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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 1st, second or 2nd, 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 3rd) 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
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