CONSIST OF, CONTAIN, BE DIVIDED INTO, BE MADE OF, HAVE, INCLUDE and BELONG TO.

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THE CONCEPT OF COMPOSITION

Sometimes when we talk about what is inside things, we are thinking of all that is inside, and sometimes we are thinking only of some. The word composition refers to all of what is inside something (despite this rather plural meaning, the word itself is uncountable and hence not normally plural).

The exact meaning of composition, however, is more precise. If we consider what is “inside” a car, we find that at least two different types of answer are possible. On the one hand, we might list objects or structures – seats, the engine, doors, windows etc. On the other, we might think of materials – metal, glass, plastic etc. It is the latter that composition normally implies. To talk about the former, it is normal to prefer the plural noun components or parts, even though these can also refer to some rather than all of what is inside something (see 293. Tricky Grammar Contrasts 4, #2). With cars, and machines in general, parts tends as well to refer to replaceable components – often called spare parts.

The difference between the composition and the components of structures like cars is what makes the difference between the two prepositional verbs BE MADE OF (glass etc.) and BE MADE UP OF (doors etc.). There is an English nursery rhyme that asks What are little girls made of? and answers by listing not body parts but sugar and spice and all things nice. An alternative to BE MADE OF when describing consumer products is BE CONSTRUCTED OF. Note that by after both of these verbs introduces the maker, not the material.

An alternative to BE MADE UP OF is BE DIVIDED INTO. HAVE and POSSESS are possible too, but are vague about whether all or just some of the components are being mentioned. Alternatives to both BE MADE OF and BE MADE UP OF are COMPRISE, CONSIST OF and BE COMPOSED OF (see 10. Words with Unexpected Grammar 1, #f). There + BE is usable too (see 161. Special Uses of “There” Sentences, #7). CONTAIN, however, is not usable: it indicates some, not all, of the materials or components inside something.

A more exact synonym of composition is constituents. This word might be preferred when we are saying what is inside made or manufactured things rather than natural ones. We might talk, for example, about the constituents of a coffee or a concrete mixture, but the composition of an acid or a rock. We might also prefer constituents when considering something abstract, e.g. the constituents of pity. To name all of the constituents of something by means of a verb, use COMPRISE or CONSIST OF (not BE COMPOSED OF).

Moreover, constituents, like components, is usable not just with all of what is in an object or material but also with some. It differs from components, of course, in referring to substances or materials, as composition does, rather than to objects or structures. Because composition cannot indicate some rather than all, constituents may be used with this meaning even with natural substances or materials. The relation between these three words might be summarised like this:

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SPECIAL KINDS OF INSIDE

The word content (again uncountable) is rather like constituents, but is even less likely to apply to all of what is in something. It seems to be most typical in descriptions of food and communication. With foods, the use commonly singles out individual constituents, such as sugar, salt or carbohydrates. One might hear, for example, that a food has high sugar content. With communication, content might be some lines in a play, a scene in a film, a section of a book, or an idea in a speech. Quite often it it might be characterised with an adjective like amusing, violent, explicit or emotive.

A common confusion is between uncountable content and countable contents. The latter is the usual choice for one or more concrete objects held inside a container. Matches, for example, are the contents of a matchbox, furniture or toys can be the contents of a room, and clothes can be the contents of a suitcase.

There are, however, also abstract meanings, which can at times be difficult to separate from the meaning of content. The least problematic refers to the chapters in a document – these are always contents. Elsewhere, however, I have seen contents used of dialogue, directories, experience, regulations and thoughts. Perhaps the choice of the countable form emphasises that the parts in question are divided into individual instances very separate from each other.

The above meanings of the countable noun contents are what I have elsewhere called “substance locations” (see 43. Noun Countability Clues 4). Confusingly, however, there is another (rarer) countable meaning that is not of this kind, but instead highlights the divisibility of the meaning of uncountable content into different subtypes. Suppose, for example, that a particular food was shown to contain sugar, salt and fat. We might hear that it had three contents, meaning three types of content. For more on this kind of meaning, see 23. Subtypes.

The verb related to content(s) is, of course, CONTAIN. As indicated above, it is similar in its particular association with some rather than all of what is in something. However, it can be used more widely than the nouns: not just with contents and content but also with components like windows and constituents like glass. HAVE is usually an alternative.

Content is not the only word for what is in food. A familiar alternative with processed foods is ingredients. The difference is not just that ingredients is the word used in recipes. It usually represents everyday objects or substances that are likely to change their shape and/or composition during cooking, and which often have unspecified content of their own that will contribute to the overall content of the food. For example, bananas can be an ingredient without specifying their carbohydrate content. A typical verb for listing ingredients is BE MADE WITH.

A different special name is needed for something inside a classification: words like part and component are not suitable. A useful general word is members. This can refer to either individuals within the classification or groups. Alternative words for individuals are examples or instances (for the difference, see 218. Tricky Word Contrasts 8, #5). Groups can be called (sub)categories, (sub)divisions, (sub)groups, kinds, sorts or (sub)types (see 162. Writing about Classifications). Sometimes, forms is preferable (= types of transport, identification or support – see 180. Nouns that Count the Uncountable).

The word divisions is perhaps more flexible than the others, since it can sometimes refer to parts or components instead of types. It is not an exact synonym of these other words because it additionally implies that the parts are similar to each other. Often they will be abstract and created by people, as in a sentence, message, film, society or organization. A third meaning of divisions is, of course, “disagreements”.

Verbs used for saying what is in a classification vary according to whether all or some of the possibilities are the focus, and also whether these are individuals or groups. To link a classification with all of the individuals within it, BE or COMPRISE is common, e.g.:

(a) The primary colours are/comprise red, yellow and blue.

On the other hand, to link a class with all of the groups within it (e.g. elements linked with metals etc.), one can use BE CATEGORISED INTO, BE CLASSIFIED INTO, COMPRISE, CONSIST OF, BE DIVIDED INTO or BE GROUPED INTO. If a class needs to be linked with fewer than all of the possibilities, whether individuals or groups, INCLUDE is usually best. For a full discussion of all these possibilities, see 162. Writing about Classifications.

Another fairly common part-referring word is aspects. Literally an aspect is a side of something that can be seen from a particular position, suggesting that there are other sides visible from other positions. It may be this feature that explains why the word typically represents parts of abstract ideas like agreements, design, life, issues, problems, questions, strategies and work. In some such cases an alternative is part or area. A problem to beware of with aspects is that it does not normally follow in – you have to use respects instead (see 81. Tricky Word Contrasts 2, #4). A common context for this use is comparisons (see 82. Common Errors in Making Comparisons, #4).

Other names for an inside of something seem to be possible only when the something is a more individual concept. Written documents often have parts and/or chapters and/or sections, the difference apparently being one of size. Each can be more generally referred to as divisions.

Events that happen over time, such as processes, procedures, routines, stories and growth, are typically divided into phases or stages, while procedures can also have smaller steps. History is usually associated with ages, eras, periods or times (see 282. Features of History Writing, #16). Towns and cities typically comprise areas, districts or sides, while some smaller geographical entities have sectors, and countries often have provinces or regions. Hierarchies, finally, may have individual members or broader levels.